Tommy leaned into the shadows of the doorway and watched the building across the street. 

The July night was sharp, clear, and clean—the exact type of city night he loved most—and he'd been watching the five-story walk-up, and the block on which it was situated, for most of the last thirty hours. It was just a spot of surveillance, one of many favors he'd done for detectives Mueller and Thomas in the fourteen months since he'd returned to the city, and it was easy and pleasant.

He nestled back a touch more and waited. Several hours had passed since sunset, and the shadows cast by the sidewalk scaffolding overhead were more than sufficient to veil his face from any passersby, but caution was his watchword.

Not that he had any real fear of the criminals in the building opposite, but he'd made a religion of staying thoroughly in the background during police investigations on which he assisted. Only his two friends on the NYPD knew him by name and sight—to all others, he was an anonymous source who recently had helped the PD close a significant number of complex cases—and Tommy intended to keep it that way. He trusted Mueller and Thomas with his identity and Mueller and Thomas alone.

One or both detectives soon would be along, hence his caution.

As if on cue, he detected Mueller approaching from the direction of one of the police surveillance vehicles stationed nearby. The scent of the detective arrived well before he did, thanks to the young man's distinctive and not-so-subtle choice of cologne. How could he possibly think women find that alluring? Tommy chuckled inwardly.

The detective eased under the scaffold and took a spot next to Tommy. "What's your friend's ETA?"

"Well, good evening to you, too, Eric." His tone was friendly and patient. He knew Mueller was nervous, excited, and under intense pressure. They'd been tracking this small band of Bulgarian nationals off-and-on for nearly two months, certain they were part of a larger gang trading in automatic weapons in New York City and elsewhere along the eastern seaboard. This was a combined federal, state, and city taskforce, and bringing in the bad guys ahead of the feds would be an enormous feather for he and Camille Thomas.

With Tommy's help, the detectives had been able to trace the arms dealers to this precise building. But there, Tommy's heightened senses had stalled. Snatches of Bulgarian that he heard throughout the building—the neighborhood had numerous emigres from that country—and the slight scent of gun oil convinced him that the criminals were on one of the building's top floors. But he had no way of immediately narrowing which floor or which apartment.

Thus, was their need for Tommy's young friend, Raquel Kinder.

"She texted five minutes ago," he told the detective, "... and speak of the devil." Tommy nodded from the shadows toward a taxi that was pulling up near the corner. Raquel, who preferred the name Ricki, emerged with a bound and a smile and shortly joined them in the shadows.

"You know what we're doing here?" he whispered to the woman of about twenty years as she wrapped her arms around his torso.

"Yep," she replied shortly and cheerfully. "Where am I going?"

Mueller listened quietly, not fully aware what role the young woman would play. Tommy had been vague, not even sharing Ricki's full name with the detectives.

"That building right across the way," he pointed with his chin. "It's either the fourth or fifth floor. We're looking for any sign of firearms."

Without a word, the youngster took Tommy's hand and led him several feet down the sidewalk to a point with a better view of the building in question. Still in the shadow of the scaffolding, the two leaned arm-in-arm against the wall. Resting her head on the side of Tommy's chest, Ricki closed her eyes and allowed her body to relax into his. He gently supported her weight. To any outward appearances, the two might have been young lovers stealing a few minutes alone on a clear and quiet summer's night.

Mueller had retreated to the position in the doorway formerly occupied by Tommy. The detective was sensitive to his companion's aversion to publicity, for which Tommy was endlessly grateful. Yet the sound of Eric's breathing and his switching from foot to foot told Tommy the detective was anxious and more than just mildly curious.

"Ricki has a special Gift," he whispered softly toward where the detective waited. "She can go walking around outside her body." Tommy glanced at the policeman and even in the dark caught the look of wonder on the man's face. "Unfortunately," he continued, "she can't just will herself anywhere. She can only move from place to place at about the same pace she can walk. It'll be a few minutes before she gets to the fourth floor."

"Shhh ..." the young woman said almost imperceptibly. "Getting started takes some concentration."

Both men remained silent for nearly five minutes before she continued.

"Okay, room 401," she said in a hush and, after a few moments, "young Hispanic couple watching wrestling on TV. I don't see anything else."

After another minute, "Room 402 ... empty. No sign of any weapons." Ricki was calm, but Mueller already had taken to holding his breath in anticipation of her speaking.

"Room 403 ... oooohhh ... a couple of old people fucking," she whispered with a surprised chuckle. "They really seem to be enjoying it, too ... but no guns."

Her dialogue went on this way, in a faint whisper, for another ten minutes before reaching room 409.

"Okay, three ... no, four guys here. All fully dressed, lots of beer cans, watching TV in a language I don't understand ... oh, crap ... there's a gun on the coffee table in front of them."

Tommy reached out with his acute hearing but couldn't discern to which television show Ricki was privy. To his ears, the neighborhood was awash in chatter in any number of languages, a veritable cocktail-party of voices.

"What kind of gun," Mueller whispered. He was standing closer to Tommy now, and to Ricki.

"Mmm ... I don't know," she replied. "A pistol, but a big one."

"Try and look around the apartment," said the detective, his quiet and calm tone masking his uncertainty.

"It's a corner apartment," Ricki whispered after a few more heartbeats, "so it's bigger than the others. And the lights are out everywhere except the living room. I can't see much."

"Give it a few minutes," said the detective. His breathing was short.

Tommy could tell Eric was like a child on Christmas morning, but he knew he had to temper the man's excitement. "Detective, Ricki can only keep this up for forty-five minutes or so."

"I'm good," the young woman replied before the policeman could speak. "It's only been about fifteen." No sooner did she say those words than her breath stopped. "Okay. One of them is getting up." Another pause. "He's going to the bathroom ... ummm ... he turned the hall light on." Another slight gasp. "Shit, I see rifle in one of the back rooms. It's sitting on a wooden box."

"What kind?" whispered the detective, his voice low and husky. He moved even closer, and less than two feet now separated him from Tommy and Ricki.

"Sorry, I don't know guns real well. It's like one you see in action movies ... black and really scary looking." The girl made another near-silent gasp. "Ohh ... someone just turned on the kitchen light, and ... I can see like one, two ... five rifles. All of them are like the first one. Three are leaning against the wall; two are sitting on wooden boxes."

"Oh, fucking-eh ... this is the place." The enthusiasm in the detective's voice was thick, and Tommy could hear him fumbling for his radio.

Before Mueller could make any communication to his partner or the other detectives, Ricki barked in an excited voice loud enough for any passerby to hear, "oh, shit, there's like ... I dunno, some sort of like bazookas or rockets in one of the bedrooms."

Tommy could both feel and hear Mueller's heartbeat suddenly race.

"What kind?" the detective asked aloud, his voice nearly a rasp.

"I don't know," replied Ricki more quietly but with a hint of exasperation.

"Sorry, sorry," said the detective. "Just describe them."

"They're dark green and about five or five and a half feet long ... about as thick as my leg ... and I see two lying out. There are four ... no, six big ... what do they call them, um ... pelican cases in the room big enough to fit them."

"Shit," the detective spat. "Okay, look for any markings ...."

What followed was a quick and precise series of questions from Mueller to Ricki over the next twenty minutes, enquiring about the nature of the weapons, the number of men and their equipment, and the precise dimensions of the apartment's rooms. He asked each question twice, and several three times. Tommy could tell by the end that Ricki was just beginning to fatigue.

When the detective concluded, he made no attempt to veil his worry. "Okay, you two should get out of here. What you're describing sounds a lot like portable antiaircraft missiles. We're going on that apartment as soon as I can fudge an affidavit and get a warrant."

The officer thanked both Tommy and Ricki, quickly and sincerely, and headed at a run back up the block to where his partner waited.

***

Camille Thomas was focused and energized, as she had been every single moment of every single day for more than a year. Her life had become a pulse of energy and action, and she loved it.

Still, events had spun up quickly after Mueller brought word from Tommy's friend of the contents of the fourth-floor apartment. Antiaircraft missiles, she thought. Jesus.

The two detectives had held a brief and intense debate over the path to proceed and had settled on a plan. Despite their worries over establishing probable cause—these were constant sore-points between the detectives when dealing with the unorthodox ways in which Tommy brought them information—surface-to-air missiles were too great a threat to ignore. They called in the Emergency Services Unit to lead the raid on the apartment, contacted their lieutenant to apprise him of the mess, and sent in a request for a warrant. They'd decided, given the heightened risk of the weapons inside, they would stage the assault as soon as ESU was ready, whether the warrant had come or not.

It took ESU about ninety minutes to arrive, examine the situation, and deploy their forces, and the moment the unit was ready, warrant in hand, they moved on Apartment 409.

As such things so often did, they almost immediately went sideways.

Camille, with Mueller at her side, followed the ESU commander and his support team up the front stairway. A second team, which would stage the main assault, came up the back stairs, the landing for which was mere feet across the hall from Apartment 409. The job of Camille's team on the front stairs was simply to secure the main hallway, which ran the length of the building, and to prevent any residents from getting in the way or any suspects from fleeing.

Before the detective and her companions had rounded the corner from the fourth-floor landing into the hallway, a thunder of automatic weapons fire erupted nearby. A flurry of radio calls from the assault team indicated the security element covering the upper stairwell of the back stairs had come under fire from someone on the fifth floor.

Without a word, Camille turned and shot up the next flight to the fifth floor, taking the stairs three at a time, with Mueller and at least two of the ESU officers behind her. Once on the fifth-floor landing, she paused only long enough for the other officers to stack on her. It was a drill well-known to all. Camille raised her hand, waited three breaths for the pat on the shoulder that signaled the others were ready, and moved around the corner and down the fifth-floor hallway at a steady walk, one officer falling in to her left and another to her right, with the remainder in the rear.

They immediately spotted two armed men seventy or eighty feet down the hallway, near the rear stairwell. Camille's call for the two to drop their weapons and surrender was drowned by the sound of gunfire as she and her fellow officers, never breaking stride, let off a series of carefully aimed shots at the suspects, who foolishly had rounded and raised their rifles at the officers. One of the two men collapsed to the ground, apparently dead, while the second scrambled five feet toward a doorway, where he disappeared.

Like lightning, Camille bolted through the door taken by the fleeing felon as another group of ESU officers exploded from the back stairway in front of them, shouting and leveling weapons.

There was no sign of the fleeing suspect in the short maintenance hallway she entered, but her heart told her the perp likely had fled up a stairway to the left rather than through the open door to her right, which was the only other egress from the hallway. She took the stairs three at a time.

***

After Mueller left them, Tommy walked Ricki down a few blocks, flagged her a cab, and said goodbye with an affectionate embrace and a few hundred dollars for her trouble. The young woman took the money with a playful punch on the arm. She didn't need the cash. Of the forty-seven refugees who had followed Tommy to New York City a year before, after his having rescued them from government custody, she was one of the few who immediately had landed on her feet. Ricki and two Gifted comrades ran a small company near Wall Street that provided clients investment counseling and, appropriately enough, a spot of corporate espionage on the side.

Still, he didn't like dragging any of his wards into his business with Mueller and Thomas. He trusted the officers, but his protégés had been through enough. Hence, his discretion.

After Ricki departed, Tommy loitered. Without the two detectives to add context, there was no reason any other officers secreted in various places along the block would come to recognize his face—that was one of his many Gifts.

A small Greek sandwich shop lured him in with the intoxicating aroma of gyros and falafel, and he simultaneously ate and eavesdropped on the detectives' preparations and plans. Even a block and a half away, he could make out the conversations among the officers, whose voices were warmly familiar, with great ease.

It wasn't that he didn't trust them to do their jobs. On the contrary, the police with whom Camille and Eric worked were, with one or two exceptions, skilled at what they did. Tommy merely liked seeing things through to the end. Besides, he had nothing else to do until he picked up his girl Rhonda from work at 6:00 am.

After sating his hunger further on pepperoni and sausage pizza—Tommy was always hungry—he began to look about for a place from which to observe the festivities. Fortunately, the building he'd been surveilling was located on a corner, and there were several other structures that height or taller located front, side, and back from which he could secret himself to observe the police operations.

He settled on another five-story building across the alley from where the police quietly had begun assembling for their operations. After wandering down the alley for a few minutes, he ascertained it was dark enough that no one could see him. He easily could jump or fly to the roof, but there was no need to tempt fate. He cast about with his senses. No one was watching, so he merely scampered up the side of the fire escape with a speed and agility that anyone who happened to observe him would attribute to an exceptionally gifted gymnast.

Once on the roof, he relaxed in a recess where he could see the side of the building on which Apartment 409 was located and waited. In the distance, several television shows in Bulgarian played on, but only bits and slices of police operations were audible, even to Tommy's exceptional hearing. The discipline of the officers was impressive.

Quiet fell across the roof as he waited ... and waited.

Quite without warning, automatic rifle fire resonated from across the alley. Suddenly alert, Tommy moved from the shadows and crouched on the building ledge, every sense alive. He was certain he heard snips of Camille's voice raised in anger amid further bursts of gunfire, and less than two minutes after the initial shots rang out, the metal door on the roof of the building opposite burst open, and a tall, thickset man carrying an automatic rifle sprinted across the top of the building.

Tommy didn't hesitate. There was no chance the man could see him in the dark, so silently and somewhat impulsively he leapt the sixty feet to the opposite roof. He touched down without a sound behind an enormous HVAC unit on the roof and stepped out to intercept the fleeing man. With incredible speed, Tommy lunged, only to catch a glimpse of Camille from the corner of his eye as she emerged from the same rooftop door, followed fresh on her heels by a second man armed with a rifle, which he held raised to fire. Tommy could cover seventy feet quickly but not quickly enough.

"Camille, get down," he screamed with all the breath in his lungs as he slid to an awkward halt.

The young detective dropped to the ground and by some miracle skidded and rolled to her right side and shoulder, her pistol still fully under her control and, seeing the man behind her with a rifle at the high-ready, fired three shots center mass into his body before she'd even come to a complete stop.

Still half balanced on one foot and thinking to rush to Camille's aid, Tommy hesitated for a split second. Before he could even regain his proper footing, a searing pain stabbed his head.

"Mother fucker," he screamed aloud. Something hard, hot, and sharp had hit Tommy's left eye, and he began hopping around, skipping, and shrieking like a little child in pain. "Goddamn motherfucking sonofabitch ...," he screamed at the top of his lungs. More vulgarities, in several languages, continued to spill from his lips.

The agony seemed to last many, many minutes, but Tommy knew his humiliating outburst lasted scant seconds. He again caught sight of the first felon, the one who he'd been about to grab. The man's weapon was still up as he continued to fire. Tommy pivoted and backhand slapped the man, not gently, with an open palm across his chest, and the felon's firing ceased as he flew backwards into the shadows and landed with a brutal thud.

"Shit ... shit ... shit ...," Tommy continued to yell with slightly less vigor as he walked back to where Camille was righting herself, "... goddamn that stings."

He saw that his young friend, rising from where she'd dived to the ground, was scuffed-up and highly excited but, generally, unharmed, and he helped her to her feet. Looking about, there was no one else present. The gunman she had shot was alive but barely moving.

By that time, Tommy had the heel of his left hand to his eye, holding it gently. As his profanities diminished, he gingerly checked his hand as if looking for blood.

"That motherfucker shot me in the left eyeball," he told Camille. "Do I still have an eye?" He pulled his hand away and blinked several times, canting his left profile at her. He knew his eye was still in place because, despite some blurriness brought on by his tears, he could still see Camille clearly. He just needed some comforting.

The horror and agitation on the young detective's face faded in a moment, and Tommy discerned she was trying her best to keep from laughing.

"This is not funny," he said with as much dignity as he could muster.

"Go truss that one up," she said, handing him a black zip tie from her belt. Her laughter only escaped as he walked away to where his shooter was laid up, heels-over-head and unconscious, against the same HVAC unit behind which Tommy moments before had concealed himself. The man was still alive, and Tommy calmed and composed himself as he tied the felon, searched him for further weapons, and dragged him back to where Camille examined the other suspect.

Her laughter had passed, though she still trembled noticeably from the excitement of the shooting.

"Was your bloke wearing body armor?" he asked her.

"Yeah, he was. It saved his life."

"Mine, too. It spread the force of that little pat I gave him across his chest. He has some broken bones, though." Tommy sighed. "You don't really have to tell anybody about that little episode, do you? Not even Mueller ... but especially not Rhonda."

Camille moved in close and planted an affectionate kiss on his right cheek. "I make no promises. Now get out of here. I have to gin up some plausible story about how this all went down."

The gunfire on the lower floors had ceased, and Camille's walkie had begun to squawk, asking about her location and status.

Tommy smiled, winked once at his friend (with his good eye), and moved to the building edge, where, throwing caution to the wind, he dropped the five stories in darkness to the alley below. Not a sound escaped him. After a short jog down the same alley, he turned onto the street and casually strolled away.