The Tideflats King Claimed the Surveyor Who Trusts No One, and My Signature Was His Brother's Alibi novel · Chapter 18 of 24
Chapter 18: The Cold Floor
I went to his freezer floor at midnight, because he had told me once what was down there and I wanted to see it.
The warehouse was dark except for the amber lights along the catwalks.
The night shift had gone to the Blair Waterway to move a barge, and the loading floor stood empty under a roof as high as a church.
Pallets of frozen crab stood in rows, shrink-wrapped and stacked six high.
The air was nineteen degrees.
I came out of the freight elevator in my wool coat and my boots, with my breath white in front of my face.
He was waiting by the first row, in a black coat, with his hands in his pockets.
He did not move toward me.
"You said the freezer was where you went when you could not think," I said.
"I did."
"Show me."
He walked me between the pallets.
The cold was dry and clean and smelled faintly of salt and cardboard.
Our footsteps rang on the concrete.
At the end of the fourth row there was a gap, a narrow alley between two walls of pallets, about the width of a man's arms.
He stopped at the mouth of it.
"Here," Niko said.
"I stood in this spot the night they sentenced Davor.
"I stayed an hour.
"A man came and asked if I wanted my coat, and I said no, and he went away."
I walked into the gap.
I put my back against the shrink-wrap, with the crab stacked cold behind my shoulders, and looked at him.
"Come in," I said.
He came in, slowly.
The alley was so narrow that he had to stand close, his boots between mine, his arms at his sides.
His breath mixed with mine in the cold.
His eyes were very dark in the amber light.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of The Tideflats King Claimed the Surveyor Who Trusts No One, and My Signature Was His Brother's Alibi are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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