…We had brought cartons of Chinese food, but I was so wound up I couldn’t eat. Michael could eat, no problem. Hours passed. Around midnight, we took turns trying to sleep, but I couldn’t. Michael could sleep, no problem. Around four in the morning, he woke up after about three hours of sleep.

“Tell you what, Spygirl,” he said. “I didn’t think when we finally spent the night together it would be like this.”

Just then, an SUV turned into the row and crept along with its lights off. It was a black Cadillac Escalade with tinted windows.

“Looks like your boyfriend’s car.”

Eye roll. But it did look like Santiago’s SUV. I wondered briefly if he had lied about finding the Dostoyevsky novel on his desk. It could’ve been in his glove box because he was the one delivering them to warn people off. But bottom line, I didn’t feel that Santiago was Dostoyevsky. Mexican mafia, maybe, but Russian mafia, nyet.

“Half of southern California drives that car,” I said.

The Escalade stopped midway down the row. The driver’s window buzzed down and a flashlight beamed out at one of the storage units. The Escalade inched forward and the beam flashed on the next one, and the next. It stopped in front of our unit. The flashlight went off, then the rear window slid down.

“This is it,” Michael whispered.

It suddenly hit me that what we were doing was insane. We had no backup. Worse, nobody knew we were here, not even Molly. If these people were Russian mafia, they would have AK-47s. They would gun us down without the least hesitation.

…Michael drew his gun and we slid down as far as we could under the dash.

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