Harry said there would be days like these.
There really is no such thing as going home again, and it grates on Molly as she spins on her knee, shotgun at the ready, checking behind her for the faintest sign of movement.
Oh an easy job, and back home to boot; just find the kid, get the contents of the jump drive, simple in and out, she muses darkly. It's not like Reading, Pennsylvania is a big place to start with, and hidey-holes for kids like Manny aren't a dime-a-dozen here. Reading is simply an overgrown town, and the underbelly hierarchy presently in place doesn't exactly have a lot of depth.
But sometimes, even the most familiar places can surprise you, and that's how Molly found herself at the back entrance of the Pagoda, overlooking the city, holed up with her small arsenal, waiting for the rest of the Daybreak brothers to arrive to take her out.
Fucking vampires.
Dogma, her sometime-handler, sometime-partner, full-time pain-in-the-ass, suggested the assignment to her. Nakamura wanted his files back and he didn't want any officials learning of his black market leanings. So he put word on the wire, and Molly foolishly viewed this as almost a vacation. To be back home, to work a city she knew like breathing…the entire case sounded like a nice change of pace after being stuck up in Detroit for three weeks, smelling rotting cabbage through the tiny window in her perch across the street from the headquarters of United Auto Workers, waiting for the union's Vice-President to finally show his puny face so she could tranq him and haul him back to Portland to face those nasty racketeering charges.
One 15-year-old boy running with his old gang back in Reading after a short stint in the Big Apple suddenly sounds almost charming in comparison.
Nakamura is certain that Manny doesn't know what he's carrying, what is on the USB drive that he brought with him to Reading. Manny was supposed to hand the drive over to some guy named Pulse at midnight yesterday down on 6th Street Bridge.
That was the plan, yesterday, to find Pulse and replace him at the drop. Basic background showed Pulse was part of a new, relatively unknown gang that had infiltrated Reading during Molly's prolonged absence and that they holed up in an abandoned warehouse (practically the greatest natural resource of Reading at this point) down near the Outlets.
That last part didn't sit well with Molly. Gangs tend to avoid the high-traffic areas, and this one parked themselves spitting distance from the busiest portion of town.
In retrospect, it really should have been her first clue.