Julio's heart is racing as he steps into the apartment, gun clenched in his hand. He inches around the corner into the living room, and what he sees makes his blood go icy. Angel is sprawled out on the coffee table, groaning faintly as he starts to come to.
"Shit," Julio breathes, hurrying over to his friend. Angel's ghost-white face and the blood trickling from his mouth twist Julio's stomach into knots.
"Where'd they go?" Julio demands, trying to sound calmer than he feels. His eyes dart around the room like he's half-expecting the people they're after to pop out from behind the couch.
Angel blinks blearily, the morphine clearly fogging his head.
"Wha...what's going on?" he slurs, trying to pull himself up before collapsing back with a pained grunt.
"The people we're after, man - where are they?" Julio presses, his patience fraying. He needs answers, and fast.
Angel peers up at Julio, his gaze all over the place. He winces, shaking his head slightly.
"I don't know, they were just here and then they vanished." He croaks, his voice barely audible as he gingerly touches the sore spot on the back of his head. A new bruise is already starting to swell where Kate had hit him with the statue.
Julio scrambles to his feet, his eyes wildly searching the apartment. He needs to think fast. As he moves away from Angel, his gaze falls on a roll of bubble wrap and a U-Haul box on the floor. Something unexpected catches his eye. He drops down quickly. A Glock is lying on the floor. He picks it up, feeling confused and alarmed. He turns to Angel and demands,
"Why did they leave my gun?" Suspicion and fear edge his voice.
Rick and Kate are eavesdropping intently at the bedroom door. He can barely hear everything Julio says and quickly moves away when he starts yelling at Angel about what they were doing in the living room just a minute ago.
Rick leaves Kate with a warning not to open the door.
"We can't risk being seen," he urges.
They don't want to get caught. He moves to the window overlooking the alleyway to see if they can escape down the fire escape. But he spots two dirty NYPD cops patrolling the alleyway below. That escape route is out of the question, he thinks grimly.
"What were they doing in here, Angel?" Julio demands, his temper fraying.
Angel lowers his head to think and suddenly realizes his phone is missing from his back pocket. Panic jolts through him as he reaches back for it. He looks up at Julio and admits,
"They have my phone." His voice shakes slightly.
Julio looks at him incredulously. He can't catch a break today.
"Damn, you know I just bought that phone!" Angel complains, feeling a little sorry for himself.
Julio's disgust boils over into renewed anger.
"The phone is the least of your problems, Angel. Take the gun, if anyone comes through the door, shoot them." His eyes turn icy and hard.
Kate cautiously opens the bedroom door and peeks out just as Julio is walking away. She can barely see his face, but when his lips move she panics. He's going to call Angel's phone and they'll be caught.
Rick is turning around, still typing a text, when he sees Kate running towards him with pure terror on her face. She quickly gestures for him to hand over the phone. She swipes up, abandoning the text he was writing, and quickly goes to settings to mute the volume. Just as Kate sees the little speaker icon with a line through it, the phone vibrates in her hand. Julio's picture mocks her from the screen.
After the phone rings about five times, Julio gets disgusted and hangs up his cell phone. He starts walking back towards Angel who is mumbling something he can't quite make out.
"Once he calls 911, we will have him. The second dispatch gets his call they will lead us right to him."
"Well, maybe he's smarter than that. Did you ever think about that? Hold on a second…"
He should have thought of it sooner now he's kicking himself because he didn't. He pulls the cell phone out of his jacket pocket and quickly dials a number. The call connects and he's talking to his hacker.
"Listen Johnny I need you to track Angel's phone."
"Boss why would I do that, Angel is with you isn't he?"
"Don't ask questions just do it! Julio hangs up the phone and starts walking to Angel when he hears a noise.
Julio looks at Angel and he knows he didn't hear anything because he's so out of it from the morphine he's riding high on but he asks him anyway.
"Did you hear that?"
"Hear what?"
Julio quickly puts his finger to his lips telling Angel to keep quiet.
Downstairs Ernesto has been standing around doing nothing. He's been watching the fire escape and the back door for the past hour and no one had shown up.
Just then, a black Dodge pickup truck tries to drive past him cutting through the back of the alley compromising his location. So he decides to give the driver a hard time.
"What the hell are you doing back here buddy?"
The driver doesn't want anything to do with Ernesto or his questions so he blows the horn and never stops. Ernesto walks up to the driver's side window and starts yelling at the driver who doesn't do anything. He just keeps blowing the horn.
After about thirty seconds of the horn blowing Julio calls Ernesto on the radio and asks him what the hell is going on.
"Boss I swear this guy is acting like an idiot he keeps blowing the horn."
"Shut him up. Do whatever is necessary to make him stop blowing that goddamn horn."
Ernesto pulls out his gun and points it at the driver. The horn stops blowing and the driver puts the truck in drive and takes off. Problem solved.
Rick froze mid-step, his muscles tensing like steel cables. The pop of bubble wrap beneath his foot shattered the silence — four tiny explosions that might as well have been gunshots in the tomb-quiet apartment. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and the familiar ache in his bad knee screamed at him to move. But he didn't dare. Without shifting his foot, he turned to Kate, catching the silver glint of her charm bracelet in the dim light filtering through the dusty blinds.
Her hands moved in quick, nervous gestures, fingers trembling slightly as they formed the signs to ask him,
"Do you think anyone heard that?"
The moonlight caught the old burn scar on her right palm as she signed back to him.
His fingers flew back, steady despite the adrenaline coursing through his veins.
"Not sure. But we need to go. Now."
He'd spent fifteen years as a cop teaching others how to stay calm in crisis situations. Now those lessons were going to be keeping them alive.
They crept toward the window and the promise of escape beyond it, stepping over the scattered moving boxes that Kate hadn't finished unpacking since relocating here weeks ago. Each box was a potential betrayal waiting to scrape against the hardwood or tip over. Rick eased the pane up, wincing at each subtle scrape of glass against the frame — the window was old, probably original to the building, with decades of paint layers making the tracks sticky and unreliable. Once it was open, he helped Kate onto the fire escape, the metal grating cold beneath their feet, then squeezed his bulk through the opening. His shoulders barely fit; he'd have to start skipping those protein shakes. Just as he slid the window shut, the door creaked open with the distinctive sound of old brass hinges that needed oiling. They pressed themselves against the wide brick facade between windows, barely daring to breathe. The rough texture of the century-old bricks bit into Rick's back through his thin cotton shirt Kate nestled against him becoming as small as possible.
Angel burst into the room like a hurricane in human form. Through the glass, Rick caught a glimpse of him heading for the fire escape, Rick grabbed Kate's hand, feeling the slight tremor in her fingers, and they darted to the opposite window to the next room avoiding detection. The frame lifted easily — a small mercy in a day that had offered few — and they slipped back into Kate's living room. The space looked different from this angle, almost alien, with shadows stretching across the ceiling from the street lights six stories below. They moved like shadows past the couch and loveseat, the furniture she'd chosen specifically because it matched the color scheme of her grandmother's antique rug. They reached the hallway door in seconds, their footsteps muffled by the plush carpet runner. Kate eased it open just enough to peer through, the hinges mercifully silent thanks to the WD-40 she'd applied just yesterday. Sometimes paranoia paid off.
Rick yanked her back before she could step out, his fingers digging into the soft fabric of her sleeve. Julio was walking away from the front entry door, heading toward Angel's position, his massive frame taking up most of the narrow hallway. The tribal tattoo on the back of his neck seemed to writhe in the fluorescent lighting. Rick's mind raced, calculating angles and timing. If they timed this right, if they waited until Julio's back was fully turned and the distance was perfect... they might just make it out of the apartment unseen. The elevator was out of the question — too slow, too noisy, too easy to track. But the service stairs? Those could work. They just had to time it perfectly, and hope that the rest of Angel's crew wasn't waiting in the lobby.
A now frustrated Julio gets on the two-way radio and asks the dirty cops if they or anyone in his crew has seen the two people they are after. He continues to walk towards Angel who is still holding up a now empty IV bag long after the medic has left. It's empty so he yanks it from his hand and the IV line comes out of his arm. This action causes a little bit of blood to leak out from his right arm where the needle was, but he doesn't care because he's not getting any results. Just then the dirty cops respond with,
"Floors one, two, and three are clear and we're heading up to four."
"Good. At least that's something!"
Rick and Kate stumble upstairs to the upstairs hallway like drunk teenagers trying not to wake their parents. The lights above them keep flickering - you know, that awful fluorescent buzz that makes everything look like a cheap horror movie. The wallpaper's peeling off in strips, and honestly? The whole place smells like his mother's basement.
They can hear the cops downstairs, radio static mixing with voices that bounce off the walls. It's weird how sound travels in old buildings like this. Every step they take feels like it's announcing their location to the whole damn world. They're passing door after door - all identical except for the numbers, some of them hanging crooked - when Kate suddenly yanks Rick backward so hard he nearly ends up on his ass. She's got that look in her eyes, the one that says she's onto something. Her hands are shaking (can't blame her) as she lifts up one of those cheap welcome mats everyone's grandma seems to own. Bingo - spare key.
The apartment they slip into is like stepping into a time capsule. Rick closes the door as quietly as he can, but the lock still clicks like a gunshot in the silence. God, his heart's going so fast it feels like it might explode. The place is straight out of 1975 - plastic on the furniture (seriously, who still does that?), one of those ancient TVs with rabbit ears, and enough doilies to stock a craft store. The air's thick with that weird mix of mothballs and what smells like someone's attempt at arroz con pollo from about three weeks ago.
While Rick's doing his paranoid check of every possible exit (like they have options at this point), Kate's frozen in place, staring at this old photograph like it holds the secrets of the universe. Through glass that probably hasn't been dusted since Obama's first term, there's this old lady standing proud in front of the building, surrounded by kids with those huge smiles you only see in summer vacation photos.
Kate's hands start flying - she's signing so fast Rick can barely keep up.
"Mrs. Diaz," she tells him.
"I helped her with groceries almost every time she went to the store." She swallows hard like the words taste bitter.
"Every Thursday for three years. She'd make me coffee - the real Cuban stuff, not that Starbucks crap - and tell me stories about home. The Cuba she left behind."
Her eyes get all glassy, but she's too stubborn to actually cry.
"She doesn't even know they're kicking her out. No home, no future - just like me."
Rick's about to say something probably useless when Angel's phone buzzes in his pocket. Unknown caller. Great. But then Javi's face pops up on the screen, looking about as happy as someone who just found out their dog ate their winning lottery ticket.
"Rick, what the hell?"
The rest plays out like a bad dream - you know the kind where you're trying to run but your legs won't work, right? Rick's voice cracks like he's thirteen again,
"Javi - my hearing aids are dead. I have Kate Beckett with me. The witness who saw the murder. We're trapped in her building. These guys... they've got badges but they're not cops. Not really."
Kate's practically looking over his shoulder to read Javi's lips, and with each word, she looks more like she's seen a ghost. The phone's blue light makes them both look like extras from The Walking Dead.
When Javi drops the bomb about corrupt cops, Rick's hands cut through the air so hard he practically creates a breeze. The dust dancing in the light makes it look like they're surrounded by tiny, panicked fireflies.
Then - because timing is a cruel joke - a floorboard creaks outside like something from a cheap horror flick. Rick peers through curtains that have probably been hanging there since the Carter administration. Down below, black SUVs have joined the party, looking about as friendly as a shark convention.
That's when Kate taps his shoulder - the kind of tap that feels like a goodbye you're not ready for.
"Mrs. Diaz's fire escape," she signs.
"Broken latch. Maintenance is about as reliable here as my ex-boyfriend."
They give Javi the rundown of their half-baked escape plan. "Fifteen minutes," Rick signs, trying to keep his hands steady and failing miserably.
"Get your people ready. And if this goes sideways - check my kid's copy of 'In a Hail of Bullets.' First edition. You know the one."
Kate adds her piece, fingers dancing through the air,
"Mrs. Diaz needs someone watching her back. This whole mess - the evictions, the sketchy property deals, the murders - it's all connected. Like one of those crazy conspiracy boards, except this one's real."
She pauses and swallows hard.
Tell her I'm sorry. Tell her 'gracias por todo.'"
The sound of boots on the stairs might as well be a countdown timer. Rick kills the call while they back toward the bedroom like they're being stalked by something nasty. Kate scribbles a note for Mrs. Diaz - probably the world's most inadequate apology - and tucks it under the photo, weighing it down with one of the million little ceramic angels scattered around the place. Guardian angels watching over their great escape? Yeah, right. They're gonna need more than ceramic angels to get out of this mess.
