The inside of the station smelled like floor wax and stale coffee, the cheap kind that had been sitting on a heating element for too long. The grey floor tiles caught the faint light from a window down the hall and gave back nothing. Tony moved with his back close to the wall, his head turning at each junction point, his body reading the geometry of the building before his conscious mind could name it. He moved slowly, checking every corner, every open doorway.
They reached the main hallway. At the far end, the front desk was visible. A policeman sat there in the posture of a man fighting a losing battle against sleep, his head resting against one propped hand, his eyes fixed on a small television that flickered silently on the desk in front of him. His eyelids were doing the slow, heavy work of someone who had already mostly lost the argument.
Nadia tapped Tony on the shoulder and pointed to herself. Tony looked at her for one second, then gave the smallest possible nod.
She moved like floating in the air with silent steps.
It was the kind of movement that was difficult to track in real time, not because it was explosive, but because it was completely without wasted effort. She did not run and she seemed simply to no longer be where she had been, and then to be somewhere else entirely and in less than a fraction of a second she reached the front desk and slipped behind the officer in a single flowing motion. Before the man could even register the change in the air pressure behind him, her fingers easily found the pressure point behind his ear and her other arm came across his chest to anchor him in his place. His body responded immediately, the way bodies always respond to that particular interruption to the blood supply to the brain. He did not make a single sound as he simply became heavy, and Nadia without a doubt caught the weight of his head before it could hit the desk and placed it gently down on his folded arms to make sure he looked like a man who had simply, finally, given in to the night.
Tony and Mutt moved past the desk into a side room. Two more officers sat at a small table, a deck of cards spread in between them, the game apparently having ground to its own natural halt. One of them looked up at the sound of footsteps, his mouth beginning to form a shout.
Mutt was already moving before the man even managed to draw a single breath. A single strike to the jaw, quick and precisely placed, and the officer's lights went out before the sound reached his throat. Tony took the second man from behind, locking a forearm across his throat and applying the pressure in the specific way that interrupts blood flow without crushing the airway. It was not to kill but to stop these officers. The officer's hands came up and clawed at Tony's arm with the reflexive, panicked strength of someone who didn't yet understand what was even happening. Then his hands slowed down and then they slowly stopped still, and his body went slack. Tony held the pressure for two additional seconds after the resistance ended, then lowered the man carefully to the floor.
They tucked both men under the table, out of sight of the hallway. There was neither any blood nor any noise. There were even no signs of any struggle of the two officers who appeared to have fallen asleep in unorthodox positions.
Tony took the ring of keys from the hook near the desk. They walked deeper into the station, moving toward the back where the air changed character completely. It became thicker, damper, carrying the layered smell of sweat and old stone and confinement.
Most of the cells here stood empty, their iron doors open on dark interiors. The last cell on the right was occupied. Three men sat on a narrow wooden bench, their conversation was a low murmur that stopped the instant they heard the sound of boots on the stone floor. All three faces turned toward the bars. Three pairs of eyes adjusted to the light and recognized what they were seeing.
The leader of the group came to his feet in a single motion, his chair scraping backward. His eyes were wide, and the color had already left his face.
"You!" he gasped, pressing himself backward until his shoulders found the wall. "How did you get in here? Guards! Help!"
The cry died without an echo. Tony took the key from the ring, found the correct one, and slid it into the lock. The sound of the tumblers turning was the only response the man received.
Tony walked alone into the cell. Mutt and Nadia remained in the doorway, their faces set and still.
"No one is coming," Tony said calmly as his voice carried no edge and no heat but it had the flat, declarative quality of a man stating the weather.
"What do you want?" the leader asked, his hands trembling visibly at his sides. "We didn't tell them anything! We said we got into a simple fight with some strangers! We never gave them your names!"
Tony looked at the three of them. They were just small time men, the kind who made their living by taking from people who had less to lose than them. To them, the fight in the alley had been just a bad night, a miscalculation they were paying for with a few days of confinement. To Tony, they were a thread that led back through a series of other threads to something he could not afford to have unraveled.
"It does not matter what you told them today," he said slowly. "It matters what you will tell someone tomorrow. Or maybe next week. Or it might be next month, when someone makes you an offer that is better than silence. You saw us and you also saw our faces and the way we move. You are a map, and as long as you are alive, that map exists and i cannot leave a map of my team's location sitting in a police cell."
The youngest of the three, still on the bench, began to cry. The tears came quickly, the way they do when the body understands something before the mind has finished processing it.
"Please," the young man said, his voice breaking apart at the edges. "We were just hungry. We just needed money. We will not say a word. I swear on my mother's life. I swear on everything."
Tony looked at him for a moment without speaking. There was no pleasure in the young man's fear. There was also no hesitation. "I do not know your mother," he said, and his voice was not cruel when he said it. "But I know human nature. You will talk if the police offer you a shorter sentence. You will talk if someone pays you enough. You are a risk, and I cannot carry risks across a desert." He paused. "This is not because I hate you, it's because you have stepped in the wrong place and now you have become a danger to me and my people."