I watched Sasha become more frenzied in her attempts to breathe. As she instinctively yanked at her restrained wrists, the chair crashed sideways to the floor.

Whoever was recording her death zoomed in on her face.

The plastic bag did its job.

The duct tape sealed out the air she needed to survive.

It didn’t take long.

After just a few more heart-wrenching seconds, Sasha MacIntyre stopped moving, stopped struggling, and lay limp and lifeless on the floor.

“No!” I cried, my voice reverberating starkly off the basement walls.

Sirens screamed down at us from the street outside.

Backup.

It was over.

But then it wasn’t.

The electricity clicked off, and all of the monitors went black, sinking the basement into a thick, unforgiving darkness.

I still had my phone in my hand. I tapped the screen to wake it up, then used its light to see as best I could.

No one was coming at me, but the men were trying to escape.

I shouted for them to stay where they were but heard scuffling, and two of them headed toward the steps. The first man knocked Calvin to the ground, and then Joe kicked my friend twice in the abdomen as he rushed past. They were brutal, powerful kicks, and Calvin gasped harshly in pain.

This could easily turn into a bloodbath if I started shooting, and as far as I’d seen, no one down here was armed, so, swearing, I holstered my weapon, cuffed the remaining man, and ordered the woman not to leave her chair.

She sat there staring at her screen, muttering how she’d been too slow, how she shouldn’t have let this happen.

And then, as I knelt beside Calvin to see how he was doing, I heard her begin to cry soft, tender tears for the woman she had just watched die.

59

NYPD stopped every one of the basement’s occupants from escaping the neighborhood except for the noseless man, who’d slipped away before they arrived.

The officers took them all into the station. We would need to let our lawyers sort out what charges might be leveled against them. The physical assault against Calvin might be enough—might be all we could get.

Right now I wasn’t concerned about any of that.

I was concerned about my friend making it through the night.

He wasn’t recovering from being kicked while he was on the ground, and the EMTs loaded him onto a gurney to take him to the hospital.

“I’m riding along,” I told them unequivocally and, after exchanging a glance with each other, the one in charge nodded. “Alright.”

As we left, the ambulance’s emergency siren sounding, I tried to process all that had just happened.

Calvin was injured.

Sasha was dead.

I’d witnessed her suffocate, and that was not a memory I would ever be able to erase or escape.