Locke
The smell hits me before the heavy iron service door even finishes swinging shut on its hinges.
It isn't the familiar, sharp bite of motor oil, copper, or denim that fills the club's main garage downtown. It’s something far colder, far cleaner, and infinitely more dangerous: a clinical stench of industrial solvents, acetone, and glacial acetic acid.
It’s the smell of raw, unrefined death.
I step down into the subterranean basement of our southside warehouse, my heavy steel-toed boots making a quiet, rhythmic clack against the damp floor.
The space used to be a cold-war era meatpacking vault, buried fifty feet beneath a legitimate commercial scrap yard.
It’s the only place that I know of that’s safe enough to store a chemical haul like this.
Standing in the center of the bay,
