The evacuation had little to do with the word "smooth."
Although patrol officers from the 10th and 18th Precincts had set up a cordon and parked police cars outside it as cover, the barriers were fragile due to insufficient manpower and lax supervision. Anyone could force their way through. The Irish and Black civilians living in the neighborhood either poured into the streets in panic, standing behind the yellow tape and praying that the fire would not spread to their homes, or hid in The Basement with weapons of questionable legality in hand, refusing to come out and swearing to drive off anyone who came here to cause trouble.
If two civilians fearlessly walked toward a neighborhood where fierce gunfire was raging, even the most Dull patrol officers stationed on the perimeter would come looking for trouble, not to mention the Department of Homeland Security, which had apparently caught wind of something. The fake IDs Salomon had created out of thin air would be useless then. Neither FBI nor S.H.I.E.L.D. credentials would work. Their progress would definitely be delayed by overly conscientious Department of Homeland Security agents.
"What do we do?" Little Lorna sounded anxious. She tightly gripped the handle of the pistol inside her motorcycle jacket and tried to keep her voice low so the ordinary people around them would not hear. But Salomon thought she was too tense. Those civilians had no attention to spare for their conversation right now; the commotion outside was no less intense than the gunfight within. "We can't get in without using magic."
"This is Hell's Kitchen. Anything can happen." Salomon glanced at the police car by the roadside. Perhaps the disturbance this time had been too great, and the patrol officers had been in such a rush that they forgot what kind