“My mom,” he whispered. “If Maurice finds out…”
“He already sent you to burn a building with a man inside,” I said. “How long before he sends you somewhere you don’t walk back from?”
The cigarette dropped from Danny’s fingers.
He talked for nine minutes.
Names. Cars. A warehouse by the docks. A meeting planned for midnight. Most important, he said Maurice had been raging about a traitor. Someone close. Someone feeding cops and Horn.
When Danny finished, he looked smaller.
“What happens to me?”
“You go upstairs,” I said. “You tell your mother you’re sick. You stay inside.”
“And Maurice?”
I looked toward the gray morning.
“Maurice is about to start seeing enemies everywhere.”
My phone buzzed as if he had heard me.
A video came through.
Van, the big man from Josie’s house, sat tied to a chair. Blood ran from his eyebrow.
Maurice stood behind him holding a knife.
And he said, “Tell Nathan Horn what happens to people who talk.”
### Part 8
Van did not scream in the video.
That bothered me more than if he had.
He breathed through his nose, jaw clenched, eyes fixed somewhere above the camera. A man trying to keep one piece of himself private while the rest was being used as a message.
Maurice leaned into frame.
“You took something from me, Horn. Now I take people from you.”
The video cut off.
No location. No timestamp visible. But there was a sound behind them—a metallic clang followed by a horn, low and mournful.
Micah replayed it twice.
“Docks,” he said.
“Or train yard.”
I closed my eyes and listened again. Horn. Chain rattle. Water birds.
“Docks.”
The goal was simple: find Van alive.
The conflict was everything else. Maurice wanted me to rush blind. He wanted me angry enough to make mistakes. But rage is a door with a handle on both sides. If you open it for yourself, the enemy can step through too.
We spent the next hour narrowing locations. Danny’s midnight meeting was at a warehouse near Pier 6. The video background had pale green corrugated metal. Three warehouses matched. One was abandoned, one was city storage, one belonged to a shell company Liliana found connected to Enrique Wolf.
The red herring was almost too neat.
“Too obvious,” Micah said.
“Which means Maurice expects us to avoid it.”
“Or expects us to think that and go anyway.”
I rubbed my eyes. Smoke from the bar still lived in my clothes. My son was hidden in a cabin with broken arms. My friend was nearly killed in my bar. My ex-wife had delivered evidence she should have noticed years ago. Every road pointed toward the docks, and every road could be a trap.
