“I called because I trust you.”
“Same thing tonight.”
We sat at my kitchen table under a flickering bulb while the bar below thumped with muffled bass. I told him everything. Darren. Maurice. The photo. The deadline.
Micah listened without interrupting. Then he asked one question.
“You want them gone, or you want them stopped?”
That was why I had called him. He knew the difference.
“Stopped,” I said.
He leaned back. “Harder.”
“I know.”
“Cleaner too, if we do it right.”
For the next four hours, we built a plan around patience. Not revenge. Not yet. Information first. Pressure second. Force only when cornered.
At two in the morning, Charlie called.
“Boss,” he whispered. “There’s a car outside the bar. Been there twenty minutes. Engine running.”
Micah was already moving.
I went to the window and looked down through the blinds.
A dark sedan idled across the street.
Someone inside lifted a phone and took a picture of my apartment.
Then my own phone buzzed.
A message from Josie.
Nate, I found something in Darren’s closet. I think it belongs to Maurice. Please call me before they come back.
### Part 5
I told Josie to leave the house, take nothing, and drive to the police station.
She said she couldn’t.
Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t.
“There’s a car outside,” she whispered. “Same one from this morning. I think they’re watching me.”
Micah was close enough to hear. His expression went flat.
I asked, “What did you find?”
A drawer opened on her end. Papers shifted.
“Names. Dates. Amounts of money. Photos of men I don’t know. And a little black drive taped under a shoebox.”
My first thought was trap.
My second was worse: Darren had been stupid enough to keep insurance against his brother.
“Listen carefully,” I said. “Put everything back exactly where you found it. Walk to your kitchen. Make coffee. Act normal.”
“Nate—”
“Normal keeps you alive.”
Micah and I left through the rear exit of McGrevy’s. The alley smelled like wet cardboard and fryer grease. The sedan across the street stayed where it was, watching my lit window while we slipped into Micah’s rental two blocks away.
Josie’s house sat on a quiet cul-de-sac where people watered lawns and pretended nothing evil could park under maple trees. The watcher’s car was a blue Honda with two men inside. Young. Bored. Dangerous mostly because bored men look for reasons to become interesting.
Micah drove past once.
“Kids,” he said.
“Los Muertos?”
“Prospects maybe.”
We parked around the corner.
Josie opened the back door before I knocked. Her face was bloodless.
“You shouldn’t have come.”
“Too late.”
The house smelled like lavender candles and stale beer. I hated seeing Jacob’s small sneakers by the entryway, one lace still knotted from the last time he had been there. A dinosaur drawing was stuck to the fridge with a magnet. In it, a stick-figure family stood under a sun. There were three people, not four.
Josie saw me looking.
“He drew that last month,” she said.
I said nothing.
In Darren’s closet, beneath work boots and old gym bags, we found the shoebox. The papers were exactly what Josie said: names, numbers, partial addresses. Some I recognized from bar talk. Some I did not.
The flash drive was smaller than my thumb.
Micah turned it over. “This is either leverage or bait.”
