Chapter 7
Evan’s blood turned to slush in his veins.
"What is it?" Seth yelled, lunging across the center console, trying to grab the phone. "Evan! What did they send? What is that?"
Evan didn't answer. He jammed the transmission into drive, slammed his foot onto the accelerator, and sent the Mercedes fishtailing onto the wet blacktop of Route 9, the twin-turbo V8 screaming as the speedometer surged past eighty.
"Marcus," Evan spat between clenched teeth, his knuckles turning dead white on the leather wheel. "They didn't just send it to me. They sent it to Marcus."
***
Marcus Kane’s riverfront estate was a three-story monument to generational wealth and carefully cultivated political vanity. White Georgian columns, a sweeping circular driveway of dark Belgian pavers, and manicured boxwood hedges that looked pristine even under the sullen autumn sky.
Evan didn't bother using the call box at the front gate. He punched in the master override code he had forced Marcus to install during his first municipal campaign, blowing past the iron gates and sliding to a halt on the wet pavers, the brakes squealing in protest.
The front entrance was unlatched.
"Marcus!" Evan roared, kicking the heavy mahogany door open and stepping onto the white marble floor of the foyer.
The house was suffocatingly warm, smelling of spilled gin, damp wool, and the sharp, chemical tang of unburned matches.
In the formal dining room, the crystal chandelier blazed at full wattage.
Marcus was standing beside the long mahogany dining table, his tailored dress shirt unbuttoned to the sternum, his silk tie discarded on the rug, his hair wild and matted with cold sweat. His hands were shaking so violently that the heavy silver letter opener he held trembled like an aspen leaf in a gale.
On the table sat an oversized leather duffel bag. Inside, stacked in tight, brick-like bundles, were hundreds of thousands of dollars in banded federal reserve notes—the non-sequential campaign kickbacks and offshore commercial consulting fees Marcus had kept hidden in his basement floor-safe for seven years.
Beside the open bag, Marcus’s personal cell phone lay on the polished wood, its screen frozen on the exact same green night-vision frame of the boy’s femur sticking out of the blue tarp.
"Marcus," Evan said, stepping into the room, holding his hands out in front of him, palms forward. "Put the knife down."
Marcus whipped around, his bloodshot eyes bulging, his voice cracking into a shrill, hysterical shriek that echoed off the high plaster ceiling. "Stay back! Don't you come near me, Evan! Stay the hell away from me!"
"Marcus, look at me," Evan said, his tone low, measured, the practiced cadence of an executive handling a hostile takeover. "You're having a panic attack. Put the letter opener down before you hurt yourself."
"A panic attack?" Marcus laughed—a dry, rattling bark that ended in a sob. "Look at the screen! Look at what they sent! They're standing on him, Evan! They have a shovel in the dirt! The mayoral debate is Thursday night! If that footage hits the DA’s inbox, state troopers will kick down this front door while the cameras are still rolling! My house, my name, the senate bid—everything I spent twenty-five years building—gone! They’ll put me in a state penitentiary with the animals I sent to death row!"
"The District Attorney doesn't have the footage," Evan said, taking a slow, steady step across the Persian carpet. "If they wanted to ruin you, they wouldn't ask for cash. This is an extortion play. They want the money, Marcus."
"Then I’m giving it to them!" Marcus shouted, dropping the silver opener and hauling the heavy duffel off the table, the brass zipper straining against the bricks of currency. "I have six hundred and twenty thousand in this bag! Non-sequential, completely untraceable! I take it to the silo, I drop it on the floor, and this whole nightmare dies!"
"You fool," Evan snarled, his patience snapping like a dry twig. He closed the distance in two strides, grabbing the thick leather strap of the duffel and yanking it out of Marcus’s grip. Marcus stumbled against the heavy mahogany chair, gasping for breath. "You think you walk into an abandoned rail silo at midnight with a half-million dollars and just walk back out? You think a blackmailer with a dead body on video says 'thank you' and retires to Florida?"
"They promised—"
"Julian is dead!" Seth shouted from the dining room doorway, his voice cracking with sheer hysteria.
Marcus froze.
The color vanished from the councilman’s face, leaving his skin the shade of damp chalk. He slowly lowered himself onto the arm of the dining chair, his mouth trembling. "What... what did you say?"
"Julian was murdered four hours ago," Evan said, his grip tight on the duffel strap. "Suffocated in his own garage. Leo’s brass lighter was left sitting on the dashboard."
Marcus pressed his palms against his temples, rocking back and forth, a thin line of saliva leaking from the corner of his lips. "No. No, no, no... God help us... they're hunting us down... one by one..."
"Julian died because he was isolated," Evan pressed, leaning down until his eyes were inches from Marcus’s face. "Whoever is doing this wants us divided. They know you have the liquid cash. They know your election makes you terrified of exposure. The rail silo is a slaughter box, Marcus! It sits three miles outside municipal jurisdiction, surrounded by three hundred acres of dead switchgrass and an abandoned train yard with zero cellular reception! If you walk in there alone, you aren't paying a ransom—you're walking straight into an execution chamber!"
"Then what do we do?" Marcus wept, tears cutting clean black lines through the grease on his cheeks. "Tell me, Evan! You won't let me pay them! You won't let me call the police! How do we stop this?"
"We use your meeting as bait," Evan said, his eyes turning to cold flint.
He leaned closer, his voice dropping into a harsh, conspiratorial whisper.
"You set the drop. You confirm the midnight deadline. But you don't go alone. Seth and I will be in the upper conveyor rafters three hours before you arrive. I have a night-vision scope and my suppressed Remington. The second this bastard steps through the silo door to grab that bag, I put a high-velocity round through both his knees. We drag him to the basement of my estate. We find out who else has copies of that tape, who else knows about the culvert. Then we burn the video, we put him in the deep woods behind Blackwood Hill, and this ends forever."
Marcus looked up, his watery eyes searching Evan’s face with pathetic, desperate hope. "An ambush? You're going to shoot him?"
"It’s the only language people like this understand," Evan said. "We don't negotiate with a ghost. We put a bullet in it."
Marcus went completely still.
He dropped his gaze to the polished floorboards, his shoulders sinking, his hands lying limp in his lap. The polished, grandiloquent posture of Newford’s next mayor was entirely gone, stripped down to the terrified coward who had held the flashlight ten years ago while Julian dragged the body into the pipe.
