HARGROVE RELEASED AFTER CASE DISMISSED ON PROCEDURAL GROUNDS scrolls along the bottom of the screen. A second line flashes: RELEASED PENDING REFILING.
Cipher snorts. “Can’t turn that shit off fast enough these days.”
Pluto shakes his head. “You hear about this story?” he asks Wyatt.
Wyatt nods.”Yeah.” He keeps watching the TV. “Pretty fucked up.”
Babydoll lifts an arm to point to the screen. “See that guy standing behind him?” She reaches up to tap her nail on the image of the man who took me that night.
Wyatt squints. “Yeah?”
“He’s the one who came through here the other day. They had hired guns with them. Walked right in. Went directly to Silas’s room, Billy’s office, the boardroom. He had a device to get through the locks. And they took out boxes of stuff. Had to load it into two vans.”
I’m still staring at the TV. My mind is racing with memories of that man’s face. How strange and out of place he’d been that night he’d approached me at Dewy’s.
“Having a good night?”he’d asked. Something about his smile made my skin crawl.“It’s Maxwell, right?”
And then the night that they took me. He and Silas yanking me into a van. Silas lifting his gun and shooting Ryder in the chest.
The same hands, the same face, but now he’s standing behind a U.S. senator on the news.
“Well,” Wyatt replies to Babydoll slowly, dragging it out. “That tracks.”
“How so?” asks Cipher.
Wyatt clears his throat. “You know the surveillance Silas was running?” I hear him say. “We have reason to believe it wasn’t just club security. Not the way it was set up.”
“Oh yeah?” Pluto sounds wary.
“Silas downloadedeverything.He had it all saved offline, a whole wall of drives labelled by category in the tech room. Usually, with surveillance, you overwrite it regularly because storage gets expensive. You keep a day, maybe two, because you’re looking for a break-in or a fight. But Silas wascategorizing and uploading to an external server. That’s not security, that’s documentation.”
“What external server?” Cipher asks. “How do you know this?”
“I took Silas’s diagnostic tablet,” Wyatt confesses. “And I had someone in tech take a look at it. Someone who knows what they’re looking at. It was synced to a government server and copying files over to it.”
Babydoll’s expression sharpens. “Like a mirror.”
“Right.” Wyatt looks at her. “Like a mirror.”
“So what does this motherfucker want with the recordings?” Cipher points at the screen.
“At first, it would have been security,” Wyatt explains. “Oversight. But now he wants it destroyed. Since his arrest, the feds are investigating whether Hargrove has ties to the club, and they’re going to find them. He funded Billy, and in exchange Billy ran his side hustles for him. Money laundering, drugs, weapons trafficking. That’s racketeering under federal law. A RICO case would mean prison, asset forfeiture, and a public record that ties his name to organized crime forever.”
“But Billy built this club from the ground up,” says Pluto, a frown in his voice.
Wyatt looks at me, and this time I manage to pull my focus away from the TV screen. I shake my head.
“No.” I have to clear my throat. “Mr. White—Senator Hargrove—paid Billy.Hebought the hangar.” Cipher and Pluto look dumbstruck. “I went to their meetings. I watched Hargrove give Billy his first big check.”
“Shit.” Pluto rubs the patch on his leather vest with one hand as if by unconscious habit.
“So why are you really here?” Cipher cuts in. “They took everything, you know. Nothing left here but us chickens.”
“We’re hoping to find anything they might have left behind,” Wyatt answers. “Silas was a paranoid bastard, you know that. He didn’t trust anyone. Plus he loved knowing he could spy on all of us. We think he might’ve kept a private stash. Backups to his backups.”
“Silas was a fucking creep,” says Pluto. “No doubt about that. But I never heard anything about no government money buying this building.”
“Billy lied to you,” I explain. “To all of us. This club was never what he pretended it was. It was just a way for him to become powerful. He helped rich fuckers in the government get richer. Is that what you want on your backs when shit goes down?” The strength of my words surprises me. It comes out without me thinking about it.
