"Gabe, if you're hearing this, something went wrong. I hope I'm just being paranoid and we're laughing about this over a burger someday. But if not, you need to know what I found."
Gabe clenched his fists, hanging on every word.
"Dad wasn't dirty. He was murdered because he discovered what I've spent months documenting. There’s been a smuggling operation running through Haven Cove for at least twenty years. Same routes. Same corruption. Different players, but the structure's identical."
Pause. David's voice thick with emotion.
"I can prove it now. Everything Dad tried to expose before they had him killed is on this drive. But Gabe, it goes deeper than we thought. Law enforcement’s involvement. Money laundering through shell corporations. A distribution network that spans the entire West Coast."
Another pause.
"I'm sorry I didn't tell you before. But I couldn't risk you getting hurt. I hired Ruiz to document everything. And if you're hearing this, either he got the evidence to you safely, or you found my backup plan."
"Finish this, Gabe. Finish what Dad started."
"Be the hero he raised us to be."
The recording ended.
Gabe sat in the destroyed bakery and let himself break. Just for a moment. Just long enough to process hearing his brother's voice after three weeks of silence.
Cara put her hand on his shoulder. Didn't say anything. Didn't need to.
Once David’s voice faded from his head, he tried the other files. He groaned.
“What?” Cara leaned close, staring at the failure message on the screen.
“Encrypted.” Exactly as he suspected. Each file would have to be cracked individually.
Footsteps on the stairs. Tom appeared, wiping his hands on a rag. "Sounds like you got in." He shrugged. "I heard voices."
Gabe straightened. Pulled himself together piece by piece. "Yeah. But there's..." He clicked through folders. Manifests. Audio files. Photos. Financial records. Surveillance logs. "There's months of documentation here. Maybe years. I don't even know where to start."
More footsteps. Wade came down, tool belt still strapped around his waist. Reagan followed, her apron gone but her server's notebook still tucked in her pocket.
"Saw the lights," she said. "Thought you all might need coffee."
Piper appeared last, phone in hand. "What's going on?"
Gabe's instincts screamed at him to shut this down. Send them home. This wasn’t their fight.
Except his counter-intelligence training saw something different.
The way Tom assessed the damaged security system and known exactly what needed fixing. The guy had tech skills beyond what a handyman should have.
No matter how much he tried to hide behind that silent-dude exterior, Wade oozed situational awareness, and probably a lot of other hidden skills Gabe could only guess about.
Reagan might run a diner now, but the woman had a genius for pattern recognition. She’d earned that somewhere.
Even little Piper had special skills. She was sharp and disarming and way more thoughtful than she wanted anybody to realize.
These weren't just helpful neighbors. These were people with skills they weren't advertising.
Just like Cara.
His brother's voice echoed in his head.Finish this, Gabe. Finish what Dad started.
He couldn't do it alone. Not in forty-six hours. Not with unidentified goons tracking his every move. Not when the evidence sprawled across decades and he didn't know the local players or patterns.
