Mekhi was leaning against the far wall with his arms crossed. Watching the whole thing with that expression he gets when he’s already done the math and is just waiting for me to arrive at the same answer. We’d known each other since we were kids. Since the days when Banks Reserve was drowning in predatory debt. The kind my father and Uncle Calvin had buried the company under. Interest rates designed to bleed you dry. Terms that gave lenders leverage over everything my grandparents had built. No bank was going to refinance a company run by a teenager. No investor was going to bet on a kid.
So we did what we had to do. Me, Justice, Mekhi, and his brother Zephyr. We used what we had. The trucks. The distribution network. The warehouses. The supply chain that moved Banks Reserve product into every bar, restaurant, and liquor store on the East Coast. We added another product to the shipments. Hidden in plain sight, moving alongside premium cognac and aged whiskey. Nobody checks a Banks Reserve truck. The name is too clean. The brand is too respected. That’s exactly what we were counting on.
Twenty years later, the debt was paid. The company was a billion-dollar international brand. And we were still the plug. Supplying dealers. Keeping the machine running. Reinvesting through the casino and Mekhi’s real estate developments. It wasn’t what I dreamed about when I was a kid watching my grandmother trying to hold this thing together. But it was what saved us. I’d made peace with that a long time ago.
Most days, anyway.
Justice was sitting in a chair by the door. Quiet, the way he always was in these situations. He wasn’t built for this part of the business the way Mekhi and I were. Justice was the numbers. The CFO. The one who made sure every dollar was accounted for on the clean side. But he’d been in the room for twenty years, and he understood that sometimes the room looked like this. A boarded-up row house in Northeast. A young boy on his knees.
“Let me tell you what I know,” I said, still rotating the balls, still calm. “Three weeks ago, one of our trucks got hit. Fourteen cases of Banks Reserve barrels on the manifest. What was in those barrels was worth significantly more than the bourbon, and it’s gone. All of it.”
Dimonte shook his head so hard I thought he might give himself whiplash. “Quest, I’m telling you?—”
“I’m not finished.” I let the Baoding balls stop. Set them down on the cushion beside me. One at a time. Careful. Deliberate. “In my twenty years of running this operation, a Banks Reserve truck has never been hit. Not once. Not during the early days when we were moving reckless. Our routes are tight. Our schedules are randomized. Our drivers are vetted and paid well enough to never get creative.” I tilted my head. “So when a truck gets hit, and the people who hit it know exactly which truck to target and exactly what time it’s going to be at exactly which rest stop off 95? That tells me something.”
I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees.
“That tells me it was an inside job. And since you were the driver on that route, Dimonte, that makes you the first person I need to talk to.”
“I got robbed too!” His voice cracked, going high and desperate. “They had guns on me! They made me get out the truck and get on the ground! I called y’all right after?—”
“You did.” I nodded. “You called Mekhi twenty minutes after the truck was supposed to arrive at the warehouse. Twenty minutes is a long time, Dimonte. Long enough to help unload. Long enough to make sure everything gets transferred to whatever vehicle was waiting. Long enough to wipe down the cab and rehearse a story.”
“That ain’t what happened!”
“Mekhi.” I didn’t even look at him. Didn’t have to. “Tell me about the G-Wagon.”
Mekhi pushed off the wall, pulling his phone from his pocket. Scrolled for a second before holding it up. The screen showed an Instagram post. Dimonte and a girl I didn’t recognize, both posed up in front of a pearl-white Mercedes-AMG G 63. She had a Birkin. He had a watch I could identify from across the room as an AP Royal Oak. The caption said something about God’s timing being perfect. Given that he was currently on his knees in a trap house about to meet God personally, that was an irony I wished I could appreciate under different circumstances.
“Posted that two weeks after the robbery,” Mekhi said, his voice flat. “The truck is a hundred and eighty. The bag is anywhere from ten to thirty depending on the color. The watch is about forty. And those Amiri jeans he got on right now?” Mekhi nodded toward Dimonte’s knees on the floor. “Those are eleven hundred retail.”
Dimonte’s face changed. That panicked, crying, desperate energy shifted into something quieter. Something that looked alot like a man who just realized the math wasn’t mathing and everybody in the room could see it.
“We pay you four thousand a run,” I said. “Six runs a month. That’s twenty-four thousand. Before taxes, which you don’t pay because this isn’t exactly a W-2 situation. Twenty-four thousand a month is good money. More than most people your age will see in three months. But it’s not G-Wagon money, Dimonte. It’s not AP money. It’s not Birkin-for-your-girl money. And you and I both know that.”
He didn’t say anything. Just knelt there, chest heaving, eyes darting between me and Mekhi and Justice like he was looking for the exit that didn’t exist.
“What I can’t figure out,” I continued, “is whether you’re stupid or just arrogant. Robbing the truck is one thing. That’s business. Business disputes have business solutions. But then going on Instagram and posting the evidence?” I almost laughed. Almost. “My guy, you literally geo-tagged the dealership. You tagged the girl. You tagged the BAG. You might as well have written ‘I robbed my boss’ in your bio and called it a day.” I shook my head. “That’s not business. That’s disrespect. And I take disrespect personally.”
“Quest.” His voice was barely a whisper now. The crying had stopped. The begging had stopped. He was looking at me with the kind of clarity that only comes when a person finally understands what room they’re actually in. “Please. I got a daughter. She’s three. Please.”
And I heard him. I did. I heard the fear in his voice. Saw the tears drying on his face. Registered that somewhere in this city there was a three-year-old girl who was going to wake up tomorrow and ask where her daddy was. The honest truth? None of that changed the math. The math was simple. If you let one person rob you and live, you have to let the next person try. And the next. And the one after that. The reputation we’d built overtwenty years—the reason no one had ever hit a Banks Reserve truck—was because everyone understood what would happen if they did.
Dimonte was about to become the reminder.
I picked up the Glock from the cushion next to the Baoding balls. I’d set it there when I sat down, casual, like it was a TV remote. The weight of it was familiar in a way that I never let myself think about too deeply.
“I’m sorry about your daughter,” I said. And I meant it. That was the worst part—I genuinely meant it.
I raised the gun and pulled the trigger.
The sound was sharp and contained in the small room. Dimonte dropped sideways like someone had cut his strings. One shot. Clean. No struggle. No mess. No blood on my shirt or my shoes or anywhere it would be difficult to explain later tonight.
The Baoding balls hadn’t moved from the cushion. My cufflinks were still in. My shirt was still crisp.
I set the gun down on the coffee table and stood up, reaching for my jacket.
“I’ll get Zephyr on cleanup,” Mekhi said, already pulling out his phone, not even looking at the body. This wasn’t his first time. Wasn’t his hundredth. “Y’all go ahead. You got Yusef’s thing tonight, right?”
