Chapter 37
Bastien Montclaire
Murder’s easy.Covering it up is where the art comes in.
It wasn’t difficult to find his car. He parked as if the neighbors’ cameras didn’t exist. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
Matt will take care of the neighbors’ footage. And yes, I’ll owe him once more.
I sit behind the wheel of the man’s car. Headlights carve a clean path through the dark. In the rearview mirror, the street behind me erases itself.
Matt calls back before I reach the end of the block. “Plates belong to Calvin Moreau. Multiple priors.”
A pause. Another.
Keys tap, stop, then resume.
“Armed robbery. Assault. Extortion. Intimidation. Trafficking facilitation.”
The list keeps coming, each charge landing with dull familiarity. I turn onto a side street and ease off the gas.
“Never graduated to murder though,” Matt says. “Kept his hands clean enough, but cops are familiar with him. In and out. Never stayed long.”
I picture a man who survived on smaller crimes with smaller rewards. The kind who learned at a young age how far he could push without crossing a line he couldn’t slip back from.
“Until tonight,” I say.
Matt exhales. “Yeah. At least no homicides on record that I can find. This was fresh territory for him.”
“Thanks, bro. See you soon.”
Some men survive because they know where the edge is. Some die the first time they mistake it.
Of course, he misjudged. He wasn’t built for this kind of job, one he didn’t understand. He thought it was another felony that paid better than usual.
Wrong.
I stop at a red light, and a streetlamp shines on him in the passenger seat. His face is slack, emptied of whatever calculations once lived there.
His mistake was taking a job he didn’t understand and stepping into something he thought he could control.
He misread the room. Misread the target. Misread me.
I don’t miss. He did, and that’s the difference between being a professional and a corpse.
The Lemaire mansion waits at the end of the street—tall, manicured, insulated by money and the assumption that nothing bad ever reaches this far. I pull in and park the car where it can’t be ignored.
I picture the morning. Helene stepping out of her pristine home, still believing she’s untouchable. The hesitation when she sees the car. Confusion giving way to irritation. Then the sudden spike of understanding that crawls up her spine when she realizes this problem of her own making is now sitting in her driveway.
This is where the actual work happens. She’ll have a choice to make. Call the police and tell them there’s a dead man in her drive that could lead back to her… or clean up her own mess before anyone else sees it.
Either way, she’s stained now.
Either way, she bleeds.
I leave the keys in the ignition and close the door behind me. No rush or drama. I’m a ghost who walks away without looking back, already finished with the problem I’ve returned to her.
This one is on her now.
