A blunt instrument.
A plastic fork for eye gouging.
And a string of nylon.
It wasn’t a bad makeshift arsenal.
I kept the bottle right at my side, then reached for the keychain, inspecting the funny shape. It only took a few seconds to recognize the mainland and the upper peninsula of Michigan.
So.
A Michigan keychain.
That felt… almost pointed?
Was this about an old job?
I’d done, I think, three in Michigan early on in my career. All of them went well. At least they had to me. But did someone else get screwed over in the process? It was impossible to know if there were pressure points that might snap when I helped broker deals between organizations.
Did I accidentally screw someone over? Was this their revenge?
I put the keychain to the side and reached for the newspapers instead.
This felt like more confirmation.
Because they were all newspapers from Michigan—Detroit, specifically. And none of them were current. They were papers from years and years ago. So far back, in fact, that they couldn’t have been connected to any job I’d worked.
What the hell was going on here?
These were clearly clues, but I wasn’t connecting them the way I was meant to.
Michigan keychain.
Detroit newspapers from years ago.
But then it hit me.
The pickles.
The fucking pickles.
The door slid open.
And there he was.
“You son of a bitch.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Caymen
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s him,” I told Jade when the final image came in. “Though, he’s a little bloody and bruised now.”
“I’ll email this over to Arty,” Jade said, sounding relieved since it took five revisions to get the guy right.
“I can run it through some facial recognition software I developed,” Arty said as he slid his chair over to another monitor and clicked around. Sure enough, after a few seconds, the screen started scanning pictures against the sketch Jade provided.
It had been hours.
