EPILOGUE
WRECKER
Three weeks later.
Fluorescent lights hummed like bees trapped in a jar. The badge on my chest said a name I don’t answer to, and the polo said SECURITY in block letters big enough to be a dare. The cameras said I belonged. The janitor said hi every morning like we’d been neighbors in another life.
The logistics hub lived in a concrete box off a feeder road that forgot where it was going. Square roof, tan paint, six bays, the kind of landscaping that dies the minute the contractor stops faking it. The sign out front had a heart logo and a tagline about hope. Hope probably didn’t love the way the forklifts screamed.
Amanda walked past my desk at 09:07 with a clipboard and a coffee cup that said WORLD’S OKAYEST ADMIN. She didn’t look at me. That was the point. She paused at the printer that jams twice a day if you don’t talk nice to it, thumped it, and kept going. That was the signal: ten minutes.
I took my lap like I always did, check the dock doors, glance at the break room, pretend to read a bulletin about slip hazards and fall in love with the idea of earplugs. The men on the floorhad learned my orbit and stopped flinching when I showed up. A guard who doesn’t make people flinch gets ignored. That’s when you can hear things.
Back office. Door that sticks. I shouldered it open and stepped into air cold enough to make my eyes water. The IT closet was a plywood coffin with manners, router, switch, three camera feeds struggling not to throw up. I closed the door and pulled the chair the way I always did: two inches left of the desk, squeak-squeak, sit. Routine covers sins.
Monitor one: bay doors, numbers stenciled, trucks nosed in, a dance of pallet jacks and hands. Monitor two: hallway, copy machine groaning, two temp badges crossing with armfuls of binders. Monitor three: basement.
The basement camera wasn’t on any map. It lived where good intentions go to rot, a dead corner in the sublease diagram with a label that read STORAGE in a font too small to be honest. You didn’t find it unless you were looking for it. We’d been looking.
There she was.
Not Amanda. Sunshine.
Hair hacked short now, eyes too big in her face. Chained. Breathing. Alive. A blanket on her shoulders that had never met laundry day. A paper sign on a rolling cart that said RELIEF in black marker like that made it sacred.
“You were right,” I said, low. “They’re still moving them.”
Amanda slid into the doorway without touching it and closed it the way you close a secret. She leaned a hip against the rack like she was born next to blinking lights. The fluorescent picked up the purple under her eyes and the new tightness at her mouth.
She didn’t look at the monitor first. She looked at me. That’s trust or trouble or both.
Then she looked.
Her hand went to the clipboard without thinking. Her thumb ran along the metal edge until it came away clean. She swallowed. “There’s a second sub-basement,” she said, barely above breath. “It doesn’t exist unless you know the code. The manifest shows pallets. The delta shows bodies.”
“Proof?” I asked.
“Incoming,” she said, eyes still on Sunshine. “Two nights ago, they logged a humanitarian shipment from a flood county four states over. The donation numbers are real. The timing isn’t. The pallets don’t weigh right. The signatures don’t match the county office. Someone rubber-stamped an alias.”
I watched the girl on the feed not cry. Strong isn’t the word we use. Strong is what you say when you can’t fix something and need to fill the air.
“Watcher?” I asked.
“Twice,” she said. “On site yesterday. He loves the glass hallway because he can see himself reflected when he talks.”
“Figures.”
She pulled a flash drive from her jacket and didn’t hand it to me. Good. We did the drop separately, offsite, when God was busy. “I can’t get a clean download of their internal delta without tripping an audit log,” she said. “I can print. If I print, it lives here. If it lives here, it gets shredded the second they feel wind.”
“Then we don’t spook the wind,” I said.
She nodded like it hurt. “They move the ‘relief’ pallets on weekends. Fewer eyes. Fewer volunteers. This weekend is a ‘blanket drive.’” The way she said it could’ve cut your hand. “They’ll load at the north bay at dawn. A supervisor who isn’t a supervisor signs with a name that isn’t a name.”
“Drivers?” I asked.
“Contractors,” she said. “Turnover like a tire fire. Two regulars. One has a limp. The other brags about his flashlight like it’s a pet.”
“Two uniforms, two ball caps, a clipboard,” I said. “We pass the gate. We pass ourselves.”
