Chapter 4 - Three Names in Red
Jace Mercer woke to the sound of his little sister coughing through the bedroom wall.
He lay still beneath a blanket that smelled of laundry soap and damp plaster. His phone vibrated against the floor. Notifications stacked over one another: strangers calling him a monster, teammates asking whether the video was real, a message from his manager at the tire shop saying not to come in until things cooled down.
A second cough came from the hallway.
Jace got up.
His sister, Miri, sat on the edge of her bed with both hands around a plastic cup. She was eleven, thin as a reed, with a pink inhaler beside her knee.
“You okay?” he asked.
“You’re famous.”
“Don’t start.”
“Mrs. Hanley said you’re going to jail.”
“Mrs. Hanley should mind her own porch.”
Miri coughed again. Jace reached for the inhaler and held it while she took two careful breaths.
“Did you hurt the old man?” she asked.
“No.”
“You took his cane.”
“It was a joke.”
“Was he laughing?”
Jace had no answer.
His phone vibrated again. This time the message was from Nolan.
COME TO THE GARAGE. NOW.
Nolan Mercer was Jace’s half brother, employer, landlord, and the person who had paid for Miri’s inhaler when their mother disappeared for three days with a man named Curtis.
Jace left the apartment without breakfast.
The garage stood behind a row of abandoned warehouses near the river. Nolan’s black sedan was parked inside with the hood raised, though nothing appeared wrong with the engine.
“You’re late,” Nolan said.
“It’s eight in the morning.”
“Exactly.”
Nolan was thirty-one, broad across the shoulders, and careful about his clothes. He never wore a uniform, even while working. Today he had a charcoal coat and polished boots.
Jace saw the envelope in his hand.
“What?”
Nolan tossed it across the room. Inside were printed photographs of Miri leaving school, Miri standing at the pharmacy, Miri asleep in the back seat of Nolan’s car.
Jace’s stomach tightened.
“You following her now?”
“I’m protecting an investment.”
“She’s a kid.”
“She’s your responsibility.”
Jace folded the photographs. “What do you want?”
“The key.”
“I didn’t get it.”
Nolan’s jaw flexed. “You had one job.”
“The driver came out.”
“You had ninety seconds before she came out.”
“Then ask Talia. She cut the video.”
“Talia didn’t have the key.”
“Neither did I.”
Nolan stepped closer. “The old man had a duplicate. There are two keys. One opens the locker. One opens the archive room. We need to know which one he was carrying.”
“You said it was just a key.”
“I said what you needed to hear.”
Jace remembered Elias on the pavement, one hand against the shelter wall. He remembered the old man’s pocket being empty when Jace reached for it. He remembered a second figure behind the shelter, reflected in the pharmacy window: a man in a transit maintenance jacket.
“Someone else took something,” Jace said.
Nolan’s face went still.
“What did you see?”
“A maintenance guy. By the alley.”
“Describe him.”
“Gray jacket. Orange stripe. Didn’t see his face.”
Nolan grabbed Jace by the collar and pressed him against the sedan.
“You will forget him.”
“Get off me.”
“You will forget the old man. You will forget the girl in the raincoat. You will forget every detail except that you were stupid and drunk and no one else was involved.”
Jace shoved him away. “You put us there.”
“I gave you a way to clear your debt.”
“You gave us a video.”
“I gave you a chance to keep your sister housed.”
The garage seemed to contract around them.
At noon, Talia Voss sat in a booth at the Blue Lantern and watched the video without sound. She had deleted her copy, but the internet had made deletion meaningless.
Devon sat across from her, his hands wrapped around a glass of water.
“We need to tell someone,” he said.
“Who?”
“The police.”
“Your mother’s pharmacy gets its lease from Calder Meridian.”
“That doesn’t mean she’s involved.”
“No. It means they can make her disappear from the block by Tuesday.”
Devon rubbed his face. “Jace said the key was in the old man’s pocket.”
“Jace says a lot of things.”
“You saw him take it.”
“I saw him reach.”
“And then?”
Talia looked toward the window. A black sedan rolled past the restaurant and slowed at the corner.
“Then somebody took it from him.”
Devon followed her gaze. “Who?”
“I don’t know.”
The sedan continued down the street.
Talia opened her phone and brought up a second file, hidden beneath a false folder. It was not the public video. It was the original recording, with the missing eleven seconds intact.
She had watched those seconds seventeen times.
At the beginning, Jace bent toward Elias. At the end, a hand in a gray transit jacket reached into the old man’s coat.
Between those moments, Elias looked directly at the camera.
Not at Talia. At the person holding the phone.
May you like
His lips formed four words.
You are June’s girl.
