I stood in my kitchen with the phone pressed to my ear and watched the light move across the floor.

"Why are you calling me," I said.

"Because I have not eaten in three days," she said.

"And because if it is the lieutenant, then somebody in that building is going to answer for it eventually, and I would rather it was me who helped than me who kept quiet."

"Do you know where I can find the lieutenant tonight," I said.

She was quiet for a second.

"Markham is meeting Captain Ellis tonight," she said.

"A warehouse on Dock 7, out past the freight road, eleven thirty.

Cole is supposed to be there too.

He told me not to come near it, and that is how I know it is real."

I wrote it on the back of an envelope.

"Tran.

If anyone at the station asks you anything about me from now on, you don't know me."

"I don't know you," she said.

"Good," I said.

She hung up first, and I stood there a while longer, listening to the refrigerator hum and thinking about the way my name had gone silent on every screen in that building by lunchtime.

I called Reyes from a pay phone two blocks from my house, because I did not want a call from my phone to look like a call from my phone.

She answered on the fourth ring.

"They already served me," I said.

"I heard.

It went through records at eight this morning."

"Tonight at eleven thirty, Dock 7.

Warehouse at the end of the freight road.

Markham, Ellis, and the boy who did the planting."

Reyes was quiet long enough that I heard her take one slow breath.

"Then we go," she said, "and we don't knock."

Chapter 6 - Dock 7 After Midnight

Posted Oct 16, 2026

Chapter 6 - Dock 7 After Midnight

At eleven o'clock that night, three people who were not supposed to be there met in a gravel lot two hundred yards from the warehouse at the end of the freight road.

I was first.

Reyes came second in her silver sedan with her headlights off, and she parked behind me without getting out until she had looked in both directions twice.

Tran came last.

She had taken her uniform shirt off and was wearing a plain gray hoodie, and when she walked up to the car she was holding her keys in her fist like a small weapon.

"I don't want to be here," she said.

"Then stay in the car," Reyes said.

"No," she said.

"I want to be here.

I just don't want to be here."

I understood that exactly.

I hadn't slept more than an hour in two days.

My shield was in a drawer in the property room with my name on the envelope.

If this went wrong, I would not go home to the life I had, and I had already decided that morning that I would rather lose it than keep it by standing still.

We moved up the embankment along the fence line.

The warehouse was one long gray building with a roll-up door open six feet at the far end and a single work light burning over the loading bay.

From a stack of pallets fifty yards out, we had a clean line of sight through the open door.

Lieutenant Markham stood with his hands in his coat pockets.

Captain Ellis was beside him, holding a blue evidence bag in one hand.

A third man I did not recognize stood across from them in a leather jacket with a duffel bag at his feet, and I knew from the file I had read four times who he was.

A supplier.

Nobody had ever been able to prove it because the evidence against him kept disappearing.

He opened the bag.

Cash, banded.

Ellis put the blue evidence bag down on a folding table and the supplier put the money on top of it, like a handshake made of paper and cash.

I took out my personal phone and started recording.

For two full minutes I kept it steady on them while they talked.

Markham said something I could not hear and the supplier laughed.

Ellis wrote on a clipboard.

Another evidence bag came out of a cardboard box by the wall.

I heard Reyes whisper beside me.

"You have it."

"I have it," I said.

I backed away from the pallets and started toward the cars.

Reyes was behind me.

Tran was behind her.

That is when the light changed behind us.

A white SUV with its headlights on came down the freight road without its roof lights, moving too fast for a patrol car, and cut across the gravel between us and the cars so that we had nowhere to go but left, toward the back fence.

Two men got out of the SUV with flashlights.

I did not know either of them.

That was worse than knowing them.

"Somebody's out here," one of them called.

We ran.

Reyes went right along the fence line the way we came, and I went left with the phone in my front pocket and my hand on top of it.

Tran was behind me, and she was slower than me, and I heard her fall.

I turned around.

One of the men had her by the arm, pulling her up off the gravel.

"I got one," he said into his radio.

"A woman."

The other one was already running at me with the flashlight, and I was standing between the warehouse and the fence with a recorded phone and a decision.

If I ran, I made the trees on the far side of the freight road and the recording went to the state Attorney General's office by morning, and Tran went wherever they took people who saw things they should not have seen.