“Then we make sure they survive a second time,” Garrett said, and something in the old man’s face shifted from caution into the look of a man deciding which side of a fight he intended to stand on.
He set his coffee down and looked between Emmett and me with the weight of a man about to commit his whole club to something bigger than a Saturday-morning favor. “From this moment, neither one of you goes anywhere in this county alone until Marcus Deveraux is behind bars or worse, and I don’t much care which.”
Nadia was already pulling out a legal pad, unhurried and practical, a woman who’d clearly organized more than one crisis for this club before. “I’ll get a rotation running. Somebody on Emmett’s garage after dark, somebody keeping half an eye on the diner during Dawn’s shifts. Quietly. We don’t need to spook him before the federal case is ready to move.”
I hadn’t realized, until that exact moment, how long it had been since anyone had organized itself around keeping me safe instead of around managing the inconvenience of my grief.
Chapter Four: The Yard on Route Nine
Federal authorities move carefully enough, even with good evidence, that I understood within a day we didn’t have the luxury of waiting for them to act before Marcus Deveraux realized his compartment had been photographed and his newest problem was still breathing.
The break came through Curtis Amaro’s sister, who called the diner two days after the crash asking whether anyone actually believed her brother had found something dangerous before he died. I drove out with Emmett that afternoon, and she handed over the text message she’d saved, Curtis’s own words describing a load that didn’t match its manifest and a foreman who’d told him, almost word for word, that some things were safer left exactly where he’d found them.
That message, combined with Emmett’s photograph and my own eleven-year-old file, was finally enough to get a DEA task force agent named Priya Bhatt on the phone instead of a form letter. She’d had Deveraux Hauling flagged in a database for over a year without gathering quite enough to move on him directly.
“I need forty-eight hours to build this properly,” she told me. “Not a raid built on a mechanic’s photograph and a diner cook’s old grief, however good the evidence is underneath that. A warrant that survives every motion Deveraux’s lawyers throw at it.”
“Wyatt’s case fell apart in eleven days because somebody rushed it before it was ready,” I said. “I understand exactly why you need to do this right. I just need you to understand what every one of those hours costs me, standing in the same intersection twice.”