My phone buzzed in my hand, vibrating violently against the table. The caller ID showed Sarah’s name.
I took a deep breath, smoothing the anger out of my voice, and answered. "Hey, sweetheart."
"Grandpa, where are you?" Sarah asked. Her voice was tight, layered with anxiety. "The mechanic said if we don't pay the deposit in the next twenty minutes, he's pulling my car off the lift and charging me a storage fee. Are you close?"
"I ran into a delay at the bank," I lied smoothly. "I'm working on it right now. I need you to listen to me carefully, Sarah."
"What's wrong?" she asked.
"Nothing is wrong, but I need you to leave the shop," I said. "Tell the mechanic you'll be back tomorrow. Walk out to the main road, call an Uber, and go straight to your friend Emily's apartment. Do not go back to your house, and do not go to my apartment."
"Grandpa, you're scaring me. What happened at the bank?"
"Just a mix-up," I said. I could hear the hum of the transmission shop's air tools in the background of her call.
"Are you sure?" Sarah asked, her voice dropping to a whisper. "Because a police cruiser just pulled into the mechanic's lot. They aren't getting out. They're just sitting there, idling near the bay doors, watching the office."
My blood ran ice cold.
They hadn't just taken the money and planted a tracker. When Cole opened my wallet in the alley, he had seen my veteran's ID. He had seen my address, and he had seen Sarah's emergency contact card tucked directly behind it. When the tracker on the bus started moving erratically away from my home, they didn't chase the empty leather. They pulled up the file on my ID. They knew exactly who I was, where I lived, and who I cared about.
They were sitting outside her location right now, using her as leverage, waiting for me to show up with the rest of my savings or to see if I was stupid enough to involve the authorities.
"Sarah," I said, my voice dropping into the absolute command tone I hadn't used since my second tour. "Go out the back door of the office. Do not look at the police car. Get in a cab, go to Emily's, and lock the door. I will call you when it's clear."
I hung up before she could argue.
I looked down at the cold cup of coffee on the table. The rules of engagement had just fundamentally changed. This was no longer just about recovering my granddaughter's two thousand dollars or submitting a complaint to a broken department. Cole and Miller had crossed a line that couldn't be uncrossed. They had brought the threat directly to my family, assuming I would fold under the pressure of their badges.
Waiting for the system to correct itself was suicide. Submitting a quiet report was a death sentence. I couldn't protect Sarah by playing defense. I had the undisputed proof in my pocket, and I was going to use it to rip their careers apart in an arena they couldn't control.
CHAPTER 2 CONTINUED
I typed back immediately: Stay inside. Do not answer the door for anyone, even a uniform. Turn off your phone’s location services right now. I will explain tonight.
I watched the screen until the small read receipt appeared, then slipped the phone back into my heavy canvas jacket. She was temporarily safe, but the hunt was actively underway. Cole and Miller had already demonstrated they were willing to leverage a family member to secure their stolen cash and silence a witness.
I needed physical backups of the cloud recording, and I needed to establish exactly how they had tracked her down.
I walked two blocks north to a small, cluttered electronics repair shop I had passed earlier. The bell above the door chimed lightly as I stepped inside. The air smelled of soldering iron rosin and stale dust. I walked straight to the glass display counter, pulled out the handful of loose cash I had remaining, and purchased three encrypted, high-capacity USB thumb drives from the teenager behind the register. I didn’t ask for a receipt.
From there, I moved three streets over to the downtown branch of the public library. It was a sprawling, brutalist concrete building, mostly populated by students and people looking for a warm place to sit. I walked past the circulation desk and found an open computer terminal in the back corner, facing the wall.
I sat down in the hard plastic chair, plugged the first thumb drive into the tower, and logged into my secure cloud drive through the browser. The connection was painfully slow, the download progress bar crawling across the bottom of the monitor, but the high-definition video file eventually transferred. I repeated the process for the other two drives. The unbroken footage of Officer Cole pocketing the two thousand dollars and dropping my empty leather wallet was now physically secured in triplicate.