Chapter 2
Monday morning. Six-fifteen on Calle Ocho, the sun barely up, throwing shadows that stretch toward Café Cuba. Four blocks there, four blocks back. Nine years of the same route.
I check the Glock at my hip through the black t-shirt. The knife is in my boot. Standard carry.
A jogger comes toward me from the opposite direction — male, thirties, wireless earbuds, expensive running gear. At thirty feet he registers me. The calculation is quick: my size, my pace, the width of the sidewalk. He crosses to the other side. Smooth. Like it was always the plan.
I keep walking. The Miami heat is already building.
On the third block, I come across a mother with a stroller. The toddler inside is awake, staring at me with that open curiosity kids have before they learn to look away. Direct toddler stare. No fear. Just watching.
The mother sees me. Her hand goes to the stroller handle and pulls it sideways toward the curb. Not stopping, just redirecting. She says something quiet to the kid. The child's face turns away. They pass. The toddler twists in the seat, still trying to stare back. The mother does not look.
The Saint Michael on my forearm catches the morning light where the sleeve is pushed up, an armored figure with sword, wings spread. My patron saint.
Café Cuba's window is open. Yamila is behind the counter. She sees me coming and starts the order without asking. She watches the espresso machine. Not me.
My coffee order never changes, a double-shot piccolo. After a few years, Yamila finally worked up the courage to joke about a man my size ordering a coffee that small. I didn't laugh, and she never made the quip again.
"Six fifty," she tells the register, not me.
I leave exact change on the counter. She slides the coffee across with my tostada in a paper bag.
"Gracias."
"De nada."
The transaction is done. She is already turning away.
The walk back is quieter. Early Miami, before the real heat, before the tourists wake.
Delivery trucks. People with jobs that start before nine.
They give me space. A woman with her dog crosses at the corner rather than pass.
A man in a suit steps into a doorway and checks his phone until I am past.
It doesn't bother me. My face reads wrong, and my body reads worse. People see what they see and they make their decisions. I stopped fighting it long ago.
La Sirena's front door is still locked, so I use my key and go in through the back. The main floor is dark, chairs on tables, stage empty. This business sleeps late. I cross toward the back hallway.
Time to check the garden before I head to the security office.
The back door opens onto the garden. I push through with my shoulder, coffee in hand, expecting emptiness.
Someone is sitting on my bench.
An old man. Sixty-something. Soft. White hair. Glasses pushed up onto his forehead. Absorbed in what he is doing. A watercolor block sits on his knee, a paint tray beside him with brushes. He is working on the bougainvillea that climbs the back wall, sitting on my stone bench.
Not next to it. On it.
My hand tightens around my coffee. The box under the bench holds nine years of evidence, and he is sitting on it.
He has been at this for some time. The painting shows everything. The stone base blocked in with charcoal undertones, bougainvillea blooms massed in crimson washes that bleed into purple shadows, the cracked plaster of the wall suggested through stippling. He knows what he's doing.
I set my coffee and tostada on the back step and cross the small walled garden in three strides. My shadow falls across his watercolor.
He looks up. The color drains out of his face.
"You're trespassing."
His mouth opens and closes. The brush trembles. "I — I'm sorry. I didn't think… the gate was open. I saw the flowers from the alley." The French-Canadian accent thickens with panic. "I paint flowers. For my daughter. She loves bougainvillea."
"ID."
People accuse me of using too few words. The same people obey the short sentences faster. Why waste the effort?
The old man's hands shake reaching into his jacket. The wallet is worn leather. He fumbles it open, slides his license out and hands it over.
Nicolas Gilles. An address in Pristine, a small town about two hours north. He's sixty-three. After a few moments, I decide he's probably telling the truth, so I'm extra nice to him as I hand the wallet back.
"Out. Don't come back."
I point to the tiny gate that leads to the alley.
"Yes, yes, sorry —" He scrambles to pack and knocks over the water glass.
The water runs across the lower corner of the block before he can right it.
The paint there bleeds — the bougainvillea blooms at the edge smear into a long pink streak, ragged at its outer rim.
His hands are too shaky to dab at it. The rest of the painting is untouched.
He grabs his jacket, brushes, and paint tray.
Leaves the block where it sits, the streak still spreading.
"Thank you," he says, though I have not done anything worth thanking for.
He backs toward the gate. Nearly trips.
"Sorry, I won't —"
"Go."
He goes. Fast. The gate clangs shut behind him.
I look at the watercolor block. The streak has slowed where the paper soaked up the excess water — a ragged pink wash across the lower-left corner, the blooms there gone into smear.
The rest is clean. The bench structure, the flower cascade, the back wall, citrus tree, all rendered with a precision that makes my jaw clench.
The bench with my buried box is now documented.
My hand goes to the block before I have decided why. I pick it up. Water runs off the corner onto the stone. I carry it inside with the coffee. The old man's fear was real, but fear does not mean innocence. Nobody paints this detailed without paying attention to more than flowers.
Logan is at his desk in his office on the mezzanine, one of the security feeds pulled up on his screen. He glances at the watercolor and raises an eyebrow, but doesn't ask. He knows I'm not one for idle chit-chat, and I appreciate that about him.
I set down my coffee, and the painting. The humid morning air followed me in. Jasmine and heat.
"Peytone flagged something you'll want to take a look at, Gunner." He turns the screen toward me. "There's a twenty-three minute gap in the security footage at the loading dock, three nights back. From two-fourteen to two-thirty-seven."
I move closer. The timestamp jumps clean. No glitch. No static.
"It was replaced with a loop," he says, reading from Peytone's notes. "Earlier footage, from the same night."
I grunt.
"Professional job," I agree.
Security for the Delgado operations throughout Miami is my responsibility. Not just here at the club, but at the docks too. And nobody takes their responsibilities more seriously than I do.
I'll have to run the security footage again, looking for buffer level insertion, check for firmware access. Try to figure out exactly what level of professional we're dealing with. And exactly how deep the shit is that we're currently standing in.
Peytone's good at this stuff, but I'm better.
My phone vibrates. Erika Leibnitz from JAG. She never calls me unless she has a damn good reason.
"Yeah," I say.
"Morning, Gunner. How are you?"
I just grunt in reply. She didn't call me to discuss my health.
"I have some bad news, I'm afraid," she says.
"Spill it."
"You asked me to keep an ear out for activity around your ex-Army commander, Morten Hallstein, and his name is coming up."
My knuckles crack as my fist forms.
"And?"
"He's being floated for a new Pentagon advisory commission on military justice reform."
Hallstein? Military justice? That's an oxymoron. Having that man reform military justice is like having an alligator lead a committee on rights for catfish.
I scoff, and Logan looks up sharply. That's not a sound I usually make.
If Morten Hallstein gets appointed to a Pentagon commission, he'll be untouchable. I need to bury that asshole before I lose my chance for good.
"Timeline?" I ask.
"It's moving fast. I only just heard about this, but it's been going in the background already for a month or two. I'd say we only have four weeks or so until the announcement. After that, it'll be official."
She stops talking, and the pause runs into silence.
"So," she continues, "I don't know what your deal is with him, but I'm pretty sure you're not a fan. So if you want to do something about him, you'd better do it before he becomes a Pentagon darling."
"I do."
I have four weeks. Four weeks until Hallstein becomes untouchable. Four weeks until the man who discharged me, who did what he did to those women, becomes the voice of reform.
"Anyway, I thought you should know."
"Appreciate it."
"Take care of yourself."
The line goes dead.
I set the phone next to the loop footage, next to the streaked watercolor.
The pieces line up fast. A professional breach at our docks three nights back.
A Pentagon announcement in four weeks. An old man in my garden this morning, right above my key evidence, rendering the layout in recon-level detail.
Hallstein knows I have something on him, he just doesn't know what. I have no doubt he was behind the breach at the docks. The only question is whether he was also behind the old man in the garden.
A first scout. That is what this looks like. Or an old man with a sketchbook who liked the flowers from the alley. Either is possible. I cannot afford the wrong one.
The old man's wallet. The daughter's name.
The emergency contact in Pristine. She will know her father's movements, his recent work, his contacts.
She is also the lever. Young, female, isolated.
Take her, and the old man talks. Take her right, and it looks exactly like what people expect from someone built like me.
I roll my shoulders. I feel the Glock's weight.
"I'll investigate," I tell Logan. "A cottage in Pristine. Painter named Gilles."