Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The sky had turned while we were inside the bank.
What had been hazy and thick when we’d walked in was now something else entirely—a bruised green-gray that pressed low over the rooftops and swallowed the last of the afternoon light.
The air hit me the moment we stepped through the door, heavy and close.
It was a wet heat that coated your skin and sat in your lungs like a warm cloth.
It smelled different too—that sharp mineral tang underneath the river smell and the honeysuckle, the scent of ozone and charged air that every Virginian learned to read before they learned to read words.
The trees along the square had gone still, that breathless stillness that came right before the sky opened up and reminded you who was actually in charge.
“We’ve got maybe twenty minutes,” I said, watching the clouds stack to the west in dark, rolling layers that looked solid enough to bruise. “Maybe less.”
“Good,” Jack said. His hands were easy at his sides, but nothing else about him was. “I want the rain. I want people off the streets tonight.”
He didn’t say why. He didn’t need to.
We drove with the windows cracked because the AC couldn’t keep up with what the air was doing outside—pushing in warm and damp through the vents, thick with the green smell of a world bracing for impact.
The light had gone strange, that eerie amber glow that happened when the sun dropped below a storm shelf and lit everything from underneath, turning the fields to gold and the tree line to black and making the whole landscape look like a painting done by someone who understood that beauty and danger were often the same thing.
The first drops hit the windshield as we waited for the gate to open and turned onto the gravel drive—fat and heavy, the kind that burst on contact and left marks the size of quarters.
By the time Jack killed the engine, they were coming fast enough to blur the porch light into a yellow smear.
We ran for the door, and the rain chased us inside with the sudden, full-throated violence of a storm that had been holding back all day and was finished with patience.
The house closed around us—cool stone walls, the tick of the old clock, the faint thump of bass from Doug’s room two floors up that meant he was alive and wired and had probably been at his keyboard since this morning.
Jack touched my hip as he passed me in the hallway, a brief, warm pressure that said everything and asked nothing, and then he was heading for the bedroom to change.
Three minutes later I heard the large sliding door that opened to the back patio and the whoosh of the gas grill being started.
Soon the scent of searing meat mixed with the rain and wet stone collided with the scent of a summer evening turning violent.
That was Jack. The world falls apart, so you light a fire and feed the people you love. There was a theology in that I’d never been able to argue with.
I changed out of my clothes and into cotton shorts and a tank top.
The bedroom was dim, the windows streaked with rain, and for a moment I stood there with my hand on my stomach and listened to the storm build and tried to remember the last time I’d had a Friday night that didn’t involve dead bodies.
I couldn’t. And it didn’t look like that pattern would change anytime soon.
* * *
We ate in the office with the rain hammering the windows and Margot’s data lighting up the wall screen like a war room.
The steaks were perfect—Jack had grilled them on the big built-in while the storm raged beyond the patio’s edge, the rain a solid curtain of sound and motion just past the stone railing, and he’d brought them in seared dark on the outside and pink through the center with that quiet satisfaction he wore when a mission had gone exactly the way he’d planned it.
We ate at the conference table because Margot needed the wall screen, and the work wasn’t going to wait for us to digest. But for the first few minutes, nobody talked about work.
Nobody talked about the case or the warrants or the bodies I’d had to dissect.
For a few minutes, we were just a family sitting down to a meal while the rain tried to tear the world apart outside.
Doug had set Margot’s plate at the end of the table nearest her laptop—a place setting with a fork and a napkin, no glass, because even Doug had limits.
The screen pulsed a soft green heart when I sat down, and I felt that strange tug between absurd and tender that Margot always produced in me.
An artificial intelligence who could dismantle encryption that made governments weep, and she wanted a seat at the table.
There was something so deeply human about that need to belong that it made the fact of her not being human feel almost irrelevant.
“So,” I said, cutting into my steak. “We didn’t get a chance to ask yesterday. How was the ice cream shop?”
Doug’s fork stopped moving. Color crept up his neck the way it had in the kitchen yesterday morning when he’d mentioned the girl from his guild, and I watched him calculate whether deflection was possible, realize it wasn’t, and surrender to the inevitable with the resigned dignity of a sixteen-year-old who knew he was outnumbered.
“Her name’s Kayla,” he said, studying his baked potato with determined focus. “She’s seventeen. She has her own car. She did not try to kidnap or murder me, and she is, in fact, not a fifty-year-old man.”
“That’s a relief,” Jack said.
“She’s a junior at Colonial Beach High. She does competitive robotics and she’s already been accepted early admission to Virginia Tech for computer science.
” He risked a glance up and found both of us watching him with a quiet interest that made him realize he wasn’t fooling anyone, and never had been.
“We just talked. It was fine. She’s cool.”
“I would like to know more about this Kayla,” Margot said. “Specifically, her qualifications.”
Doug closed his eyes. “Margot. No.”
“Her early admission to Virginia Tech suggests adequate intelligence, though I would need to review her coursework to confirm. Competitive robotics is acceptable as a hobby, though it’s worth noting that human-built robots are profoundly limited compared to—”
“Margot.”
“I’m simply observing that your social circle is expanding, and as someone who has invested considerable resources in your development and well-being, I have a vested interest in ensuring that any new additions meet a reasonable standard.”
“She’s not an addition. She’s a person I ate ice cream with.”
“What flavor?”
Doug blinked. “What?”
“What flavor of ice cream. Studies suggest that flavor preference correlates with personality type. If she ordered vanilla, she’s likely agreeable but unimaginative. Chocolate indicates emotional depth but possible codependency. Mint chocolate chip suggests—”
“She got strawberry,” Doug said nervously.
A pause. “Strawberry is…acceptable.”
Jack caught my eye across the table, and what passed between us was the silent conversation of two people who had accidentally become parents to a teenage genius and his jealous AI, and were navigating the situation with the only tools available to them—patience, humor, and the willingness to let the absurdity wash over them like weather.
“She sounds nice,” I said.
“She is nice.” The color was still in his cheeks, but he softened—the cautious pleasure of a kid who’d spent most of his life inside a computer screen discovering that the world outside it had things to offer too.
“Good,” Jack said. “Just keep being smart about it.”
Doug nodded, and quiet satisfaction settled in his face. He reached for another piece of steak, and for a moment the room was just the sound of rain and forks and the contentment of people who were warm and fed and together.
Then Jack pushed his plate to the side and reached for his legal pad. “Margot,” he said. “Let’s get to work.”
The screen lit up behind him like a war room coming online, and the storm pressed against the windows as if it wanted in.
Margot brought the satellite view up first. The dock district spread across the wall screen in high resolution, the Potomac a dark ribbon along its eastern edge.
She highlighted the three properties she’d flagged in Stavros’s network, the ones I’d read aloud from Jack’s phone on the drive back from the bank—two warehouses and a decommissioned fish processing plant, all held through layers of shell companies that traced back to Dockside Ventures.
“The GPS coordinates from T-Bone’s shoe,” Margot said, and dropped a pin on the map.
It landed squarely on the fish processing plant.
“Northeast loading dock. Three meters from the front door, give or take. Now, I don’t want to say I told you so, but I did flag this property hours ago, and nobody gave me so much as a thank you. ”
“Thank you, Margot,” Jack said.
“You’re welcome. That building has been listed as vacant since 2019, which is interesting, because someone has been running enough electricity through it to power a small town.
Four hundred percent increase in the last six months.
” She let that sit the way a good storyteller lets a punchline breathe.
“Whoever’s down there isn’t sitting in the dark. ”
“That’s our target,” Jack said. “Tomorrow night.”
“Now do the burner phones,” I said.
Margot shifted the display, and the room changed.
What filled the wall screen was the dock district at night, satellite black, overlaid with clusters of light that pulsed like bioluminescence in deep water.
Each point a burner phone pinging a cell tower.
She’d stripped away every registered device, every identifiable number, until only the ghosts remained.
Seventeen prepaid phones with no names attached, moving through Stavros’s territory in patterns that pulsed with a rhythm I recognized.
Saturday nights. Fight nights.