Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The sheriff’s office after midnight had a different pulse than the one I knew during daylight hours.
The fluorescent lights hummed the same frequency, the coffee maker gurgled the same burnt brew, but the air was charged.
It was tight with adrenaline and the controlled urgency of people who understood that the clock was running and sleep was something that happened to other people.
Jack had turned the building into a machine.
Demetri Kallas was in interview room one.
Vic Caruso was in interview room two. Jack had them walked down the same corridor a few seconds apart, close enough that they entered their rooms at almost the same time.
Vic looked at Kallas nervously, but Kallas never acknowledged Vic was there.
That was the game, and Jack had been playing it before either of them sat down.
I stood behind the observation glass and watched Kallas sit behind the interrogation table like it was his living room.
No fidgeting, no scanning the room, no working the cuffs or testing the table bolt.
He sat with his hands flat on the metal surface and his eyes fixed on the far wall.
The stillness coming off him wasn’t anxiety or resignation.
It was discipline. The practiced, professional stillness of a man who had been in rooms like this before and understood that silence was a weapon and he intended to use it.
Jack went in alone. He sat down across from Kallas and opened a folder.
He didn’t speak. He let the silence do what silence did in small rooms with bright lights—expand, press, fill every corner until the air itself felt heavy with everything that wasn’t being said.
He laid photographs on the table, one at a time, faceup.
The tunnels. The ring. Close-ups of the bullet wounds in the back of Dre’s and T-Bone’s heads.
Kallas at the tunnel entrance with his arms crossed.
Jack didn’t narrate them. He didn’t explain. He just set them down and waited.
Kallas looked at the photographs the way a man looks at a menu in a language he doesn’t speak. Flat disinterest.
“Lawyer,” he said.
Jack gathered the photographs, closed the folder, and stood. He walked out without a word. The whole thing lasted ninety seconds.
Jack found me in the corridor. “He’s Stavros’s man to the bone. He’s willing to go down with the ship.”
“You can see it.” Something about the way Kallas held himself reminded me of the bodies I worked on, men who’d been hard in life and carried that hardness into death, their muscles locked even after the rigor passed, as if the discipline had become structural. “He’s not going to give you anything.”
“He already gave me something.” Jack’s mouth curved, barely. “He didn’t ask what he was being charged with. A man who doesn’t know why he’s in trouble asks questions. A man who knows exactly what he’s done sits still and calls his lawyer.”
He headed for interview room two, and I moved to the other room to look through the observation glass.
Martinez was already inside with Vic, leaning against the wall by the door with his arms crossed and one ankle hooked over the other.
It was a performance, and a good one. Everything Martinez did in an interview room was calibrated to keep the subject focused on Jack while he read them from the periphery.
Vic looked up when Jack walked in. No surprise in his face.
No pretense of confusion. Whatever game they’d been playing across boxing rings and crime scenes for the past week, Vic understood that this was where it ended.
Not with gloves and bravado but with a table and a folder and the acoustics of a room designed to make every word feel permanent.
“Vic,” Jack said, sitting down.
“Yeah.” Vic’s voice was rough, forty years of cigarettes and ringside shouting.
He looked smaller in here than when he’d been in the ring, as if the fluorescent light was doing what age and gravity hadn’t quite finished.
His hands were clasped on the table, and I could see the old scar tissue across his knuckles.
Vic glanced at the one-way glass, then back at Jack. “Who’s watching?”
“Why? You worried about your friend being next door? About what he’ll say?
” Jack opened the folder and laid the photographs on the table, the same ones he’d shown Kallas, plus more.
Vic ringside. The betting table. The cash.
Dre’s notebook pages. He fanned them out without hurry, the way a card dealer spreads a hand, and let Vic take them in.
“That’s quite a collection,” Vic said, licking his lips.
“It’s just a sample.” Jack leaned back. “Let’s talk about Dre Washington.”
“I trained Dre. That’s no secret.”
“You did more than train him. You recruited him into an illegal fighting operation, introduced him to Nikolai Stavros, and kept him in the organization after he wanted out.”
“He was a fighter. He fought. That’s what fighters do.”
“He’s dead, Vic. Somebody put a .22 to the back of his head and executed him. That’s not what fighters do. That’s what happens to fighters who try to leave.”
Vic’s jaw tightened. His eyes dropped to the photographs.
“I don’t know anything about that,” Vic said.
“Sure you do.” Jack’s voice was easy, almost conversational.
“You knew Dre better than anyone in that operation. You trained him. You watched him fight. You knew when he started asking questions, because you’re the one Stavros would have come to.
Stavros doesn’t know his fighters. You do.
So when Dre became a problem, who did Stavros call? ”
Vic said nothing. But something shifted in his face, not a crack, not yet, but the first faint line in a surface that was starting to take pressure.
“Let me tell you what I think happened,” Jack said.
“I think Stavros found out Dre was planning to leave. Dre was your best fighter. Men like Stavros don’t like to lose money.
I bet you weren’t too happy either. He told you he was leaving, because you’re the one who manages the fighters.
And I think you told him you’d handle it.
But then you went to Stavros and he told you to handle Dre.
No one walks away from this life, right Vic? ”
Vic’s eyes came up fast. The words had landed. I could see it from behind the glass, the flinch he almost controlled, the way his hands tightened against each other on the table.
“You know that phrase?” Jack asked. Mild.
Curious. “The situation needs to be handled? Because I’m betting that’s exactly how it was put to you.
That’s how a man like Stavros says it. He doesn’t say kill.
He doesn’t say murder. He says handle it.
And everyone in the room knows exactly what it means. ”
The silence that followed was the loudest thing in the building.
“You’re sixty-three, Vic,” Jack said. His voice shifted, not harder, but quieter, closer to the bone.
“You’ve been in this a long time. You know how RICO works.
You know what federal conspiracy charges look like.
And you know, because you’ve been around men like Stavros your whole life, that when the walls start closing in, he’s not going to protect you.
He’s going to protect himself. He’s going to let every man in that organization go down while his attorneys build a firewall around him and his money. ”
Vic stared at the table.
“I’m offering the chance for one deal tonight,” Jack said. “What the deal is, I don’t know. That’s up to the prosecutor. But either you or Kallas will get the chance to put Stavros away for a long time. First come, first serve.”
Jack stood. He gathered the photographs and closed the folder.
“Think about that, Vic. I’ll be back.”
He walked out. The door clicked shut. And through the glass, I watched Vic Caruso sit motionless, his scarred hands clasped on the table, his eyes focused on something I couldn’t see. Then he reached for the water, unscrewed the cap with fingers that weren’t quite steady, and drank.
* * *
Jack’s phone buzzed as we walked back toward his office. He glanced at the screen.
“Doug’s got the flash drive open,” he said. “Conference room.”
Doug had taken over the long table in conference room B, Margot at the center, cables running to the wall-mounted monitor, empty energy drink cans lined up like soldiers along the far edge.
Doug looked up when we walked in, and his expression stopped me. I’d expected the wired excitement of a kid who’d cracked a puzzle. But it was something older and harder. Something that hadn’t been there before tonight.
“Six files on the drive,” he said. “Four are financial documents, bank transfers, shell company paperwork, money trails. One is a spreadsheet of fight dates, locations, and payouts going back two years. Margot cross-referenced it against Dre’s notebook and they match to the penny.”
“And the sixth?” Jack asked.
“Video.” Doug’s hands hovered over the keyboard. “Three minutes, forty seconds. Dre hid his phone somewhere near the ring. Low angle, propped against something. The image is clear and Margot enhanced the audio.” He paused. “You can hear everything.”
He hit play.
The tunnels filled the wall-mounted monitor, and for a moment I was back underground—the vaulted brick, the work lights, the press of bodies.
But this was different. This was the tunnel alive, the way it had been before SWAT tore through the door and turned it into a crime scene.
The crowd was packed tight around the ring, faces slick with sweat and adrenaline, mouths open, voices merging into a single roar that came through the speakers with enough force to change the air in the room.
I could almost smell it. The beer, the sweat, the copper tang of blood under hot lights.