Chapter 17 #2
A fight had just ended. The crowd surged and shifted, some pushing toward the betting table, others milling with drinks in hand, their voices loose and loud with the energy that came after watching violence. The buzzing, electric aftermath of a crowd that wanted more.
Then the crowd parted, and Stavros walked into frame.
He moved the way a man moves through his own house, unhurried, proprietary, touching a shoulder here, accepting a handshake there.
People stepped aside without being asked, the way they stepped aside for weather, for traffic, for things that were bigger than them and moved in their own time.
He wore a dark jacket and an open collar and the easy, pleased expression of a host surveying a party that was going exactly the way he’d planned.
A young man stood near the ring ropes. Mid-twenties, lean, dark-eyed, still breathing hard from a bout.
A towel hung around his neck and his hands were unwrapped and he had the loose, spent look of a fighter coming down from the adrenaline, his guard lowered, his body telling him the danger was over.
His body was wrong.
Stavros reached him and put an arm around his shoulders.
The gesture was warm and generous, almost fatherly, pulling the young man close the way a coach pulls in a fighter after a win.
Joaquin went with it. You could see the uncertainty in his posture, the slight stiffness in his shoulders, but he went with it because what else do you do when the man who owns everything puts his arm around you and smiles?
“Joaquin.” Stavros’s voice came through the speakers, clear and unhurried, carrying the warmth that I’d heard on Jack’s speakerphone when he’d called.
The warmth that wasn’t warmth at all but something wearing its skin.
“It was a hell of a fight tonight. You’ve got real talent.
Real heart. I’ve always said that about you. ”
“Thanks, Mr. Stavros.” Tight. Careful. The voice of a young man who could feel the temperature changing but couldn’t find the source.
“I take care of my fighters, Joaquin. I’ve always taken care of you.
The money, the training, the opportunities.
Everything I’ve given you, I’ve given because I believe in you.
All I’ve ever asked in return is loyalty.
” He squeezed Joaquin’s shoulder, the easy, affectionate squeeze of a mentor, a benefactor, a man who cared. “That’s fair, isn’t it?”
“Yes sir.”
“So imagine how it felt—” Stavros’s voice dropped, not in volume but in register, settling into something intimate, “—when I found out you’ve been hedging bets against my line.
Skimming off the top. Playing both sides.
” The arm stayed around Joaquin’s shoulders.
The smile didn’t change. “Did you think I wouldn’t notice?
I know every dollar that moves through this operation.
Every bet, every payout, every penny that changes hands.
I built this. And you tried to steal from it. ”
“No, Mr. Stavros, I— “
“Shh.” Gentle. Almost kind. The way you’d speak to a child who’d broken a priceless artifact and didn’t yet understand the cost. “That’s the thing about betrayal, Joaquin. There’s no version of the story that makes it go away. There’s only the example it sets.”
And then Stavros did something that made my breath stop.
He looked up. Not at Joaquin. At the crowd.
He lifted his gaze from the young man under his arm and swept it across the room to the fighters along the wall, the men at the betting table, the spectators with their beers and their phones, every face in that underground chamber.
He looked at them the way a preacher looks at a congregation before the altar call, and the room went quiet.
His free hand went to his jacket, a motion so smooth it barely disturbed the fabric, and when it came back there was a blade in it. Short, fixed, the kind of knife that lived in a sheath against the ribs and waited for the hand that knew it was there. Nobody saw it until it was already moving.
He pushed it into the side of Joaquin Melendez’s neck the way you’d slide a key into a lock.
Smooth. Unhurried. The arm still around his shoulders, holding him upright, holding him close, the gesture still reading as an embrace from three feet away.
Joaquin’s hands came up, a reflex, desperate, his fingers finding the handle and the blood that was already sheeting down his chest in a hot dark curtain. His mouth opened. Nothing came out.
Stavros held him. For two seconds, maybe three, he held the dying man against his chest with the tenderness of someone saying goodbye to a friend, and then the weight became too much and he let go and Joaquin folded to the tunnel floor.
His hands were still reaching for his neck when he stopped moving.
Stavros looked down at the body and he took a cloth that Kallas handed him, wiping the blood from his hands.
He adjusted his jacket with both hands, a small, precise motion.
And then he turned to the silent crowd and his voice carried through the tunnel the way it had carried through Jack’s speakerphone.
“Does anyone else have questions about how we do business?”
Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. A hundred people stood in that tunnel and stared at the body on the floor and the man who’d put it there.
Doug stopped the video.
The conference room was its own kind of silent.
Not the shocked silence of people who couldn’t process what they’d seen.
We’d all seen death, all of us in that room, in our different ways and for our different reasons.
This was the silence of recognition. Of seeing, clearly and without the mercy of distance, exactly what kind of man we were building a case against.
I realized my hands were gripping the edge of the table. I let go. The blood came back into my fingers in a tingling rush.
“That’s first-degree murder on camera,” Martinez said. His voice had gone flat and hard, stripped of the charm the way a weapon is stripped of its safety. “In front of a hundred witnesses who were too terrified to do anything about it.”
“He wanted them terrified,” Jack said. “That’s the whole point. He killed Joaquin the way he did because fear is how he runs the operation. Every fighter in that room watched it happen and understood that if you step out of line, you end up dead.”
Jack’s phone buzzed in his hand. He looked at the screen.
“It’s the crime lab,” he said.
The room went still. Jack answered on speaker.
“This is Sheriff Lawson,” Jack said.
“Dr. Wendt at the state forensics lab. I have ballistics results on the .22 caliber revolver submitted under your case.”
“Please tell me you have good news.”
“The rifling patterns and striation marks on the .22 recovered from both victims, Andre Washington and Terrance James, are consistent with test rounds fired from the submitted revolver. Both rounds were fired from this weapon. It’s a match.”
Jack closed his eyes. Just for a second, a blink that lasted a beat too long, the only outward sign that the words had landed somewhere deeper than professional satisfaction. Then he opened them.
“That’s what I needed. Thanks for getting it back to me so quickly.”
“It’s not like I’ve got anything better to do in the middle of the night.”
Jack hung up and said, “Kallas gets two counts of first-degree murder. Stavros gets first-degree on Joaquin, conspiracy on Dre and T-Bone, racketeering, and enterprise homicide. I want warrants before the sun comes up.” He looked at Martinez. “How long has Vic been sitting?”
“Long enough he should be good and nervous.”
“Good.” He looked at his watch and grimaced. “Now I get to wake up a judge and someone from the DA’s office.”
“Better let me call the DA’s office,” Martinez said. “Leisa Slater has a soft spot for me.”
“I guess that leaves the judge for me,” Jack said.
Doug was still sitting at the table, his hands flat on either side of Margot’s keyboard, staring at the dark monitor.
The wired energy that had carried him through the night was gone.
What was left was a sixteen-year-old boy who’d just watched a man get murdered on video and was carrying the weight of it the way you carry something sharp.
“You should get some sleep,” I said. “Jack’s got a cot behind his office.”
He shook his head. “Not yet.” He was quiet for a moment.
“I keep thinking about Dre. Sitting in that crowd. Watching Stavros kill that kid. And then going back. Week after week. Recording, documenting, building the case.” He looked up at me.
“How do you do that? How do you watch something like that and go back?”
“Because the alternative is letting it stand,” I said. “And some people can’t live with that.”
Doug nodded slowly. He didn’t say anything else, and I didn’t push. Some things didn’t need more words.
* * *
I found Jack in his office twenty minutes later, hanging up the phone.
“Judge Aldridge signed the warrants and sent them over electronically,” he said.
“Two counts first-degree murder on Kallas. First-degree murder, conspiracy, racketeering, and criminal enterprise charges on Stavros. She wasn’t happy about missing out on her beauty sleep, so she told me we’d better make an airtight case or she’s coming for me. ”
“I always liked Judge Aldridge.”
“Martinez got Slater at the DA’s office. She’s reviewing the affidavit now and she’ll have the formal charging documents ready by morning.”
“So you think it was Leisa Slater’s house Martinez was seen leaving in the middle of the night?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Jack said. “But it wouldn’t surprise me at all. She’s got a thing for cops. She and Colburn went a few rounds several years ago.”
“Oh really?” I asked, arching a brow. “Maybe that’s why things always seem a little off between Colburn and Martinez.”
There was a knock on the open door, and a uniformed deputy I didn’t recognize leaned in.
“Sheriff, the suspect in interview two is asking to talk. His lawyer showed up about half an hour ago.”
Vic talked for forty minutes. He told us everything we needed to make sure Stavros never saw the light of day again.
“Dre deserved better,” he said, slumped in his chair like a man who accepted his fate. “He deserved the shot I never gave him. If putting Stavros away is the last thing I do for that kid, then I’m okay with it.”
I guess that was as close to remorse as we would get.
When it was over Jack had everything he needed—Stavros’s direct order on Dre, Kallas as the triggerman, the three days in the back chamber, T-Bone’s execution after Beckwith tipped the cooperation, and Cole’s shooting, ordered as a tactical diversion so Kallas could get to T-Bone.
Jack found me in the corridor.
“We’re done for tonight,” he said. “Nothing happens until Stavros moves in the morning.”
The building was settling into that strange pre-dawn quiet, the hour when exhaustion felt almost peaceful and the world outside hadn’t decided what it was going to be yet.
Stavros was asleep somewhere, still believing the night had gone his way.
Morning was coming.
And so were we.