Chapter 13 #2
Two men in suits. I know exactly who and what they are before they say a word.
Experience settles it faster than thought ever could.
There’s a sameness to them that never quite blends in—the shoes too deliberate, the posture too ready, the way their attention sweeps the room before their bodies follow.
One of them is familiar. Detective Okafor, who took my statement at the gas station five weeks ago.
The other one I don’t know.
They walk across the floor toward me. Reyes clocks them and says nothing. Castillo finds somewhere else to be.
“Mr. Woods.” Okafor stops a few feet away. “You have a few minutes?”
Not really a question.
“Sure,” I say. I don’t reach for my phone. “What do you need?”
“Following up on the Peachtree incident. Some additional questions have come up in the review.” He glances at the other detective. “Routine.”
Nothing about this is routine. It’s been nearly five weeks since the gas station fiasco. Routine follow-ups don’t happen in the middle of a training session five weeks later. This is someone who wants to see how I answer questions when I haven’t had time to prepare.
“I’m happy to help,” I say. “I’d like to call my attorney first.”
Okafor’s expression stays neutral. “You’re not obligated—”
“I know. I’d still like to.”
I call Bill. He tells me to say nothing substantive until he arrives. Twenty minutes.
I hang up and look at both detectives.
“He’ll be here in twenty. Can I get you water?”
The second detective—who hasn’t introduced himself—looks around the gym. At the ring. At Reyes. At the heavy bags.
“You’ve been training hard,” he says.
“Title eliminator in seven weeks,” I say.
“Right.” He looks at me. “That’s important to you.”
“Yes,” I say. “It is.”
The twenty minutes are the longest I’ve spent since the gas station. I sit on the bench, drink water, don’t say anything substantive, and think about Andi’s voice an hour ago. Stay in the gym. Finish the session. She knew something like this was possible. She told me to stay functional.
I’m staying functional.
Bill arrives at nineteen minutes. He shakes hands with Okafor, introduces himself to the second detective—Hargrove—and says pleasantly: “What can we help you with today?”
The questions take thirty minutes. The gas station sequence. My knowledge of the men’s identities. Whether I’ve had contact with anyone claiming to represent them. The man who died at Grady.
Bill handles the ones that need handling. I answer what I can answer directly.
When they leave, Hargrove pauses at the door.
“One more thing,” he says. “The man at Grady—the one with the medication error. The hospital’s internal review found anomalies in the care records. They’ve opened a separate inquiry.” He looks at me steadily. “Thought you’d want to know.”
He walks out.
Reyes waits until the door closes. “What was that?”
“They wanted to see how I answered questions without time to prepare,” I say.
“Were you ready?”
I think about sitting on that bench for twenty minutes, saying nothing. One thing I’ve realized about myself is that I’ve learned the discipline of waiting when everything in me wants to act.
“Getting there,” I say.
Bill puts his hand briefly on my shoulder. “You did well.” Then quieter: “The separate inquiry into the Grady care record—if the hospital formally identifies the error as deliberate, it changes the evidentiary picture significantly. For us.”
“I’ll call Andi,” I say.
“I’ll call her,” Bill says. “Finish your session.”
He walks out.
Reyes looks at me.
“Tomorrow,” he says. “Same time.”
“Same time,” I say.
I sit in the quiet gym and think about seven weeks. About what has to happen in them. The work doesn’t stop because the world is complicated. The work is how I stay ready for what the world asks.
ANDI
Deja asks to talk to me privately on a Tuesday afternoon, two weeks after she moved into the room Linda prepared with the kind of quiet care that doesn’t require acknowledgment.
We sit in my office. She’s in the chair across from my desk—not because I put it there but because that’s where she chose, the slight formality of it deliberate. She has something prepared.
“The woman,” she says. “Evelyn Carrington.”
I go still.
“I told you about my friend,” she says. “That wasn’t the whole thing.”
“I know,” I say.
“I was there too,” she says. “Not just at the party. After. My foster mom made an arrangement. I didn’t know what it was at the time.
I know now.” She says it steadily, with the rehearsed composure of someone who has named a thing enough times in private that saying it out loud no longer requires bracing.
“I ran when I figured out what was happening. I was twelve.”
“Yes,” I say.
“Evelyn was at the party,” she says. “She talked to my foster mom. I don’t know if she knew what my foster mom was going to do. But she was there, and I saw her, and then my foster mom started making arrangements.” She holds my eyes. “When she walked into this center, I recognized her face.”
The room is completely quiet.
“Deja,” I say. “What I’m about to tell you—this is information I’ve been building a case around for months.
What you just told me is the most important piece anyone has handed me.
” I hold her eyes. “You are not in trouble. You did nothing wrong. And with your permission, I want to give what you’ve told me to the people who are working to stop this. ”
She looks at me.
“Bill?” she says. She’s heard the name.
“Bill,” I say. “And eventually, federal investigators.”
She’s quiet.
“Kelly said you were in the system,” she says. “She said you never let it stop you from saying things out loud.”
“I try,” I say.
“She said you testified. In front of people.”
“Yes.”
Deja looks at the window. At the activity room beyond it. At the door that faces the street that she found herself, that she kept coming back to even when she wasn’t sure she could trust what was behind it.
“Okay,” she says.
Just that.
I reach across the desk and put my hand over hers.
She doesn’t pull back.