Justice
We boarded the charter at Manassas Regional just before dawn.
Prime had called me at midnight saying he was coming too and I didn’t argue because arguing with Prime about protecting family was like arguing with weather.
It was going to happen regardless of your opinion.
So it was three of us now. Me, Prime, and Bryce, strapped into a Cessna Citation with a two-man crew and enough fuel to sweep the southern Caribbean for eight hours before we’d need to land.
Bryce took the seat behind the pilots. Prime sat across from me in the cabin.
The engines spooled up and the runway lights blurred past the windows and within minutes we were climbing through the predawn dark over Virginia.
Nobody spoke until we leveled off. Then Prime leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and asked the question I’d been building a case around for weeks.
“What makes you think it was Rodrigo?”
“He’s the one that has real beef with Quest. Quest killed his brother.
And come on, let’s be real. If somebody killed you or Quest, I’d get revenge too.
But it wouldn’t be on no covert shit. I’m putting a bullet right in their head.
I want them to know it was me. But the Rios family?
They’re cowards. Tampering with the plane, sabotaging the GPS, sneaking onto the property at two in the morning on a motorcycle.
Should’ve pulled up with the shits if that’s what it really was. ”
“They knew better,” Bryce said from behind us.
“Yep,” Prime agreed. “Quest would’ve seen them coming a mile away and handled it. We all would’ve.”
“And we still will.” I looked at both of them. “Once we find them, and I know they’re alive, we’re going to war on the Rios family. All of them. Every single one. Even the lil kids.”
The cabin went quiet. Bryce’s eyebrows lifted slightly. Prime didn’t move. He sat there and looked at me with an expression I’d never seen him direct at me before. It was layered, complicated, and it sat on his face for a long time before he spoke.
“Damn,” he said slowly. “You usually the sensible one.”
“Not today.”
“Nah, I hear you. I hear you.” But his eyes stayed on me and I could feel him taking my measure, recalculating who his brother was in this moment.
Prime had lived in the dark his whole life.
He’d done things that most people only read about in court transcripts.
Violence was a language he was fluent in and had spent years trying to unlearn.
And now here I was, the brother who wore suits and balanced books and kept the family on the right side of reckless, sitting in a charter plane at five in the morning talking about killing children with the same steady voice I used to review quarterly earnings.
I watched something move behind Prime’s eyes.
Part of it looked like recognition, the comfort of knowing he wasn’t the only Banks willing to go all the way when family was on the line.
But there was something else underneath it, something that looked almost like worry, because Prime knew better than anyone what it cost to cross that line and he knew it wasn’t a line you crossed back over.
He’d spent years trying to find his way home from the things he’d done.
Watching his brother volunteer for that same trip wasn’t entirely a relief.
“They tried to kill an unborn Banks,” I said, because I needed him to understand this wasn’t posturing. “Quest spared Mateo’s son. He spared LaLa. He showed mercy and they answered it by trying to kill his girl and his unborn child. That disrespect warrants an all-out war. So everybody pays.”
Prime nodded once. Slowly. Then he sat back in his seat and looked out the window at the dark ocean below and I knew he was with me.
Whatever reservations he had about watching his brother become something new, he was with me.
Because at the end of the day, we were Banks men.
And Banks men didn’t let things like this stand.
“You keep saying they’re alive.” Bryce’s voice was quieter now.
The war talk had faded and what was left in its place was something more fragile.
I turned around and looked at him. His hands were gripping his knees and I could see the fear written across his face, plain as a headline.
The fear that his sister and his niece had died somewhere in the ocean and nobody would ever know exactly where.
I carried that same fear. I just kept mine locked in a room I didn’t visit during daylight hours.
“You really think they survived?” he asked.
“Yeah, I do. It ain’t logical. It ain’t rational. I can’t point to a piece of evidence or a data set that supports it. But whatever happened out there, they survived. I can feel that shit in my bones. And I’m not giving up on them until somebody shows me proof that I’m wrong.”
Bryce looked at me for a long moment. Then he nodded and his grip on the armrest loosened just enough to tell me that my faith, irrational as it was, had given him something to hold onto.
Sometimes that’s all people needed. Not evidence or proof, just somebody willing to say “they’re alive” and mean it.
“Aight,” he said. “Let’s go find them.”
· · ·
The Coast Guard had been searching near the ABCs for weeks and found nothing. That told me everything I needed to know. They were looking in the wrong place.
Quest’s flight plan had him heading south toward Curacao, but the GPS was compromised.
That meant the plane could’ve drifted off course for hours before the fuel lines gave out, pushing him further north and east, deeper into the Caribbean where the islands got smaller and the chances of being spotted got worse.
I told Hargrove to skip the ABCs entirely and push north.
If the Coast Guard already covered that grid and came up empty, I wasn’t wasting fuel repeating their homework.
We were heading toward the Grenadines, the chain of islands between St. Vincent and Grenada.
Dozens of cays and islets out there, most of them uninhabited, scattered across open water where nobody was looking.
Hargrove brought us down to a thousand feet and held the aircraft steady.
Prime and Bryce pressed their faces against opposite windows, scanning the water.
I sat in the cockpit behind Hargrove and his copilot, watching the ocean roll out beneath us in every direction.
An endless sheet of blue and green that could’ve been hiding anything or nothing.
Three hours in, we’d seen nothing. Fishing boats, cargo ships, a cruise liner catching the morning sun. But no wreckage. No debris. No signal. The ocean was keeping its secrets and every mile of empty water that passed beneath us made the math worse.
Then Bryce yelled from the back.
“There. Two o’clock. Something in the water.”
I was out of the copilot’s seat and at the window before he finished the sentence.
Hargrove banked right and dropped another two hundred feet and I pressed my forehead against the glass and searched the surface until I saw it.
Something yellow and orange, partially deflated, riding low in the swells about a mile off our starboard side.
My heart rate tripled. My hand went up against the window, acting as a sun visor as I peered.
I stopped breathing because I knew what it looked like. It looked like an inflatable life raft.
“Lower,” I told Hargrove. “Get us lower.”
“Mr. Banks, at this altitude I need to maintain—”
“Lower. Now.”
He brought us down to five hundred feet and circled. The object came into focus as we passed over it and I could see it clearly now. It was a raft. Yellow and orange. Emergency grade, standard issue on small aircraft. It was partially collapsed, riding the current. Nobody in it.
My chest caved in and expanded at the same time because an empty raft was the cruelest kind of evidence.
It meant they were out here. It confirmed the crash, confirmed the water landing, confirmed that Quest had done what I knew he would do and gotten them out of that plane alive.
But it also meant they weren’t on the raft anymore.
They’d either made it to land somewhere or the ocean had taken them and the raft was all that was left.
Or it may not have been theirs at all. But something told me that it was.
“That could be theirs,” Prime said from behind me. His voice was careful, measured. He was reading my face and calibrating his tone to match whatever I needed to hear.
“It’s theirs.” I didn’t need confirmation.
I knew my brother. He would’ve inflated that raft the second the plane hit water, gotten Mehar on it, and paddled toward anything that looked like land.
Quest was a lot of things but he was not a man who sat in the middle of the ocean waiting to die.
He moved. He acted. He survived. That empty raft didn’t mean they were dead. It meant they’d found somewhere to go.
“Mark the coordinates,” I told Hargrove. “Log them. Every detail. Position, current direction, time stamp. I want to know exactly where that raft was when we saw it so I can calculate drift patterns and figure out which islands are within paddling distance.”
Hargrove started logging the data and I stood in the cockpit doorway staring at the raft as we circled and felt something shift inside me.
The current down here flows south and west. That raft had been drifting for weeks.
Which meant wherever it started was north of here, probably deep in the Grenadines.
That was our search area. That’s where Quest took Mehar to land.
They were out here. Close. On one of these islands. Alive and waiting for someone to come get them.
That’s when the sky ahead of us started to change.
The western horizon, which had been clear all morning, was stacking up with clouds that looked heavy and compressed and tinged with green at the edges.
The wind had been shifting for the last twenty minutes but I’d been too focused on the water to notice.
Now I noticed. The plane shuddered once, a hard lateral jolt that made Prime brace against the cabin wall, and Hargrove’s hands tightened on the controls.
“Mr. Banks, we’ve got a problem. Hurricane Beatriz has shifted track.
It was supposed to pass south of us but the latest advisory has it turning northwest. We’re looking at Category 3 conditions within the next four to six hours and the outer bands are already reaching our position. I need to put us on the ground.”
“No. We stay up. We keep searching.”
“Sir, I can’t fly a visual search pattern in sixty-knot crosswinds with a hurricane bearing down on us. If we get caught in the eyewall we’re looking at conditions that this aircraft is not rated for. We need to land. Now.”
I looked at the sky. Looked at the ocean.
Looked at the raft getting smaller as we circled away from it.
Quest and Mehar were down there somewhere on one of those islands and a hurricane was about to hit them and they had nothing.
No shelter, no supplies, no communication.
And I was up here in a plane being told to run from the same storm that was about to try to kill my brother for the second time.
“If they’re out there, this storm could kill them,” I said.
Hargrove looked at me. He was a professional.
Calm, competent, ex-military. And he chose the worst possible words.
“Mr. Banks, if they’re still alive after weeks in the open with no supplies and no medical care, this storm may very well finish what the crash started.
I’m sorry, but we need to be realistic about the situation. ”
I leaned into the cockpit and put my face close enough to his that he could see exactly what was behind my eyes. “Your job is to fly this plane. Not give me your opinions. Next time, keep that bullshit to yourself.”
Hargrove held my gaze for about two seconds. Then he looked away and started plotting a course southeast. “There’s a private airstrip outside Caracas. I can have us on the ground in forty minutes.”
“Then do that.”
I walked back into the cabin and sat down. Prime was watching me with the faintest trace of a smile on his face. Bryce was nodding slowly, arms crossed, looking at me with an appreciation that didn’t need words.
“I’ve never seen you like that,” Prime said.
“Get used to it.”
Prime pulled out his phone and started scrolling through contacts.
“I got somebody in Caracas. Name’s Diego.
He runs a marina on the coast, private charters, fishing boats, some other things that don’t come with receipts.
If we need a boat to get back out there once this storm clears, Diego can make it happen within hours. ”
“Call him. Tell him we need a vessel with enough range to cover the Grenadines. Every island, every cay, every strip of sand between Grenada and St. Vincent. That’s where they are. I know it.”
“Already dialing.”
The plane banked southeast toward Venezuela and the storm swallowed the sky behind us.
Through the rear window I could see the clouds churning and stacking, a wall of grey and green that stretched from the water to the top of the atmosphere.
Hurricane Beatriz. Category 3. The same storm that was about to hit every island in its path with a hundred-and-twenty-mile-per -hour winds and enough rain to turn solid ground into a river.
Quest was down there. Mehar was down there. Their baby was down there. And I was flying in the opposite direction because a pilot told me the math didn’t work.
The math was going to change. As soon as this storm passed, I was getting on a boat and I was going to check every island, every cove, every strip of sand in the Grenadines until I found them.
And when I found them, because it was when and not if, the Rios family was going to learn what happened when you came for a Banks and didn’t finish the job.
I looked at Prime. He was on the phone with Diego, speaking in a low voice, arranging things that didn’t need to be spoken about loudly.
I looked at Bryce. He was staring out the window at the storm with his jaw tight and his hands balled into fists, watching the hurricane eat the sky and knowing his sister was somewhere underneath it.
“We’re going to find them,” I said. To Bryce. To Prime. To myself. To the ocean below us that was trying its hardest to keep my brother hidden.
The plane touched down outside Caracas thirty-eight minutes later. Diego was already at the airstrip with a truck. We were going to hunker down, wait out Beatriz, and the second she cleared, we were getting on that water.
The storm had maybe two days in her. My brother had survived worse.