Epilogue #3
I don't answer blocked numbers as a rule, but something about the timing of it, the weight of it sitting there buzzing against the wood in a bar where I'm supposed to be unwinding with my brothers, makes me pick up.
"Yeah." I keep my voice flat, giving nothing.
Static fills the line first, just enough of it to sharpen my attention before a voice cuts through. It’s low and deliberately distorted, the kind of alteration that takes effort. "701 Poydras. Come alone. Now."
The line clicks dead before I can respond.
I kill the screen and set it down on the table while I process the address.
That’s a warehouse we own on the river side of the Warehouse District, leased to Gulf Meridian Imports for overflow storage.
It’s a property I haven't thought about in months because it runs itself and generates just enough revenue to make it worth holding.
Nobody calls about that address. Nobody has a reason to.
"Everything good?" Wells asks from across the table, his voice carrying the same easy warmth it always does, but his eyes have already sharpened the way they do when he's somehow aware something is off.
I slip the phone into my jacket pocket and finish the last of my bourbon in one clean pull, then set the glass down and push back from the table without hurrying.
"Yeah," I say, and the lie comes out smoothly enough that I almost believe it myself. "Just a quick thing to check out. I'll be back."
Wells raises one brow a fraction of an inch, which from him is practically a scene. But he doesn't push it, and I don't offer more, because whatever is at that warehouse is mine to handle until I know otherwise. Pulling my brothers into something before I've assessed it isn't how I operate.
I cross the bar without rushing, nodding once to the owner near the back corridor, and push through the door into the thick New Orleans night. My key fob is already in my hand by the time the door swings shut behind me.
My watch reads eleven forty-seven. Whatever this is, I'll know what I'm dealing with before midnight.
The street is still in a way that is wrong before I can name why. It’s the kind of quiet that settles over a block when whatever was happening there has just finished, leaving nothing behind but the impression of it.
A few cars sit parked along the curb, their windows fogged from the uncharacteristic chill rolling off the river. Somewhere behind me, the last notes of a brass band dissolve into the gap between buildings, the saxophone holding on a beat longer than the rest before it too disappears.
I ease the Aston to the curb two blocks short of the address and kill the headlights, sitting for a moment in the dark with the engine idling. I scan the street the way my father taught me to read a room before I enter it.
The fog has come in low and thick off the Mississippi, clinging to the broken asphalt, and the streetlights do almost nothing against it except pool weakly at their own bases.
Nothing moves. No foot traffic, no idling vehicles, not even the ambient noise of a city that never fully sleeps. The silence is deliberate, the way silence only does when someone has recently made it.
I cut the engine.
The warehouse at 701 Poydras is one of roughly a dozen properties Stone Intermodal holds in the district. It’s an overflow site we lease out, the kind of asset that generates quiet revenue and demands almost nothing in return.
There is no reason anyone should be calling me here at midnight unless something has gone badly wrong. The fact that whoever called didn't identify themselves tells me they either knew I wouldn't come if they did, or they couldn't afford to be traced.
Neither option sits well.
I reach under my seat to pull the Sig out of it’s holster. The security team installed the concealed compartment the day I took stepped in as EVP.
It was the same afternoon he told me that the shipping lanes between here and the Gulf were worth more than most countries' defense budgets and that powerful men make powerful enemies without ever meaning to.
I hadn't argued with him then. I don't argue with him now, even in memory.
The gun is cold and heavier than it should feel for something I've rarely had cause to use. I tuck it into my waistband with the practiced discomfort of a man who carries because he promised someone he would, not because it comes naturally.
The block outside is as quiet as it looked through the glass.
The warehouse sits about a hundred and fifty feet ahead, squat and lightless against the night except for a thin thread of yellow leaking from somewhere deep inside.
It’s barely strong enough to reach the ground, but it’s one of the only sources of light on the street, except for the buzzing street lamps.
Time has taken most of the building apart in the slow, patient way that neglected things go. The windows are punched out, the metal siding is warped and salt-eaten, and the paint reduced to memory.
Nothing about it belongs near the lit streets one block over, which is precisely why it's useful to the kind of people who need a place nobody looks at twice.
I move along the river side of the building, staying close to the wall, close enough now to see the broken window and the thin bleed of yellow light coming through it from somewhere deep inside.
Whatever is lit in there is buried well back from the entrance, which means whoever made that call wanted to be invisible from the street and almost succeeded.
I ease around to the loading door, which has been left slightly open. The gap is wide enough that the smell reaches me before I make the decision to push through it.
Blood, not fresh, the kind that has had time to settle into the concrete and become part of it. Underneath that, there’s something else entirely, something that belongs in a hospital room and has no business in a warehouse at midnight on the wrong side of the river.
I push through the loading door and catch the heel of my hand on a piece of jagged metal at the frame. The pain is sharp and immediate.
I cradle the hand against my chest to keep the blood off my suit jacket, which is the kind of reflex that would have made my father laugh to see his son, standing in a warehouse at midnight, bleeding and worried about the Italian wool.
At the far end of the building, a second door swings shut on its hinges just as I look up. For just a moment, just long enough to register and no longer, a man passes through the narrowing gap in the overhead light.
The man turns his head as the door closes behind him, the way people do when something startles them, and the bulb catches the left side of his neck clearly enough that I see it before the darkness takes him.
He has a port-wine stain running from his jaw toward his collar, distinctive enough that I know I've seen it before.
Then he's gone, and the door finishes its swing. The building goes quiet except for the slow creak of the bulb on its wire.
I cross the floor. And that’s when I see him.
My father sits strapped to a chair that has been bolted to the concrete. The stillness of him is absolute in a way that tells me everything before I've taken another step.
I stop anyway, because my body needs a moment that my mind is already past, and I stand there in the moving dark while the world outside keeps going without any awareness that something irreversible has just happened in this building on a street that nobody is watching tonight.
I pull my phone from my jacket and dial Vin. He answers on the second ring.
“The warehouse at 701 Poydras," I say, and my voice comes out level in a way that costs me something I don't have a name for yet. "My father is dead.”
I give him a breath to absorb that, then continue before he can respond. "There was a man with a port-wine birthmark on the left side of his neck, below the jaw. I want him found before morning."
I hang up without waiting for a response and close the remaining distance to my father.
Up close, the stillness of him is worse than it was from across the room. It’s the kind of stillness that has weight to it.
I crouch beside the chair and set my uninjured hand on his shoulder. For a moment, I stay there, not moving, while something works its way through my chest that I don't have room for right now.
He was untouchable my entire life.
I understand now that he already knew what kind of test I would eventually face. I’m not sure he knew it would come like this. But here we are.
My hand comes away from his shoulder slick with blood, and I wipe it on my trousers without thinking, standing as I do. There is no time for this. He would be the first to say so.
This is what he prepared me for. Not the shipping lanes or the contracts or the customs windows. This. The moment when the city finds out who the Stones are without Robert Stone standing at the front of it.
I straighten, adjust my jacket, and walk back toward the door.
Finish Ridge here.
Thanks for reading! xx — Blakely