Chapter Thirteen The Woman From the
Newspaper
Shay Brooks found Nuck’s garage the same way she found most things worth finding — by pulling a thread nobody else had bothered to pull.
The county records search had given her Marcus Deluca’s death, sealed case file and all, and cross-referencing his last known associates with the East Baltimore towing and salvage licenses filed over the last five years had turned up exactly one name that connected cleanly to both the Deluca file and to Jerome Ellis: a garage on Biddle Street registered to a Nathaniel “Nuck” Warren, who’d done cash work for two different vehicles now flagged in sealed county paperwork, years apart, and who happened to employ, according to a tow license database that took her forty minutes and one uncomfortable phone call to a records clerk to access, a twenty-seven-year-old driver named Jerome Ellis.
She showed up at the garage at eight the next morning with a notebook of her own — spiral-bound, unglamorous, nothing like the one that had apparently upended this man’s entire life — and found Nuck alone in the bay, halfway under a Civic, radio playing low.
“I’m not looking to make trouble for anybody,” she said, before he’d even fully slid out from underneath the car. “My name’s Shay Brooks, I write for the Ledger. I think Jerome Ellis is in serious danger, and I think I might know more about why than the people currently hunting him do.”
Nuck stood, wiped his hands slow and deliberate, the universal gesture of a man buying himself time to think. “Don’t know any Jerome Ellis.”
“You’ve got his name listed on your last three tow license renewals as an employee.
” Shay kept her voice even, not accusatory, the tone she’d learned over six years got people talking far better than pressure ever did.
“I’m not police. I’m not working for whoever’s after him.
I’ve spent two years chasing a pattern in this city’s robbery and homicide cases that never quite adds up, cases that close too fast or don’t close at all, and last night I found out his cousin’s death eight months ago fits that pattern exactly.
I think whatever he found in that impound vehicle connects to something I’ve been trying to prove exists for a long time, and I think if I’m right, he’s in more danger than he understands, from more directions than just whoever’s been chasing him the last few days. ”
Nuck studied her a long moment, the particular assessing look of a man deciding how much of someone else’s trust he had the right to spend.
“Even if I knew where he was,” he said carefully, “why would I hand a reporter his location? No offense, but you people don’t exactly have a track record of keeping folks safe.
You get your story, it runs, and then everybody whose name is in whatever he’s carrying knows exactly who to come after next. ”
“Fair.” Shay didn’t flinch from it, because he wasn’t wrong, and she respected him more for saying it plainly than if he’d simply lied to her face the way half her sources did.
“I’m not asking you to hand me his location.
I’m asking you to tell him I exist, and let him decide.
If he doesn’t want to talk to me, fine, I walk away and you never hear from me again.
But somebody in this city needs to be building a record of what’s actually happening here that isn’t controlled by whoever’s trying to bury it, and right now that’s me, and I’m the only one asking permission first instead of just taking what I want. ”
Something in that last line landed with Nuck — Shay watched it land, watched his jaw tighten slightly, watched him glance toward the office where, she’d guess, a phone sat that could reach Rome faster than she ever could on her own.
“I’ll pass it along,” Nuck said finally. “That’s all I’m promising. Whether he calls you is on him.”
Rome called four hours later, from a new number Shay didn’t recognize, voice tight and careful in a way that told her, before he’d said more than a few sentences, exactly how much the last three days had cost him.
“Nuck says you think you know something,” Rome said, no greeting, no wasted words. “I need to know what, and I need to know why I should trust a reporter over anybody else who’s come at me the last few days wanting something.”
“Because I’m not asking you for the notebook,” Shay said.
“I don’t want it. I want to know what’s in it, and I want to prove a pattern I’ve been chasing for two years that I think it can finally confirm — but I don’t need to touch the thing itself to do that.
You could read me names over the phone right now and I’d never need to see the physical book at all.
” She let that sit a moment, then pressed the one point she suspected might actually move him.
“I wrote about your cousin, eight months ago. Three hundred words on page eleven, cut down from twelve hundred because my editor said it read as conspiracy-minded when I flagged that the corner camera that would’ve caught his shooter mysteriously malfunctioned that same night.
I’ve been sitting on that instinct for eight months with nowhere to take it.
I think you’re holding the first hard proof I’ve ever had that I was right to keep chasing it. ”
The silence on Rome’s end went on long enough that Shay checked her screen to make sure the call hadn’t dropped.
“You wrote that?” Rome’s voice had changed, something rawer coming through the careful guard he’d been holding since he picked up.
“I remember that piece. My aunt cut it out, kept it on the fridge for a month, said it was the only time anybody in this whole city admitted his case wasn’t just bad luck. ”
“It wasn’t bad luck,” Shay said quietly.
“I don’t think any of the cases in that pattern are bad luck.
I think they’re the exact opposite of luck — I think they’re the most carefully managed kind of injustice this city knows how to produce, and I think the notebook you found is the actual architecture of how it gets managed. ”
Rome went quiet again, and when he spoke next his voice had steadied into something harder, more decided.
“I can’t meet you. Not yet, not with my brother where he is.
But I’ll talk. I need somebody outside all this who can hear what I know and actually do something with it if —” He stopped himself, and Shay understood without him finishing the sentence exactly what he’d almost said. If something happens to me.
“I’ll take whatever you can give me,” Shay said. “And Jerome — I mean this — I’m not going to run a single word of it until you tell me it’s safe to. This isn’t about a byline for me. Not this one.”
“Everybody says that.”
“I know they do. I’m asking you to let me prove it instead of just saying it back to you.”
Another long pause, and then, finally, the sound of Rome exhaling slow on the other end, the particular sound of a man setting down a weight he’d been carrying alone for three days and deciding, against every instinct the last three days had trained into him, to let someone else help carry it.
“Okay,” Rome said. “Where do we start.”
“Start with the first name that scared you the most,” Shay said, pen already moving across her spiral notebook. “The one you haven’t said out loud to anybody yet.”
Rome was quiet a moment longer, and when he finally spoke the name, Shay’s pen stopped moving entirely, because it was a name she’d shaken hands with at a community fundraiser not four months earlier, a name attached to a face that smiled out from campaign banners still stapled to telephone poles all over the neighborhood she’d grown up in, a name that belonged to a man who had, as far as the public record showed, spent twenty years quietly, patiently, respectably building the kind of career that put him one appointment away from a seat on the state’s highest bench.
Judge Holloway.