Justice
The FAA called at nine in the morning with nothing.
That’s what it amounted to, even though the woman on the phone used forty-five seconds of words to deliver it.
No wreckage. No debris field. No emergency locator signal.
The expanded search grid covering the southern Caribbean corridor had yielded zero physical evidence of my brother.
They were still checking. They were coordinating with regional authorities. They appreciated my patience.
I didn’t have patience. Patience was for people whose bros weren’t missing over open water with a pregnant fiancé.
What I had was a desk full of work I couldn’t focus on, a phone full of calls I didn’t want to make, and the slow, grinding realization that the government was going to run out of interest in finding Quest long before I ran out of money to keep looking.
I left the office at noon and drove to the casino to link up with Bryce.
The building was quiet in the early afternoon, just the cleaning crew and a few staff members prepping for the evening shift.
I walked through the gaming floor, past the empty tables and silent slot machines, and headed toward the security office in the back corridor.
Bryce was at the desk reviewing camera feeds from the night before.
He’d settled into the security role with a discipline that surprised me, considering where he’d been six months ago.
This was the same kid that tried to sabotage us.
Granted, that was before he knew that Mehar and Zainab were intertwined with the family.
The Banks family had a habit of absorbing people into our orbit whether they planned on it or not.
Bryce had been absorbed, and he’d earned his place.
He looked up when I walked in and I could tell he hadn’t been sleeping either.
The circles under his eyes were dark enough to look like bruises and his jaw had that permanent clenched look that hadn’t relaxed since we told him about the plane.
Bryce had been showing up to every shift on time, doing his job, keeping the casino secure, but underneath the professionalism was a man barely keeping it together because his sister was somewhere in the ocean and nobody could tell him if she was breathing.
“Any updates?” he asked. Same question he asked me every time I walked into this building. Same desperate hope sitting behind it.
“FAA called this morning. Still nothing. No wreckage, no debris, no signal.” I pulled a chair next to his desk and sat down.
“But I found something at Quest’s property that changes this whole thing.
” I pulled out my phone and swiped to the screenshot from the Middleburg security footage.
The motorcycle, far right of the frame, dark rider hugging the tree line.
“This was on Quest’s estate two nights before they flew out.
Someone on a motorcycle, no headlights, moving through the trees toward the hangar where he kept the plane.
The hangar had no camera coverage. Whoever this was knew exactly where the blind spots were. ”
Bryce took the phone and studied the image with a focus that told me he wasn’t just looking at it, he was reading it. His eyes moved across the frame the way someone reads a page, left to right, top to bottom, pulling details I might have missed.
“That’s a Ducati,” he said after about ten seconds.
“Monster 1200, maybe the 821. See the tank profile and the frame geometry? That’s not a street bike you pick up at a pawn shop.
That’s twenty, twenty-five thousand new.
” He handed the phone back and shook his head.
“Vipers rode Hondas and Yamahas, stripped down, loud as hell. This ain’t that. Whoever was on this bike has money.”
“That’s what I figured. This wasn’t a random hit. This was professional and premeditated and it came from somebody who knew Quest’s schedule, his property layout, and his security gaps.”
Bryce’s jaw tightened. I could see the math working behind his eyes, the same calculation I’d already run a dozen times. Who had that kind of access? Who had the resources to hire professionals and supply a Ducati and sabotage an aircraft without leaving a trace?
“You gotta find my sister, Justice.” His voice was low and steady but I could hear the fracture underneath it.
Bryce wasn’t a man who showed fear easily.
He’d survived things that would have broken most people twice his age.
But this was Mehar. This was the only family he had left who loved him without conditions, and she was somewhere in the ocean and nobody could tell him if she was breathing.
“That’s why I’m here. I chartered a search vessel last week but I’m not waiting on a boat to cover hundreds of miles of open water.
I’m chartering a plane tomorrow morning.
Small aircraft, low altitude, visual sweep of the islands south of the original search grid.
If the GPS was compromised, they could be a hundred miles from where the Coast Guard has been looking.
I’m going to cover every square mile myself if I have to. ”
“I’m coming with you.”
“I was hoping you’d say that. Be at Manassas Regional by five AM. I’ll have the charter ready.”
Bryce nodded once. Then he said something that I felt in my chest. “Whoever did this, I’mma kill them. I don’t care who it is. I don’t care what it costs. When we find out who put their hands on that plane, I’m handling it personally.”
I didn’t respond to that because there was nothing to respond to. He wasn’t asking for permission. He was stating a fact. And honestly, he’d have to get in line behind me and Prime because the list of people who wanted to put a bullet in whoever did this was growing by the day.
I sat in Quest’s office at the casino and worked through the logic one more time.
The motorcycle was expensive. The sabotage was professional. The operator knew the property, the schedule, and the camera layout. That narrowed it to someone with significant resources, inside knowledge, and a motive strong enough to attempt murder on a pregnant woman.
Rodrigo Rios.
Quest killed his brother Mateo in his own home.
Shot him in front of his wife LaLa. Then threatened LaLa’s son to ensure her silence.
That was the kind of act that echoed through a family for generations, and the Rios family wasn’t a regular family.
They were cartel. They had infrastructure, money, and a tradition of answering blood with blood that went back decades.
If LaLa broke her silence and told Rodrigo what happened, and I had to assume she did because fear keeps people quiet only until grief gets louder, then Rodrigo had everything he needed.
The motive was personal. The resources were unlimited.
And the execution was exactly what you’d expect from people who operated at that level, clean, professional, and designed to look like an accident.
Rodrigo wouldn’t have had the gate code himself.
But cartel operatives didn’t need gate codes.
They needed one person on the inside willing to provide access, and money had a way of finding that person.
I kept coming back to who that person might be and the list made me uncomfortable because every name on it was someone I’d sat across a table from.
I was going to find Rodrigo. After I got my answers about Quest. Despite the evidence I still believed he was alive. My brother was a fighter. Hell, Mehar was a fighter. They both survived hell and in my heart, I knew they were out there waiting for us to find them.
My phone buzzed. It was a text from Erika with a photo attached.
They were at Hershey Park. Dream was in the foreground on some kind of spinning ride, arms up, mouth wide open, chocolate smeared across her cheek.
She looked so alive and happy. This was what I had wanted for her.
This was something I didn’t have time to give her right now.
Her yellow t-shirt was wrinkled and her braids were wild and she was radiating joy at a frequency that made my eyes sting.
Behind her, leaning against a fence with her arms crossed and her face arranged into an expression of profound disinterest, was Storie.
Sunglasses on. Phone in hand. Looking at Hershey Park like it had personally insulted her intelligence.
She was surrounded by families having the time of their lives and she looked like she’d rather be literally anywhere else on the planet.
Erika’s caption: One of them is having the best day of her life. The other one told me Hershey Park is “mid.”
I stared at that photo for a long time. My girls.
Safe and fed and loved and annoyed and happy and bored in all the right ways.
Dream being Dream. Storie being Storie. Monica’s parents and sisters holding them together while their father was three hundred miles away trying to hold everything else together.
I wanted to be there. I wanted to be the one wiping chocolate off Dream’s face and arguing with Storie about why she should put the phone down and enjoy something for once.
I wanted to be a father and nothing else, just for one day, without the casino and the investigation and the missing brother and the sister on house arrest and the suspect list and the charter plane at five AM.
I typed back: Tell Dream I love her and she better bring me back some chocolate. Take Storie’s phone and force her on a rollercoaster. Have fun!
I put the phone face down on the desk and breathed. One breath. Two. Then I opened my laptop and pulled up the charter company’s flight plan for tomorrow.
A knock on the office door pulled me out of it.
“Mr. Banks?” One of the floor managers was standing in the doorway. “There’s a woman at the front asking to speak with you. Says her name is Kacey Williams.”
I hadn’t spoken to her since Quest’s last check-in with me about the monthly payments.
I didn’t have time for this right now. I had a five AM departure, a flight plan to review, and about four hours of sleep standing between me and a search mission.
But turning away a woman with two kids whose father was dead because of decisions my family made wasn’t something I was built to do.
“Send her back.”
She walked in looking different from the last time I’d seen her.
Not better or worse, just different. Her hair was pulled back, she had on jeans and a blouse, and there was something in her posture that was more deliberate than the exhausted, grieving woman who used to take Quest’s envelopes with shaking hands.
She looked like a woman who had made a decision about something.
“Hey Justice. I appreciate you seeing me. I know it’s late.”
“You’re good. Sit down. What’s going on?”
She sat across from me and folded her hands in her lap.
“I’ll get straight to it because I know you’re busy.
I’ve been grateful for everything y’all have done for me and the kids.
The money, the funeral, covering the house for those months.
Quest didn’t have to do any of that and neither do you.
But I’m not trying to live off handouts forever.
That’s not who I am. I’m not a lazy do-nothing bitch. I can cover my own.”
“Nobody thinks that, Kacey.”
“I know. But I think it. I’ve been sitting in that house collecting checks and feeling useless and my kids are watching me do it.
Kalani asked me last week why I don’t go to work like her friend’s mom and I didn’t have an answer.
I need to work, Justice. I need to do something.
Even if it’s just serving tables in one of the restaurants here. I’m not too proud for that.”
I respected that. I respected it more than she knew because I understood what it took to say those words to a family that had been writing you checks.
There was humility in it, but there was also steel.
She wasn’t begging. She was presenting herself as someone who was ready to move forward and asking for the opportunity to prove it.
“I can make that happen. Come to the office Monday morning and we’ll sit down and figure out the best fit. We’ve got openings in the restaurant and the hospitality side. We’ll find something that works with your schedule and the kids.”
“Thank you.” She exhaled and I could see the relief settle across her face. Then she paused. “I tried calling Quest a few times to talk to him about this first but he hasn’t been answering. Is he okay?”
“He’s out of commission for a little while. I’m handling things in his absence.”
“And Mehar? She doing alright? Getting close to having that baby, right?”
“She’s good,” I said. “They’re both good.”
Kacey nodded, smiled, stood up, thanked me again, and walked out of the office with her purse on her shoulder and her head held high like a woman who’d accomplished what she came to do. I lied about Quest and Mehar because the less people that knew, the better.
I locked the office, grabbed my keys, and headed for the parking garage. Manassas Regional, five AM. Bryce would be there. The charter would be fueled and ready. And tomorrow I was going to fly low over every island in the southern Caribbean until I found my brother or ran out of ocean.
Sleep wasn’t coming tonight. I already knew that.
But I set my alarm for three thirty anyway because a man who doesn’t try to sleep is a man who’s given up, and I wasn’t giving up on anything.
Not on Quest. Not on Mehar. Not on that baby who hadn’t been born yet and deserved a chance to meet a world that was messy and violent and complicated but also had people in it who would fly across an ocean to bring them home.
I got in my car and sat there in the dark garage for a minute.
The engine was off. The silence was heavy.
I thought about Monica and what she would say if she could see me right now, running a company and raising two girls and hunting for a saboteur and chartering search planes before dawn.
She’d probably say I was doing too much and not sleeping enough and that I needed to eat a real meal. And she’d be right about all of it.
I started the engine, drove home to an empty house, set my alarm, and lay in bed staring at the ceiling until the numbers on the clock stopped mattering and the only thing left was the morning.