3. Sofia
SOFIA
It was four days into the job, and Callahan still ordered the same eggs every time, like consistency might rub off on the rest of us.
He slid into the booth across from me, badge nowhere in sight, coffee already going cold in front of him before I'd even sat down.
"You're late."
"I'm undercover, not omniscient. Traffic exists even for felons."
"Cute." He didn't smile, never did during debriefs, like the muscles for it had been reassigned to something more useful. "Talk to me."
I gave him the short version: the terminal, the manifest with dimensions that didn't match the paperwork, the supervisor who flinched every time Kuznetsov's name came up.
Callahan listened with his arms crossed, still in the way of a man who'd heard a hundred versions of this exact update and was waiting for the one that mattered.
"That's it? Four days in and you've got mismatched pallet dimensions and a nervous supervisor?"
"That's four days, Frank. I haven't even gotten a name on the guy running the crane yet."
"You've got ninety, total. Four of them just walked out the door on eggs and small talk."
"I'm aware of the math."
"Then be aware faster." He leaned in, voice dropping the way it did when the diner around us stopped mattering. "The DA wants names. He wants numbers, dates, a route we can verify. What he doesn't want is a coordinator with a good read on body language and nothing on paper."
"I need more time inside before I can wire anything that matters. Rush it and I blow the whole operation for a recording of some guy complaining about crane maintenance."
"You don't have more time. You have ninety days, and eighty-six of them are left." He sat back, some of the heat draining out of his face, replaced by something closer to tired. "I fought for this assignment, Reyes. I told them you were the best read I had on a room. Don't make me a liar."
"There's one more thing." He tapped the folder between us, the one with Maxim's face in it, the same grainy surveillance photo I'd had memorized for weeks now.
"Kuznetsov runs on charm. Half my informants over the years have gone soft the second a target started treating them like a person instead of an asset. Don't be one of them."
"I know how to do my job."
"I know you do. That's why I'm the one telling you, because I trust you enough to say it straight.
" He tapped the folder closed and slid it back across the table, out of sight before anyone at the counter could glance our way.
"You've got backup two blocks out if you need it, and Alvarez in your ear if you don't. Use both.
Don't be a hero for a case that already has your name on the conviction. "
"I'm not trying to be a hero."
"Everyone says that right before they try to be one.
" He stood, dropped a few bills on the table that didn't come close to covering either of our checks, and looked down at me with something almost like affection buried under all that procedure.
"Ninety days, Reyes. Try not to fall for the scenery. "
"The scenery is a shipping terminal, Frank. It's not exactly seductive."
"Neither was the last guy, and look how that turned out."
He left before I could ask what that meant, which was probably the point.
Nina was already in the passenger seat when I climbed into the car, drive-through bag balanced on her knees, radio turned low enough that dispatch stayed a murmur under the engine.
"You look like you just got lectured."
"I got lectured."
"Callahan?"
"Who else?"
She handed me a taco without asking if I wanted one, because she already knew I always did, and unwrapped her own with the focus of a surgeon.
"So how's the glamorous world of organized crime treating you? Made any Bratva friends yet?"
"I've made one supervisor who's terrified of me and one forklift that tried to kill me."
"Very on brand for your first week." She took a bite, chewed, pointed the rest of the taco at me like a gavel. "What about the boss? The one everyone keeps whispering about like he's got a body count."
My hand found the edge of the wrapper and worried at it instead of answering right away.
"He's fine."
"Fine like boring fine, or fine like you need to tell me something fine?"
"Fine like I've met him twice and both times a vehicle nearly killed me. Ask me again when I've had one normal conversation with the man."
"Uh huh." Nina studied me over her taco with the exact expression she used on suspects who were technically answering questions without actually answering them. "You're doing the thing."
"What thing?"
"The thing where you get very calm and very specific right before you're hiding something.
" She shrugged, apparently deciding to let it go for now, more mercy than I probably deserved.
"Fine. Keep your secrets. Just don't come crying to me when Callahan finds out you've got a crush on Chicago's scariest shipping executive before I do. "
"I don't have a crush. I have an assignment."
"Sure you do." She balled up her wrapper and tossed it at the bag with the ease of someone who had made that shot a thousand times. "For what it's worth, I hope he's ugly. Makes this whole thing easier for everyone."
He wasn't. I didn't say that part out loud.
"You'd tell me, right?" Nina asked, quieter now, some of the joking gone out of her voice. "If it got complicated. You wouldn't just sit on it until it blew up."
"I'd tell you."
"That's not actually an answer, but I'm choosing to believe you anyway." She started the car, glanced at me sideways at the next light. "Four years, Reyes. I know what your face does right before you lie to me, and you're not doing it right now, which honestly worries me more."
"Nothing's complicated. I met a guy who owns a shipping company. That's the whole story."
"Sure." She pulled back into traffic, done with the subject for now, though I could tell by the set of her jaw that she planned on returning to it later, probably with less mercy the second time.
The shipping office at Calumet was barely bigger than a closet, one window, two desks, and a space heater that worked when it felt like it. I had been in there twenty minutes trying to make sense of a manifest that didn't match the inventory count when the door opened without a knock.
"You've been frowning at that page for a while."
Maxim leaned in the doorway, jacket off, sleeves rolled to the forearm, looking like a man who owned the building because he did.
"The count's off. Container fourteen says three hundred units. The manifest says two eighty."
"Show me."
I turned the clipboard around. He crossed the room in three steps and read over my shoulder, close enough that I caught coffee and something clean underneath it, cedar maybe, nothing like the gas station brand he had worn on his shirt four days earlier.
"Someone miscounted the units. It's two hundred and eighty, not three hundred. Fix the discrepancy report before it goes upstairs, or accounting will flag the whole shipment for reconciliation."
"That easy."
"It is when you know what you're looking for. You caught it, which is more than most coordinators manage in their first month, let alone their first week."
I made the correction, aware of him still standing there with no obvious reason to stay now that the problem was solved.
"You always review discrepancy reports personally?"
"Not usually."
"Then why start now?"
"Would you believe curiosity?"
"About manifest math? Not even a little."
He pulled the second chair around and sat, which I had not invited and somehow did not mind, elbows on his knees, studying me the way he had the first night, like I was a problem he had not finished solving.
"Where'd you work before this?"
"Freight company in Ohio. It folded."
"That's the résumé answer. I asked where you worked."
I looked up at that, caught off guard by how precisely he had separated the two things.
"Does it matter?"
"Everything on this dock matters to me eventually. Most people give me the résumé version anyway. You're the first one who noticed I was asking for something else."
Careful, I told myself. Careful and interesting were not the same thing, and I was quickly forgetting which one this was.
"It was a good job. Boring, mostly. Trucks came in, trucks went out, nobody threw coffee on me."
"I'll consider that a professional improvement, then."
"Debatable."
He laughed, short and real, nothing like the practiced warmth I had watched him hand out to Denny and half the dock crew.
"You laugh like it surprises you every time," I said.
"It does. There's not much on this floor that manages it."
"I threw coffee on you and nearly got you fired by your own crew. I'd hope I've earned a laugh by now."
"You earned considerably more than that, Miss Reyes." He said it lightly, but something underneath it landed heavier than the words alone should have, and I decided not to chase it any further than I already had.
"Why domestic operations? Andrei runs the empire. You run trucks and containers."
"Because someone has to be good at something ordinary. Andrei handles headlines. I handle everything that actually has to work."
"That's very humble for a man who introduces himself by owning the building."
"I'm honest, not humble. There's a difference."
I answered his next question without meaning to, the kind of real answer I usually kept locked behind three practiced ones, and he listened to all of it without checking his phone, without glancing at the door, like there was nowhere else on that entire dock he would rather be.
I could not remember the last time a man had done that. Men who could have anyone usually did not bother learning who they already had in front of them.
Twenty minutes disappeared that way, container counts forgotten, questions trading back and forth until the discrepancy report sat untouched on the desk between us.
"There's a team dinner coming up." He said it casually, too casually, in a voice I was already learning had never once been casual about anything. "Foremen, a couple of the men I trust most. Nothing formal."
"Am I invited or informed?"
"Invited. You can say no."
Every instinct built over four years on the job told me to say no. A target who invited you to dinner was a target building leverage, and leverage went both directions once you let it in the door.
"When?"
"This weekend."
I opened my mouth to decline. What came out instead surprised us both.
"What should I wear?"
Something shifted in his face, the same flicker of surprise I had seen the first night, like he had not expected me to say yes any more than I had.
"Something you don't mind losing to spilled coffee," he said. "I hear it's a hazard around me."
"Duly noted."
He stood, paused at the door like he wanted to say something else, and then did not, which somehow felt more honest than anything he could have added.
"This weekend, Reyes."
He left, and I sat there a long moment, the discrepancy report forgotten, replaying every second of a conversation that should have taken four minutes and had somehow taken twenty.
Callahan's warning sat in the back of my mind, clear as the moment he had said it, and I was already, impossibly, starting to ignore it.
I picked up the clipboard, the corrected number staring back at me, and told myself the only thing that mattered about tonight was the shipment count. It was a lie, and not even a good one, the kind I would have caught in half a second out of anyone else's mouth.
Eighty-six days were left on Callahan's clock, and I had just spent twenty minutes of my first four days agreeing to have dinner with the man I was supposed to be building a case against.