The Unkillable Warlord

Ledger of Lies

"You want to explain the face you made just now," Dom said, "or should I guess?"

Grant sat at the kitchen table, staring at a stack of invoices like they'd personally wronged him. "What face?"

"The one where you look like you're about to do something insane." Dom dropped into the chair across from him, still in his work boots. "You made Dad tell Kessler we don't need thirty days. We need thirty days, Grant. We need sixty."

"We need this." Grant slid an invoice across the table. "Look at the shipping manifests from the last three months. Every load we've lost, every contract that mysteriously fell through. All of it routes back through the same three companies."

Dom squinted at it. "So?"

"So all three are shells. Same filing address, six months apart, same registered agent." Grant tapped the paper. "Somebody's been strangling us on purpose, and Marchetti didn't need to lend us a dime to do it. He just needed us desperate enough to take the loan when he offered it."

Piper leaned into the doorway, textbook under her arm, hair still damp from a shower she probably hadn't had time to finish. "Wait, you're saying he set the trap and then handed us the bait?"

"I'm saying he's smarter than a guy who just breaks kneecaps for a living," Grant said. "Which means we can't beat him by being tougher. We beat him by being smarter."

"And how exactly do we do that," Dom said, "when we've got six thousand dollars and a warehouse that's two-thirds empty?"

Grant didn't answer right away. He was looking at the manifests again, but he wasn't really seeing them. He was seeing a war room from another life, a table covered in maps instead of invoices, a version of himself who'd learned that the smallest crack in an enemy's wall was worth more than a thousand soldiers.

"We find the crack," he said finally.

"Real specific," Dom said. "Real helpful."

"Kessler," Piper said slowly. "He's not Marchetti. He's just the guy Marchetti sends to do the talking."

Grant looked up at her.

"Guys like that," Piper went on, "they always resent the guy at the top a little. You said it yourself, he showed up with muscle for a job that shouldn't need it. Maybe he's compensating. Maybe he wants to be more than the guy who reads names off a folder."

"That's not a plan," Dom said. "That's a hunch about a debt collector's ego."

"Every plan starts as a hunch," Grant said. "The trick is testing it before you bet the whole family on it."

"And how do you test a hunch about a guy like Kessler?"

"You give him a reason to talk," Grant said. "Men who feel small don't need much of one."

"It's a start," Grant said, and meant it. He hadn't expected the crack to come from his sister's college textbooks, but a good general took intelligence wherever it showed up. "We find out who Kessler really works for. Not the name on the folder. The actual chain of command."

"And how do we find that out?"

Grant's phone buzzed on the table. Unknown number. He answered before he'd decided to.

"Calloway."

Silence on the line for a second. Then a voice, low, careful, like the person on the other end had checked twice that no one was listening.

"You made Kessler look stupid in front of his own guys today," the voice said. "That's either the bravest thing I've seen in a year, or the dumbest."

"Who is this?"

"Somebody who used to work Marchetti's books," the voice said. "Somebody who wants out. You want to know how deep this goes, Mr. Calloway, meet me tonight. Alone."

Grant glanced up. Dom and Piper were both staring at him, reading his face like a headline.

"Why would you help us?" Grant asked.

The voice laughed, short and humorless.

"Because your family's not the first one he's done this to," it said. "You're just the first one who fought back the same day."

The line went dead.

Grant sat there a second, phone still warm in his hand, running through everything the voice hadn't said as carefully as everything it had. No name. No number that would trace anywhere useful. A person who'd clearly done this kind of call before and knew exactly how much to withhold.

That told him almost as much as what she'd actually said.

"You're going to meet her," Piper said. It wasn't a question.

"Yeah," Grant said.

"Alone, in a diner, at night, with a stranger who works for the man threatening our family."

"When you say it like that it sounds worse."

"It sounds accurate," Piper said.

Dom leaned forward. "Well? Who was that?"

Grant set the phone down slowly.

"Someone who knows exactly how deep this goes," he said. "And I think we just got our first crack."

"Grant." Piper's voice was quiet now, all the earlier teasing gone out of it. "What if it's a trap? What if Marchetti's people sent that call themselves, to see if you're stupid enough to walk into an empty parking lot alone?"

"Then I'll find out fast," Grant said.

"That's not comforting."

"It's not supposed to be comforting," Grant said. "It's supposed to be honest. I'd rather know what we're dealing with tonight than guess about it for another week while the clock runs out."

Dom shook his head, but there was something under the worry that looked almost like pride. "You're going alone?"

"I'm going careful," Grant said. "There's a difference."

He was already reaching for his jacket.