The man from the photograph was already there.
They spoke for less than two minutes.
Reyes handed over something small—a drive, maybe, or a folded piece of paper, I was too far to tell—and the other man pocketed it without looking at it. Then Reyes turned and walked back the way he’d come, and the other man pulled out a phone and typed something before disappearing in the opposite direction.
I stayed where I was until my heartbeat slowed enough that I trusted my own legs.
Then I walked back to my car, sat inside it without starting the engine, and thought through exactly what I was going to do next.
His name, I learned by the following morning, was Marco Vidal. Mid-thirties. No criminal record—which was the cleanest kind of criminal record. He worked nominally as a logistics consultant, which meant he worked for whoever paid him, and right now, whoever was paying him appeared to be Nico Calderon by way of Maverick Wiese’s broader operation.
I spread everything across my kitchen table. Timestamps. Photographs. The GPS data I’d reconstructed from our fleet maintenance logs had been overlooked because whoever had scrubbed the system had only targeted the delivery records, not the fuel and mileage logs. A small oversight. The kind a non-specialist might miss. I wasn’t a specialist in any of this, but I’d grown up watching my father run a logistics empire, and I understood how trucks moved even when I’d never intended to make that my life.
The destination that kept reappearing in the mileage patterns was an industrial district three miles north of where Maverick’s campaign offices were based. I’d driven past it once, out of sheer stubbornness, and noted the units—storage facilities, most of them, the kind that didn’t ask questions about what you loaded in and out at night.
The next morning, I waited until Reyes’s shift ended and intercepted him at his locker with the photograph already open on my phone.The locker room smelled like industrial soap and old sweat. He was working the combination when I came in—still in his uniform, badge clipped to his chest. I waited until the door swung open before I said anything.
“Got a minute?”
He turned. Clocked me with the phone already in my hand, and something behind his eyes went very still.
“I’m off the clock.”
“I know.” I held the phone up so he could see the photograph. “This won’t take long.”
He stared at the screen for a moment, then turned back to his locker and pulled out his jacket slowly, like if he moved carefully enough, I might disappear.
“I don’t know what that is.”
“Sure you do.”
He didn’t answer. I leaned against the adjacent locker, arms loose at my sides, and waited. My father had taught me that, without meaning to: You didn’t need to raise your voice all the time. Stay silent long enough, and they’d crack.
Reyes held out for a while. Maybe eight minutes. Maybe nine. Then he sat down on the bench and put his elbows on his knees.
“The trucks come in on Thursdays,” he said finally. “Sometimes Saturdays, if the schedule shifts. Two in the morning, usually. After the cameras on the east dock go into maintenance mode.”
“Where do they go?”
“Warehouse off Route 9. Out past the grain elevators—the one with the blue corrugated roof.” He exhaled. “Different men every time. Four of them, sometimes five. They never talked to us directly. That went through Vidal.”
“Marco Vidal?”
“He was Nico’s guy. All the coordination, the loading times, the contact numbers—that was Marco.”
“And the crates?”
Reyes rubbed the back of his neck. “We weren’t there when they inventoried them; they’d send us on break, or just tell us to work the other end of the dock. Nobody asked questions.”
“But you knew.”
He looked at his hands. A long moment passed. Outside somewhere, a door banged shut, and we both heard it, but neither of us moved.
“Yeah,” he said. “I knew.”
I straightened up and pocketed my phone. “Next forty-eight hours, you stay out of it. You don’t make calls, you don’t talk to Vidal, and you don’t do anything except show up and act normal. If I need you, I’ll call. You answer.”
He looked up at me then. It was obvious he didn’t trust me, but at this point, he didn’t have many options left.