She knows. She absolutely fucking knows.
I watched her collapse against her car in a dark parking lot after a man with a baseball cap said her father's name and smiled, and she told me she didn't know him.
People don't fall apart over strangers.
My phone is open to the photo I took from across the Backroads parking lot last week. Partial plate, four characters.
The truck's make is hard to pin in the dark, but it's older, domestic.
Ford or Chevy. The mud on the plate wasn't accidental—someone smeared it.
I run the partial through a public plate lookup site. Nothing useful. Too many matches without the full number.
I switch to the digital threat. The network dashboard loads, and I scroll through the last forty-eight hours of access logs.
The intruder probed again last night. While the whole club was at the reopening. While I was kissing Saylor goodnight and watching a truck follow her home.
Same pattern. Different IP. Bounced through proxies, clean entry, surgical access.
They pulled a directory listing of the club's financial records—dates, file names, folder structure. Mapping.
Whoever this is, they're building a blueprint. First the financials. Now the file structure, the folder names, the way everything connects.
Next they'll go for the content itself, and when they do, the club's entire operation will be sitting on a public forum for anyone with a badge or a grudge to pick apart.
I need help.
Not a sentence I say often. Not a sentence any prospect says without choking on it.
But the intruder is better than me at covering their tracks, and I know exactly one person in this club who might understand what I'm looking at.
* * *
Krypton's room is at the end of the north hallway, and the light under his door is still on at seven in the morning.
I knock twice. The door opens and Krypton is standing there in sweatpants and a Metallica shirt with solder burns on the sleeves, a cup of coffee in one grip, his room behind him looking like a RadioShack exploded.
Monitors stacked on monitors. Hard drives in a pile. A CB radio half-disassembled on his desk next to a police scanner running low static.
"Kid." He takes a sip of coffee and leans against the doorframe. "You look like shit."
"Didn't sleep." I hold up my laptop. "I need your eyes on something."
He steps aside and lets me in. I clear a space on his desk between a soldering iron and what looks like a dismantled security camera, and open the logs.
"Someone's been in our network." I pull up the access history, the IP traces, the proxy bounces. "Started eight days ago. Financial directory first. Now they're mapping file structures. Every entry is clean—no alerts triggered, no flags, no trace I can follow past the second proxy."
Krypton sets his coffee down and leans over the screen. His eyes move fast, scanning the data with the focus of a man who's been reading code since before I was born.
"These proxy chains." He taps the screen with a nicotine-stained finger. "Old school. TOR routing through residential IPs. I've seen this setup before."
I lean forward. "Where?"
He scratches his jaw. "Feds used to run their surveillance through similar chains back in the day. Doesn't mean it's a fed. Means whoever taught them learned from the same playbook."
He pulls up a chair and sits beside me. For the next two hours, we tear the intrusion apart layer by layer.
Krypton's knowledge is deep but dated. He knows hardware, radio frequencies, analog surveillance.