Page 55 of Gonzo's Grudge
Loud where it helps.
Quiet where it hurts.
Always calculated.
By noon we had a map on the vault table that would make a city clerk puke. Names. Arrows. Dollar amounts. Copies of checks with signatures that look like men trying to keep their lies straight. Waverly had a stack of denials from the county’s records office that read like admissions if you tilt your head the right way.
“Timeline,” I said.
Burn pointed. “Walsh starts seeing Darlene two years ago. Hampton Stanley gets wind a month later. He sets the hook—makes it look like favor, sits back, waits. When the time came to move Bishop out, Stanley backs Walsh’s appointment to district. Walsh pays it back with rulings. Meanwhile, Hampton Stanley opens three shell corporations. Money moves when floods hit, when pandemic grants land, when the state parks department sends improvement funds nobody expects to track. He pays his proxies. They pay him. He pays cops and clerks and whoever else needs to be warm enough to stop shivering.”
“Proof?” I asked.
“Enough to make Devyn drool,” Loco shared. “Not enough for a jury that wants to be lied to. Not yet. Nita is on it.”
I nodded, knowing what it took for Loco to call in a favor from his ex-girlfriend’s sister. “Then we keep going,” I said. “And we do it without IvaLeigh’s name anywhere near any of it.”
Waverly pinched the bridge of her nose and nodded. “Agreed.”
Shanks looked at me. “You gonna tell her dad what we have?”
“I told him enough,” I said, and tasted the burn of that night in his study when I put him on a wall and put a sentence on his life he’s going to hear again from different mouths. “He knows. He’ll act when he thinks he can save himself. That’s not the kind of help I need.”
Disciple leaned back. “So what do you need?”
“Proof that can’t be mopped up with money,” I said. “And time.”
Church ended and I exited the space to my room on the compound grounds. I looked down at my phone like I could will it to light.
It didn’t.
That evening I went back to the cabin and did the thing I least wanted to: nothing.
I cooked chicken because my hands needed to remain busy. I set a second plate because muscle memory is a bastard. I ate both because eating is a job.
When the sun was moving down for the night and closing out under the trees, I took the letter and a stamp and drove—not rode—to a post box three towns over. I put it in because some words need help getting where they’re going, and because I needed to do one thing today that looked like faith instead of strategy.
On the way back the sky went first purple then black, and my head filled with a reel of little things: her hair on my pillow, the way she laughed at bad jokes, the weight of her hand on my chest when the world tried to climb between us.
“Don’t be stupid,” I told the windshield, but I didn’t know which of us I meant.
At home I sat on the steps and watched the night. Somewhere in town, Hampton Stanley poured himself an expensive drink and told himself he owned the board. Somewhere else, Judge Walsh looked at a photograph he pretends doesn’t exist and wondered how many nights a man can wake up before his sins crash around him.
And somewhere in a house with green shutters, a woman lay in a bed that used to be hers and thought about a man she told to stop playing her like a piece. And that man was full of regrets even if he would do it all over again to rattle the right cages to save GJ.
I lit a cigarette and let the smoke scratch the part of me that never learned how to cry without breaking furniture.
“GJ,” I said to the dark. “We’re going to do this the way you asked. Clean. But I’m also going to do it fast.”
My phone stayed dark.
I’d said once that I’d burn Dreadnought to the ground to get my son free. I hadn’t planned on finding something in the ashes worth rebuilding. Now I had both: a war to win and a house to keep standing.
So I did what I do.
I sat still long enough to call it patience.
Then I went back to work.
