Chapter 25 · The Red Line

The torch hit the door at 1:14 a.m.

I know the time because I was staring at my phone, thumb parked over Marcus's name, trying to decide if I hated him enough not to call.

The second cut came through the steel like warm butter. Sparks sprayed across the archive floor. The emergency lights went yellow, and all those gray shelving units turned the color of old teeth.

Ruiz came around the corner with a shotgun, and things got very simple after that.

Four of them. Ski masks, work gloves, no talking. Two held the door, two went straight past me to cage FC-9, where Caspian's forensic accounting lived in nine boxes of paper he thought nobody had ever pulled.

They didn't touch me. Didn't even look at me. That was the part that scared me.

Cops took forty minutes. By then Ruiz's guys had one kid cuffed face-down on the carpet and the other three gone through the loading dock on 58th.

The kid had paperwork in his jacket. A subpoena, signed, stamped, real.