Chapter 3 A Debt Paid in Blood

Sophie came out of the bedroom at first light, and the first thing she saw was Jackie's phone lying face-up on the table.

She read the message upside down. By the last word, her stomach had dropped.

"Who is Scofield?"

Jackie slid the phone into his pocket. He looked as if he had not moved all night. "Sit down."

"I'm done sitting when you tell me to. That message is about me. The girl escaped. Who wants to know why?"

He let out a slow breath. "Scofield Tyrone. He doesn't run one gang, Sophie. He sits above several of them. The men who own the club, the men who guard the docks, even my own boss, they all send him a share. His name is a door, and if you say it in the wrong room, every head turns." He turned the empty glass on the table. "In his world, every favor is a debt, and every debt is paid in blood. Nobody who owes him ever finishes paying."

Something cold moved at the edge of her mind. "Is he the name you wouldn't tell me last night?"

"Ask me again when Cynthia and Vine are home."

"That isn't an answer."

"No," he said. "It isn't."

She noticed that he had not said no, and the thought lodge with unrest in her chest. But the clock on the wall read 06:10 a.m, and every minute that ticked was a minute her friends were somewhere she couldn't see.

"Where are you going?"

"To the only man who might know where they are." He took his jacket from the chair. "Bolt the door. If it's me, I knock three times, then once."

"And if you don't come back?"

For a moment he looked almost amused, as if nobody had asked him that in years. "There's bread in the cupboard, and you leave by the roof."

Beto Salinas ran a freight yard near the port, and he sold information the way other men sold fruit. He did not look up when Jackie walked into the office. He was counting crates on a clipboard, and he kept counting until Jackie closed the door.

It was an ordinary morning in an ordinary yard, which was exactly what made the next few minutes so hard to listen to.

"I wondered how long it would take you."

"Two girls, taken from Ámbar last night. Seventeen. A silver jacket and long braids."

Beto's pen stopped. "It isn't a club, Jackie. It's a pipeline. Girls come in from the valley towns, they sit in a house in the hills for a few days, then they cross my yard in produce trucks bound for the coast. I've watched those trucks for six years. There are no inspections, no questions, and the paperwork is always perfect. Somebody has the inspectors on salary."

"When do the trucks move?"

"Sunday. Monday at the latest. After that they're nobody's daughters." He finally looked up, and his eyes were tired. "And there's more. Table nine was booked three weeks ago, paid in cash. Whoever booked it knew exactly which three girls were coming. The woman who runs the loading bay also snapped a photograph of your girl as she ran. It went up the chain before midnight."

Jackie said nothing. He did not need to ask whether the face in that picture would mean something to the man at the top. Sophie had her mother's jaw, and her mother's trick of narrowing her eyes just before she lied. He had seen that face before, years ago, on a wall in a hallway that no longer existed.

"Thank you, Beto."

"Don't thank me. Pay me when it's over."

He was halfway across the yard when he noticed the car. It was gray, parked nose-out beside a fence, and the driver's window was dark. It had not been there when he arrived. When Jackie turned toward the gate, its engine turned over.

He walked to his own car at a normal pace and drove at a normal pace, and he watched the gray sedan move onto the road a block behind him. He took the market route, left, right, left, then drove via a fountain twice and doubled back through an alley between a bakery and a supermarket. When he came out the other side, the gray car was gone.

Boring, he thought. Boring is hard to follow. But a man who had followed him all the way from the freight yard was not boring.

In the second before it vanished, he had seen a pale hand on the wheel and the collar of a polo shirt. He did not like that at all.

Victor Romano received visitors the way other men received the weather, from the back of a seafood restaurant, with a plate in front of him and a knife in his hand.

The place was closed, chairs upside down on the tables, and the smell of bleach and old fried fish hung over the empty room. Victor sat alone beside a tank of lazy gray fish, peeling an orange in one long, unbroken ribbon.

"Sit, sit. You look terrible."

"Long night."

"So I hear." Victor laid the peel on his plate like something he meant to keep. "Scofield's people are not happy, Jackie. One of his clubs lost a piece of inventory last night, and a man named Dario is in the hospital with his wrist hanging by a thread. Do you know whose name he said when he woke up?"

Jackie kept his hands loose on his knees. "He put his hands on a girl I was watching. I didn't like it."

"A girl you were watching." Victor split the orange and offered him half. Jackie shook his head. "Why would you be watching a girl? Huh?"

"She works the coat check at Ámbar. Your share from that club has been coming up short for a month, and I think she saw who was skimming. I was going to ask her quietly." Jackie shrugged as if the whole thing bored him. "When they grabbed her, I lost my temper. She's nobody, boss. Just a witness."

"A witness." Victor chewed slowly. His eyes were small and friendly and never left Jackie's face. "You know what's fragile? This." He waved his knife at the empty room, the tank, the upturned chairs. "Everything we have stands on Scofield's good mood. I let you work because you're careful, and last night wasn't careful. If you start a war with him over a coat-check girl, I won't be able to protect you, and I'll be sorry about it for almost an entire afternoon."

"It won't happen again."

"Bring her to me. I want to hear what she saw."

"She's terrified. She won't say a word in front of you. Give me a few days, and I'll get it out of her."

Victor smiled, and it was the smile that made grown men check their pockets. "Do you know what I admire about you, Jackie? You have never lied to me. That's why I'm confused, because this sounds exactly like a lie."

"It isn't."

"Of course not." He wiped the knife on a napkin. "Three days. After that I meet your witness, or I start asking questions of the people who love you. Your mother's hospital sends me a Christmas card every year, did you know? Such lovely handwriting."

Jackie stood. He did not let his face change, but the room felt colder when he left it.

Outside, the sun hit him like a slap, and he stood by his car until his hands stopped wanting to shake. Victor had given him three days. Victor had also, without once raising his voice, reminded him exactly where the strings were tied.

He was in the car, with the key in the ignition and his hands still not quite steady, when his phone buzzed.

It was a text from Beto, and it was short.

Change of plan. They're moving the girls tonight, not Sunday. Eleven o'clock, the produce depot on Ruta 4. Somebody's in a hurry.

Jackie stared at it for a long time. In ten hours, Cynthia and Vine would be gone for good, and the only person he trusted to help him stop it was a seventeen-year-old girl who thought he might have helped kill her parents.

He could go alone. He could tell himself that was kinder. But he thought of Sophie behind three locks with her chin lifted and her fists closed, and he knew exactly what she would say if he came back with the news after the trucks were gone. In a split seconds, he recalled he'd been followed after meeting Beto.

He started the engine and drove back toward the flat, and for once he did not check the mirror, because the only thing he could not afford to lose was ahead of him.