Page 22 of Phoenix

Beck’s arm tightened around me slightly. “Looks like he was being careful. Too aware of his surroundings not to be up to some kinda shit.”

“Maybe he was waiting for someone to meet him,” I suggested.

Deviant shrugged. “Or was worried about being tailed.”

I grabbed my spreadsheet and highlighted two columns of numbers. One of the dates in the first set of numbers matched the videos Deviant showed us. “We already know these are when he’s making withdrawals and how much he’s taking out.”

Beck tapped the screen, right over the column before them. “And you already figured out these are betting odds of some kind.”

I clicked on the column to the right of the dates. “But what the hell do these numbers stand for?” Then I moved to the last column. “Or these?”

“Fuck if I know.” Deviant shook his head. “The weirdest part is that none of the places repeat. Different spots every time. Only thing they have in common is that all of them are within ten miles of Old Bridge.”

As I considered what he pointed out, an idea popped into my head. “What if that’s how they’re hiding it? They only take cash and move the location around all the time.”

Beck nodded. “A moving setup.”

“Make sense if they want to stay off our radar,” Deviant agreed.

“Different spots, different days, no digital record. Cash withdrawals only. No paper trail, no alerts,” Beck listed, rubbing his palm down his stubbly cheek. “It’s a solid plan. Nobody would even know they were on Iron Rogues’ turf unless you were following a guy like Paul and watching where he went.”

“And they were smart enough to keep the locations on the outskirts of town for the closest ones,” Deviant pointed out.

Beck let out a low whistle. “Sneaky sons of bitches.”

“And organized,” I added. “With how much money Paul’s burned through, this has to be bigger than some backroom poker game, right?”

Deviant nodded. “Agreed.”

“We gotta take them down,” Beck muttered, still watching the footage like he wanted to reach through the screen and drag Paul out of it by the throat.

I flipped back through the notebook, fingers brushing over worn paper as an idea niggled in the back of my brain. “We’ve got odds, dates, dollar amounts. But how does Paul know where to show up? What if the two columns I couldn’t figure out are some sort of code for that information?”

Beck quirked a brow. “You think so?”

“Maybe.” I flipped through the notebook pages full of dollar signs and numbers until I reached one that had jumped out at me when I was putting them into my spreadsheet. Tapping my finger against the paper, I muttered, “See this? I couldn’t figure out what the little dot was doing here when none of the others had one. I thought it was just a mistake. That Paul had dropped his pen or something when he was making this entry,”

Deviant leaned in so he could see too. “And now?”

“What if he skipped the dot on all the rest because it wasn’t necessary—he already knew what these numbers meant? But this time, he started to include it because he wasn’t paying attention.” I grabbed a blank piece of paper and wrote out the odd series of numbers, this time including a round dot and the letter “N” after the first one, adding a minus sign to the start of the second, and then putting another round dot and the letter “W” after it.

Deviant shook his head. “How the fuck didn’t I see that?”

“What’s the set of numbers for the date on the video we just watched?” Beck punched the digits into the map app on his phone as I rattled them off to him, formatting them like coordinates. After he hit the search button, the address for the gas station popped up on the screen. “You figured it out, baby.”

“Which means the column next to the dates are the military times without the colon,” Deviant added. “They match up, too.”

We checked a few more videos to test our theory, confirming that the times and locations where he went after withdrawing money from the ATM matched up with the numbers listed in his journal when converted to military time and longitude and latitude.

“This is it,” I whispered. “The notebook isn’t just a record of his bets—it’s how they pass along the info to show up at the right place at the right time. Who to talk to. Where to go.”

“The bastard is in a coma but left us a damn playbook,” Deviant muttered.

“One that screams organized crime,” Beck added.

Deviant shut his laptop. “Which means there’s someone at the top calling all the shots.”

“Exactly,” I agreed, adrenaline humming through my veins. “And now we have a way to trace it back to them.”

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