Page 6 of Jax
“You’re not complicit,” he said. “You’re a target. And soon, if you’re willing, you could testify and help us bring these fuckers to justice.”
I stared ahead, voice barely audible. “I’m not a witness.”
His jaw tightened, then eased. “You are now.”
I didn’t notice the downtown skyline growing ahead of us until we were almost in the middle of it, glass monoliths rising all around us, hemming me in like a different kind of blindfold. Block by block, the world pressed in tighter, and my pulse got louder. This wasn’t the direction of safety. This wasn’t what protection was supposed to feel like.
“Where are we going?” I asked, voice raw from silence and panic.
Detective Mercado’s hands stayed steady on the wheel. “The KCPD Annex building,” he said at last—flat, unreadable.
The word landed hard. It should’ve meant structure. Relief. But instead, it pulled something tight inside me until it snapped.
“The Annex?”
He nodded once, eyes on the road. “Yes. It’s where we handle economic crimes, among other things. It’s quieter than the main station. Secure. You’ll be safe there. We need to document what happened. Get ahead of it before the wrong people do.”
My laugh was small, humorless. “The wrong people already have me.”
We turned down a narrow street bordered by chain-link fences and alleyways swallowed in shadow. The city’s pulse didn’t reach here. There were no pedestrians. No shops. No sound but the whisper of tires over cracked pavement, and the occasional flicker of a streetlamp humming to life.
The building we pulled up to wasn’t marked, not in any way that counted. It was just a slab of brown bricks with narrow, tinted windows and a side door protected by a keycard entry. No signage I could see. No flags. No indication that anything good happened inside.
He parked in the back lot and shut off the engine. “This way.”
I stepped out and immediately felt the chill. It wasn’t the weather, it was the stillness. The way even the wind seemed reluctant to touch this place. The kind of quiet that lived under the skin.
He held the door open for me after swiping a badge I couldn’t see clearly. I walked past him, my entire body clenched against the unknown.
Inside, the air was sterile. Not clean, just scraped of anything familiar. It smelled like metal, tired fluorescent bulbs, and bureaucracy. There was no front desk. No chatter. Just a long, dim hallway lined with closed doors and too many questions.
Detective Mercado walked ahead of me without looking back, and I followed because that’s what people like me did. People who didn’t have a plan. People who’d run out of fight. People who’d learned the hard way that sometimes the villain didn’t announce himself with a gun, but with silence, stillness, and a clipboard full of decisions you didn’t get a say in.
He opened a door halfway down the hall and gestured inside. The room was small. Windowless. Two chairs, one table. One wall was covered by a mirror that likely hid another room onthe other side. I’d seen detective shows, I knew an interrogation room when I saw one.
I stepped inside slowly, like the floor might give out. The walls pressed in close. The air was too still, the hum of electricity too loud in the absence of anything else. I sat down in the nearest chair, because standing any longer made my knees feel like glass.
The detective shut the door behind us and dropped into the chair across from me. He didn’t speak right away. He didn’t touch anything. Just folded his hands in front of him and studied me like I was a witness or a weapon, or maybe both.
“This is being recorded,” he said. “But it’s secure. You can talk here. No one else will hear this except for the Chief, and we can trust him.”
I stared at the tabletop. It had a long scratch running through the center, like someone had once tried to claw their way out. I cleared my throat, swallowed, and tried to hold what was left of my voice together.
“I don’t know what they want beyond my art studio.” I said, voice low and tight. “They didn’t ask questions. They didn’t need answers. They just told me what I was going to do.”
“Start from the beginning and tell me everything. Even the things you already mentioned in the car, so it’s all on record,” Quinn said.
So I did.
I told him everything. Every horrific detail. When I was finished, I felt sick to my stomach.
He didn’t interrupt. Not once. He let me pour it all out like blood into a basin, like a confession. When I finished, I was cold all over. Hollow. Like speaking the truth had cost something I hadn’t figured out yet.
He nodded once. Not disbelief. Not pity. Just confirmation.
“Like I said in the car, we’ve been tracking the company they wanted you to sign your business over to. It’s part of a network we believe is laundering more than just money. You’re not the first to be targeted. You’re just the first we found in time.”
I closed my eyes. That didn’t feel like a victory. It felt like I’d been left to drown and only now realized there were cameras recording it.
