Page 46 of Riggs
“Rae,” I say, “flag every traffic cam on the alley’s outbound route. Look for white vans with low left rear. Jaxson, feed me plates off the corridor to the ramp. Hayes, the tape.”
“Tape’s cheap craft brand,”Hayes says, bored. “Same glue signature as our last notes. Post-it’s generic—office supply chain, store number on the stamp is local. You’re in Austin; half the world shops there. I’ll try to narrow.”
“Lina,” I say, finding her in the doorway, face pale, eyes wet. I soften in the half-second it takes to pivot. “You okay?”
She nods too fast. “She dropped her bracelet,” she whispers. “Like…on purpose.”
“She did,” I say. “That’s a map. We’ll follow it.” It steadies her. It steadies me.
My phone vibrates. Dean. His voice is loud in my ear.“Talk.”
“Kellan pulled her with Brice’s help,” I say, low and clean. “White van. We’re sixty seconds behind. I’ve got beads and blood in the alley and a manager who taped his cameras because the client saidprivacy.”
“Media?” he asks.
“Not yet,” I say. “We keep this off the grid. We push decoys—Vanessa stepped out, ‘be right back’—we let Turner run quiet and keep the tabloids hungry but empty.” I look at Brice, who hears all of this and starts to stammer a question about statements. “We don’t give Kellan the stage he wants. We put him in a room without lights.”
“Do it,” Dean says. “You have point. I’ll sit on the brand and tell them they’ll tank the IPO of their own souls if they leak. Turner’s en route to you. He’s in plainclothes with no marked cars.”
“Lalo?” I call.
“I’m circling,” Lalo says into comms. “White van with a left sag took the frontage road toward the loop. We lost visual when he threaded two trucks, but I’ve got a construction cam that might’ve caught a plate. Sending to Jax.”
“Rae, ghost the feeds,” I add. “Freeze every account that could turn this into content. Delay our scheduled posts, spin up noise—old footage, out-of-order reels—anything that keeps the wolves running in circles.”
“Already lifting audio from three weeks ago and calling it a sneak peek,she says.Brands think it’s brilliant. God help us.”
Brice makes a sound like he’s drowning. “Is—shouldn’t we—like—make a statement? People saw her go back. People?—”
“Brice.” I put a hand on his shoulder, weight just shy of a push. “Shut up. If you leak, if you ‘clarify,’ if you even breathe in the direction of a DM, I will assume you’re still working with him and I will freeze you out so hard you’ll be begging a ring light for warmth.” I soften nothing. “You are done. Right now, you’re only useful as a pipeline. Be one.”
He nods, tears standing. I don’t have time for his redemption arc.
I go back into the stall. The mirror doubles me. On the floor: more turquoise beads, a single broken heel tip—hers. She’s writing in the language I taught her. I bag the heel, pocket twobeads for luck, and catch a faint smear on the curtain edge, rust-dark already oxidizing. Shoulder-height. She fought. Good.
Jaxson: Plate off a construction cam: 8KZ-1—no last two. Van’s got a sticker on the bumper of a local church—Our Lady of Something with a wildcat mascot in the school seal. There’s a water tower with the same cat on your outbound corridor. If I were a narcissist with a Catholic hangover, I’d keep the rosary and drive past my favorite picture of myself.
“Give me a grid around that tower,” I say, already moving. “Outbuildings, warehouses, yards full of junk.”
“On it,” Rae says.
Lalo swings the SUV around. I slide into the back. Lina scrubs her face and moves to come with me. I catch her shoulder. “No,” I say, not unkind. “You stay with the team and keep them from doing something stupid. You’ll see her again. That’s an order.”
She nods and I see her straighten because orders are a relief when the room tilts.
We roll. Austin splits open. Lalo threads the lanes like a letter opener. I keep my eyes on the edges, the places where men like Kellan think they can be small. We take the frontage road. We hit the ramp seam, and the SUV bumps twice.
“Riggs,” Rae says, voice low. “I’ve got a white van on a warehouse strip near a tire place called DOLLAR TIRE and a Latino grocery with a mural of a longhorn. Van pulls into a yard with a turquoise door. Camera loses it after that, but the grid’s tight. Sending you a pin.”
“Copy.” I point. Lalo turns. The warehouse strip turns the air from music to tin. Gravel crunches under us. I can smell old oil and summer heat.
“Turner’s two minutes out,” Dean says in my ear. “No lights. He’ll let you play point until he says otherwise. Keep it off the radio. Stevens wants sirens.”
Brice texts me a paragraph of him trying to be useful. I silence him. Jaxson slides in a shot of a rosary air freshener from a bodega two miles from here—security cam with time stamp. “He bought the rosary five days ago,” Jax says. “Cash. Clerk remembers him because he asked her if ‘she believed in signs.’”
“Men like this always do,” I say.
We idle a block from the pin. The turquoise door is two down, paint sunburned to chalk. A chain-link fence sags like a tired sigh. The yard holds three cars in various states of regret and a boat that will never see water again. The van isn’t visible, but a tire track fresh in dust points to the far corner where a roll-up is half-shut like a lazy eyelid.
