Chapter 6 - Calling the Phantoms
The phone rang three times before an answering machine clicked, followed by a dry, rasping voice that sounded like gravel grinding in a concrete mixer.
"Speak."
"Gunny," I said. "It's Marcus."
A heavy silence hung on the other end of the line. The sound of a lighter flicking open, followed by a long, slow exhale of tobacco smoke.
"Marcus," Thomas Miller said. His voice was forty years of salt, grease, and battlefield coordination. He had retired as a Master Gunnery Sergeant after twenty-six years in the Marine Corps, and now ran a private investigative logistics firm out of a nondescript office park twenty miles outside the city. "You're supposed to be planting tomatoes."
"I need eyes, Gunny," I said. "And I need paper that doesn't smell like city hall."
"Who's the target?"
"Julian Vance. And his nephew Dustin."
Miller didn't ask why. He didn't ask if I was okay. In our world, you didn't call the old network unless the wire had already been tripped.
"Give me forty minutes," Miller said. "Come to the warehouse on 9th Street. The back bay. Don't take your truck; take Eleanor's sedan. Kowalski's desk jockeys will have your plates flagged on the municipal traffic cams within twenty minutes."
"I'm already moving," I said.
Forty minutes later, I pulled Eleanor’s silver Camry into the alley behind an old plumbing supply warehouse on 9th. The overhead bay door rose two feet, just enough for the sedan to clear, then slammed shut behind me with a mechanical grind.
The interior of the warehouse was dark except for a circle of halogen work lights illuminating a long folding table covered in computer monitors, high-frequency radio scanners, and stacks of classified-grade file folders.
Three men stood around the table.
Thomas Miller was sixty-two, his skin weathered like old saddle leather, wearing a grease-stained mechanics jacket over a faded Marine Corps emblem.
Beside him stood Hector Cruz, thirty-four, who had lost his left eye in the Helmand Province and now made a very lucrative living retrieving encrypted hard drives that corporate executives thought they had deleted.
And sitting on an ammo crate, cleaning the bolt of an M4 rifle with a microfiber cloth, was David "Doc" Robinson, our old platoon corpsman, whose hands had sewn more bullet wounds shut than most trauma surgeons in Chicago.
Doc looked up and grinned, his teeth white against his dark skin. "Look at you, Top. Still wearing flannel like you're going to a barn dance."
"Good to see you, Doc," I said, shaking his hand with a firm, silent grip that said everything words couldn't.
Miller pointed a thick, calloused finger at the central monitor. "Julian Vance is dirtier than an oil pan, Marcus. We didn't even have to dig deep. Hector cracked his corporate staging servers twenty minutes ago."
Hector tapped a key, and a cascade of financial spreadsheets, construction permits, and wire-transfer logs filled the screen.
"Dustin isn't just an amateur fighter," Hector explained, zooming in on a set of offshore accounts registered in Belize. "Julian uses the Iron House MMA gym as an underground laundering hub for unregulated sports betting and private syndicate fights. Dustin was the enforcer who collected unpaid debts from local bookies. Three months ago, your daughter Evelyn found a ledger in Dustin's desk. She didn't know what it was, but she took photos of the account numbers on her phone because she thought he was hiding income from their joint tax returns."
The cold knot in my gut twisted tighter.
"That's why he beat her," I said, the words tasting like copper. "It wasn't just drunken rage. He realized she had the ledger."
"He went to her apartment looking for her phone," Miller said, nodding grimly. "When she wouldn't unlock the cloud drive, he threw her down the stairs. And Julian's corrupt city attorney was going to have you locked up tonight so Dustin could walk into that hospital room under the guise of an apologetic husband, retrieve the phone, and wipe the cloud before federal regulators pulled the audit."
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Doc Robinson set his rifle down on the crate with a quiet clatter.
"Well," Doc said softly. "Looks like we have a mission profile, Top."