Locked In

Reem kept the brown paper bag tucked flat against his ribs and walked like it held nothing but a sandwich.

Hollow had been clear about that part.

“No fast feet. No looking over your shoulder. You ain’t carrying trouble unless you act like trouble.”

So Reem moved at the pace of everybody else on Mercer at four in the afternoon—past the check-cashing place with the tinted door, past Mrs. Wilkes hosing cigarette butts off her stoop, past the bus bench where a man in a Phillies cap slept sitting up. The bag was folded twice and stapled shut. Light. Too light for all the attention it seemed to pull out of the air.

He crossed on the hand even though nobody else did. On the opposite corner a patrol car idled beside a dented Altima, blue stripes bright in the sun, one cop leaning in the driver’s window while the other wrote on a pad balanced over his forearm. Reem felt sweat break under his shirt.

Don’t change your face, he told himself.

A siren barked somewhere else. A little kid chased a foam ball into the gutter. Reem kept walking.

The barber shop was half underground, three concrete steps down from the sidewalk, the red-white-blue pole outside stuck forever and never spinning. Men sat inside under capes, waiting their turns in heat and talc and clipper oil. Hollow had said, You give the bag to Slim in the back chair. He’ll ask if the Eagles still sorry. You say they born sorry.

That was the whole thing. Simple.

Simple didn’t mean easy.

Reem opened the door and got hit with aftershave and hot metal. A radio near the register crackled through an R&B song. Slim was where Hollow said he’d be, back chair, long neck, faded beard, barber lining him up with one hand and holding his jaw still with the other. Slim’s eyes met Reem in the mirror and slid away.

Reem stood by the magazine rack. His heart knocked once, hard.

Slim said, “Them Eagles still sorry?”

The barber didn’t blink.

Reem lifted one shoulder. “Born sorry.”

Slim grinned around the barber’s fingers. “That so?”

Reem set the bag on the scarred counter between a jar of blue comb disinfectant and a stack of old Source magazines. Nobody looked at it. That was the trick he was starting to understand. On Mercer, the loudest lie was pretending not to see what sat in plain sight.

He turned to go.

“Yo,” Slim said.

Reem stopped.

Slim reached into the pocket of his cape, came up with a folded bill, and tucked it between two fingers. “For your trouble.”

It was a twenty.

Reem took it without counting. “Appreciate you.”

Outside, the afternoon felt brighter, almost cheap. He got halfway down the block before he let himself breathe. Twenty from Slim on top of whatever Hollow gave him. For a walk. For carrying a paper bag ten minutes from one corner to the next.

At fifteen, Reem already knew money was not really for work. Not the kind his mother did, home with wrists swollen from scrubbing other people’s dishes and bathroom tile until chemicals roughed her knuckles pale. Money was for whoever stood closest to it and didn’t flinch.

He cut through the alley behind the church lot and headed back.

Hollow was where he usually was, posted outside the bodega with one foot up on the milk crate, talking low with two older boys Reem didn’t know. They wore clean white tees and looked bored in the hard way grown men did. Hollow glanced over before Reem even reached the curb.

“Well?”

Reem handed over nothing because there was nothing to hand over. That had bothered him the first few times, returning empty. No package, no proof. Just your word. Hollow liked making a person understand how little weight their word had unless he gave it weight.

“Done,” Reem said.

Hollow stared another beat too long, then nodded. “You ain’t run.”

“Nobody was chasing me.”

One side of Hollow’s mouth moved. Maybe a smile. Maybe not. He reached into his jeans and peeled off two tens and a five. “Keep moving like that.”

Reem took the money. “That it?”

“For today.”

The older boys looked at him different then. Not like a kid hanging around. More like a tool somebody had tested and decided to keep.

Hollow stepped close enough for Reem to smell peppermint and cigarette smoke. “Listen to me. Little trips turn into bigger trips. Bigger trips turn into people eating because of you. You start eating too. But if I ever hear you opening your mouth where it don’t belong, you won’t have one no more. We understand each other?”

Reem nodded.

“Nah.” Hollow tapped his cheek, not hard. “Use your voice.”

“Yeah,” Reem said. “We understand.”

Hollow leaned back. “Good. Go be young somewhere.”

Reem walked off before his face could give anything away.

By the time he got home, the fear had thinned into something else. Not pride exactly. Something slicker. He counted the money in the kitchen while the grease popped under his mother’s chicken in the pan. Forty-five dollars looked bigger spread on the table than it had in his hand.

His little sister Nia came in hopping on one foot, the sole of one sneaker clapping open and shut where it was split. “Mama said don’t touch the hot sauce.”

“I didn’t.”

“You lying already.”

Reem palmed the cash when his mother turned from the stove. Janice Jackson took one look at him and held out her hand. “What happened?”

He almost laughed. She could smell anything.

“Nothing happened.”

“Then why you standing there like police in the hallway?”

Nia snorted.

Reem set thirty on the table. “I made some money.”

His mother looked at the bills, then at him. Her face didn’t do much. That was her way. “Doing what?”

“Helping out.”

“With who?”

“Around.”

“Reem.”

He hated when his name sounded tired before the whole conversation even started. “Just little stuff. Deliveries.”

“Delivering what?”

“Food. Boxes. I don’t know. Stuff.”

Nia reached for one of the tens. Reem slapped her hand away without looking, and his mother’s eyes sharpened at that.

“You don’t know,” she said.

“It’s not like that.”

She turned the burner down and wiped her hands on a dish towel gone thin at the middle. “Then tell it straight.”

He could have. He could have said Hollow’s name and watched what it did to the room. The walls in their apartment carried enough names already. Men who had called here once and stopped. Cousins who went away. Neighbors who got memorial T-shirts before they got old. Hollow would not land different.

Instead Reem shrugged and made himself sound insulted. “I bring home money and that’s a problem too?”

Janice stared at him long enough for the pan to hiss. Then she slid the cash back across the table with two fingers. “If you can’t say where it came from, I don’t want it for rent.”

Nia stopped smiling.

Reem looked at the money. “So what, we too good now?”

“That ain’t what I said.”

“It’s money.”

“It’s quiet money.” She turned back to the stove. “Quiet money always makes noise later.”

He left before the smell of frying chicken could turn his stomach against him. In the hall he heard Nia ask, “Can I still get the pink notebook for school?” and his mother answer too softly to catch.

He went up to the roof with the forty-five in his pocket and his composition book under his arm.

The roof tar was soft in the heat. Somebody had dragged a busted lawn chair up there months ago and left it. Reem sat on an overturned bucket instead, knees up, notebook open. From that height Mercer looked almost manageable. Bricks, antennas, laundry lines. A city reduced to surfaces.

He wrote three bars, crossed them out, wrote four more.

A hook came to him on the beat of a distant train and the slap of somebody arguing in the alley below.

Can’t live broke with the rent due first
Whole block preach pain but the verse too cursed
Corner got a hand out, saying take this work
And the dream got a throat, saying make me heard

He stopped there and read it back under his breath.

That was the thing he didn’t tell anybody, not even the boys. He didn’t just like rapping. He wanted it in the large way, the hungry way, the way some people wanted out of prison before they’d even gone in. He wanted his voice over a crowd. Wanted his mother in a better kitchen under brighter lights. Wanted his name to reach streets he’d never stepped on.

And until that happened, cash was cash.

A bottle shattered somewhere below. Reem looked over the edge and saw Malcolm in the lot with Dee, both of them circling each other in mock-boxing stances, shirts off, laughing hard. Isaiah sat on the curb with a backpack between his feet, watching like he was there and not there at once. Luis stood by the fence, one hand tucked in his apron pocket from the grocery, just off shift.

Malcolm looked up first. “Yo! Rapper! You dead?”

Reem shut the notebook and headed down.

By sixteen, they didn’t fit together as clean as they had. You could feel seams where there hadn’t been seams before.

Malcolm had put on muscle from football and from liking the feeling of not getting pushed. He talked now about recruiters and the Marines in the same breath, as if both were only different uniforms for leaving. Dee worked part-time at his uncle’s car wash and always smelled faintly of Armor All, hairline sharp, jokes sharper. Luis had a tiredness on him that came from early shifts and late buses and helping his mother count tips from the diner. Isaiah carried test-prep books thick as bricks and said things like financial aid and application fee waiver with a straight face.

And Reem, without saying it aloud, had started belonging to the corner in pieces.

“Where you been?” Dee asked when Reem hopped the fence.

“Out.”

“That answer nasty,” Malcolm said. “Means money involved.”

Reem smiled despite himself.

Luis saw it. “There is money involved.”

Isaiah didn’t ask. He just watched Reem’s pocket the way a mechanic listens to an engine.

They played two-on-two until the light changed, shirts dark with sweat, the backboard kicking the ball off crooked every other shot. Dee argued every foul like he had a lawyer in his chest. Malcolm banged in the paint and laughed when Luis cursed in Spanish at his elbows. Reem hit three jumpers in a row and felt loose for the first time all day.

On a break, Isaiah took a bottle of warm orange soda from his bag and passed it over. “You finish the history paper?”

Reem wiped his mouth with his wrist. “Due Friday.”

“It is Friday.”

“Then I’ll finish it by the end of Friday.”

Dee barked a laugh. “That’s leadership.”

Isaiah looked at him. “You trying to graduate or not?”

“Everybody so dramatic.”

“Everybody ain’t missing class twice a week.”

Malcolm bounced the ball hard once. “Leave him.”

“No,” Isaiah said, still looking at Reem. “Because one day ‘leave him’ turn into everybody acting surprised.”

The lot quieted a little.

Reem hated that Isaiah could do that without raising his voice. Make everybody hear something aimed at one person.

“It ain’t your business where I’m at,” Reem said.

“It is when you make us all stand in church one day acting like we ain’t see it coming.”

Dee muttered, “Damn.”

Malcolm stepped between them, not dramatic, just there. “Enough.”

Reem stared at Isaiah. “You think you know everything because you got books.”

“I think I know Hollow don’t hand out opportunity.”

Luis looked down at his sneakers.

That was answer enough. They all knew.

Reem palmed the ball and spun it against his hip. He could have lied. Could have said he was bagging groceries, running for the Chinese store, doing whatever respectable thing sounded thin enough to pass. But there was something in him that didn’t want to duck.

“It’s temporary,” he said. “I’m stacking till I can get what I need.”

“For what?” Isaiah asked.

Reem almost said nothing. Then he heard himself tell the truth. “Studio time. Equipment. Whatever come first.”

Dee lifted his eyebrows. Malcolm looked interested. Luis looked worried. Isaiah’s face didn’t change.

“So you gone fund your music with Hollow,” Isaiah said.

“Don’t say it like that.”

“How should I say it?”

“Like I’m not stupid.”

Isaiah picked up his bag. “Stupid got nothing to do with it.”

He walked off before Reem could answer. Malcolm watched him go, then bounced the ball to Reem. “Game to eleven?”

That was Malcolm’s gift. He knew when not to fix a thing.

Later that week Hollow sent Reem farther.

Not Mercer to the barber shop. Not neighborhood to neighborhood. Far enough for two buses and a stretch on foot through blocks Reem didn’t know, carrying a shoebox with a pair of new white high-tops inside and something taped under the insole. Hollow had shown him that part himself, peeling one shoe back and tapping the package like a teacher pointing at the right answer.

“You get stopped, you a kid delivering sneakers to your cousin. You don’t volunteer. You don’t joke. If somebody try to rob you, give ’em the box and walk away. I’m not losing product over your pride.”

“What if they keep me too?”

Hollow looked at him. “Then I guessed wrong about you.”

Reem rode the bus with the box on his lap, eyes on the dirty floor ridges. At every stop he expected a hand on his shoulder. He got an old woman with six grocery bags, a teenager rapping under his breath into busted headphones, and a baby with a runny nose staring at him from a stroller. The city always looked most harmless right before it proved it wasn’t.

The handoff happened in the parking lot of a tire shop behind a chain-link fence lined with faded pennants. A woman in red scrubs took the box without speaking, opened the lid just enough to check, then handed Reem an envelope so thin it scared him. Thin meant bills big enough not to need thickness.

“You Hollow’s boy?” she asked.

Reem said, “I’m me.”

She gave him a small look, half respect, half warning. “Stay that way if you can.”

On the ride back, he opened the envelope in the cracked plastic seat with his body turned to block the aisle. Inside were ten hundreds.

His mouth went dry.

He shut it fast, then opened it again to make sure he hadn’t imagined the count. Ten. Real. Blue security strip and Franklin’s face looking patient as ever.

That money was not his. He knew that with every part of him. But it passed through his hands, and that changed something anyway. Made other numbers feel possible. A microphone. A used keyboard. Real studio hours instead of banging on cafeteria tables and memorizing beats from the radio.

When he got off on Mercer, Hollow was waiting under the awning though no rain had come.

Reem handed him the envelope.

Hollow thumbed through without shame. He never hid counting. Counting was one of the ways men like him reminded you what the world ran on.

“Any trouble?”

“No.”

“You open it?”

Reem said nothing.

Hollow smiled then, the smile he used when he already knew the answer. “How much was in there?”

Reem looked him right in the eye. “Didn’t count.”

A beat.

Then Hollow laughed, low and pleased, like he’d heard a clean joke. He folded the envelope, tucked it away, and reached into his jacket pocket. “Good.”

He put a roll of bills in Reem’s hand.

Not folded money. A roll. Thick enough to press against Reem’s palm like a live thing.

Reem stared.

Hollow closed his fingers over it. “Don’t do that out here.”

“How much?”

“Enough for you to shut up and go home.”

Reem slid the roll into his pocket and felt his pulse hit it there. “This for one trip?”

“This for being useful.” Hollow’s face went flat again. “And useful boys stay in school. I don’t need you dumb and visible. You hear me?”

Reem nodded.

“Say it.”

“I hear you.”

“Good.” Hollow looked past him down Mercer, where kids were drawing chalk lines on the sidewalk and somebody’s auntie was yelling for them to come get plates before the food got cold. “Corner pays first,” he said. “That’s why people worship it. But it don’t pay last. Remember that.”

Reem should have carried the warning home with the money. He knew that later. Right then all he felt was the weight in his pocket and the impossible arithmetic starting up in his head.

He didn’t go straight home. He went to the electronics shop on Ridge, the one with speakers stacked in the window and used gear behind glass. He stood there while the owner argued with a customer about a blown fuse and looked at a drum machine with two missing pads, a cheap microphone, and a four-track recorder with a scratched faceplate. He asked prices like he was just curious.

The owner eyed his school ID still hanging from his neck. “You buying or wishing?”

“Both,” Reem said.

The man snorted. “That’s how it start.”

Reem left before he could spend a dollar on the wrong thing. Outside he ducked into the vestibule of a closed dentist office and counted the roll.

Three hundred and fifty.

For a minute his knees felt hollow.

He could see what everybody else saw now. Not the danger. The shortcut. Not forever, he told himself. Just until he got enough. Enough to record right. Enough to get heard. Enough to make the corner a story he told from somewhere with clean windows and a locked gate.

A bus roared by, shaking the glass.

He took out his notebook right there and wrote standing up, using the wall as a table.

First they rent your hand then they purchase your nerve
Pocket get fat and suddenly fear lose words
I can taste the exit every time I touch cash
Tell myself it’s temporary while I build from the ash

He read it once and smiled despite himself.

When he got home, his mother was folding towels at the kitchen table. The television muttered in the other room. Nia had done her homework in marker and left pink loops on the paper where she’d pressed too hard.

Reem set two twenties on the table.

Janice looked at them. Then at him.

“For groceries,” he said. “From the store. I been helping unload trucks.”

A lie smoother than the last one. That bothered him less than it should have.

His mother touched the bills but didn’t take them yet. “Unload trucks where?”

“Off Ridge.”

“With who?”

“Man named Curtis.”

There was no Curtis. There had been a Curtis once in the building, third floor, who fixed radios and owed half the block ten dollars. Reem used his name anyway because dead or gone people made good cover.

Janice held his face in her eyes a long second. He kept his steady. Finally she pulled the money closer and tucked it under the salt shaker.

“Don’t miss dinner next time,” she said.

That was all.

In his room, Reem slid the rest of the cash into a sock at the back of his drawer under T-shirts that smelled faintly of bleach. Then he took the notebook back out and lay on the floor with it open on his chest, staring at the water stain on the ceiling shaped like a state he’d never been to.

Outside, Mercer moved through its usual noises—music from a passing car, somebody laughing too hard, somebody cursing too sharp, the thin wail of a siren traveling elsewhere until elsewhere came closer. Reem reached for the money again just to feel it was real.

Three hundred and fifty. Plus what he’d already skimmed from smaller jobs. Plus whatever came next.

He could buy time with this. Buy equipment. Buy a version of himself that didn’t have to ask permission to leave.

From the street below came the deep thump of a bassline and then Hollow’s voice, carrying up clear as if the man were standing in the room.

“Reem!”

He froze, one hand still in the drawer.

Hollow called again, not loud, not needing to be.

Reem went to the window and looked down. Hollow stood under the streetlamp beside a dark sedan Reem had never seen before. The passenger door hung open. Behind the wheel sat a man in a collared shirt, pale forearms draped over the steering wheel, watching the building with the patient look of somebody waiting on a package.

Hollow tipped his chin toward the stairs.

“One ride,” he said. “Come make yourself more useful.”

Reem glanced back at the sock in the drawer, the notebook on the bed, the thin bedroom door between him and his mother in the kitchen.

Then he looked down at the open car door and wondered, not for the first time, what exactly he had just been paid to become.

Malcolm snapped the tassel off his cap before they even got out of the school doors.

“Stupid anyway,” he said, flicking the gold thread into the gutter.

The front steps of Douglass High were jammed with families, little cousins climbing railings, aunties with camcorders, teachers pretending not to smile when somebody screamed their name from across the street. White folding chairs scraped inside the gym behind them. Outside, somebody had popped a bottle of warm champagne and the sour, yeasty smell mixed with bus exhaust and the sugar smoke from a food cart parked by the fence.

Reem came down the steps slow, diploma cover tucked under his arm like he didn’t trust the cardboard not to split open and tell the truth. He found his mother near the sidewalk with Nia on one hip and a church fan folded against her chest.

“Let me see it,” Janice said.

He handed it over. She ran her thumb over his name through the plastic window. Her face didn’t open wide much, but he saw the part she tried to hide. Pride made her mouth tighten first. Then it softened.

“Boy did finish something,” she said.

Nia reached for the cover. “Is there money in it?”

“Only if I sell it to you,” Reem said.

Malcolm barked a laugh from somewhere to the left. He had his gown hanging open over a white tee and already looked like he was stepping out of one life before the door had shut behind him. Next to him stood a broad-shouldered man in a pressed uniform with a chest full of ribbons and a shine on his shoes that made everybody else’s feet look poor.

Malcolm jerked his chin toward Reem. “Yo. Come here.”

Reem crossed through the knot of families. Isaiah was there too, cap still on straight, collar buttoned all the way up under his gown despite the heat trapped in the afternoon. Luis stood beside him with his mother and younger brother, a bouquet wrapped in crackling cellophane bent in one hand. Dee had no family with him, just a clean polo he’d probably borrowed and a grin that came and went like he couldn’t decide whether this whole thing was funny or serious.

The uniformed man stuck out a hand. “Staff Sergeant Pollard.”

Reem shook it. Hard grip. Dry palm.

“He got me,” Malcolm said. “Leave in six weeks.”

Luis looked over. “That fast?”

“That slow,” Malcolm said.

Isaiah’s eyes moved to the sergeant, then to Malcolm. “You signed already?”

Malcolm spread his hands like that was the point. “What I’m supposed to do, keep talking about it?”

Staff Sergeant Pollard gave the small, patient smile of a man used to mothers hating him. “Your friend has options.”

“My friend got orders now,” Dee said. “Hear him? Man already talking like he in a movie.”

Malcolm shoved Dee in the shoulder. “Better than talking like you own a car wash.”

“Part-time management,” Dee said, straightening his collar.

They laughed, and for a second it was easy. Reem looked at the five of them bunched together on the sidewalk in gowns that didn’t fit right, sweat dark under their arms, cheap caps sliding, and thought how they still looked like boys even with everybody calling them men.

Then Isaiah reached into his inside pocket and held up an envelope with the corner already torn.

“What’s that?” Dee said.

Isaiah tried to slide it back. Too late.

Malcolm snatched it and stepped away when Isaiah lunged. “State University,” he read, loud enough for three strangers to turn their heads. “Academic Excellence Scholarship.” He looked up. “Oh, so you leaving leaving.”

Isaiah took the letter back, not rough, not gentle either. “I didn’t want to say nothing till it was official.”

“It got more official than this?” Luis said.

Janice had drifted closer with Nia. Luis’s mother was right behind her now. Adults had a way of hearing future in one word and gathering around it.

“You got school money?” Janice asked Isaiah.

“Most of it,” he said. “Housing too.”

“That’s a blessing,” Luis’s mother said, making the sign of the cross quick against her blouse.

Malcolm clapped Isaiah hard between the shoulders. “Look at you. Smartest one finally doing what he kept preaching.”

Dee squinted at the letter. “Where’s that at again?”

“Three hours up.”

“Three hours?” Dee whistled. “That’s rich-people distance.”

Isaiah smiled then. Small. Real. “It’s not rich. It’s just not here.”

The words landed harder than he meant them to. Everybody felt it. Even the sergeant looked away.

Reem watched Isaiah fold the letter along the crease already living in it and slide it back into his pocket. He should’ve said something then. Congratulations. You earned it. Don’t forget us. Instead he heard himself ask, “When you leave?”

“End of August.”

Malcolm nodded like they were comparing deployment dates. “I’m gone before that.”

Luis shifted the bouquet to his other hand. “I might be out before both of y’all.”

They all looked at him.

He shrugged, eyes on the sidewalk. “My cousin Tino got me a line on work in Newark. Framing crew. Roofing too if I want it. Real pay, not under-the-table nonsense.”

“Newark?” Dee said. “Why everybody talking states today?”

Luis’s mother put a hand on his back, proud and scared at once. “He can’t keep breaking himself at that market for cash in envelopes.”

“It ain’t forever,” Luis said. “Just to stack. Send some home.”

Reem stared at him. “You ain’t tell nobody.”

Luis gave him a look that said, When was there room? Around them horns blared, somebody’s uncle shouted for one more picture, and the sergeant was already speaking quietly to Malcolm about a reporting date, paperwork, haircut standards. The whole sidewalk felt split open, every person standing with one foot on Mercer and one foot pointed somewhere else.

Dee tugged his cap lower. “Well. I’m still right here when all y’all get homesick.”

“You?” Malcolm said. “You and that vacuum at the wash.”

Dee smiled without showing teeth. “Maybe. Maybe something else.”

Reem knew that tone. Hollow used it too.

By evening the gowns were off and the block had swallowed the day whole. Someone dragged a grill to the curb three doors down. Smoke rolled under the streetlamp and stuck in the leaves of the skinny tree by the hydrant. Kids chased each other with neon juice barrels. Old heads sat on milk crates and judged everybody’s future for free.

The five of them took the stoop outside Reem’s building because nobody said not to.

Malcolm had changed into jeans and a white tank. Isaiah still had his diploma cover with him, tucked beside his leg like he was guarding it. Luis was working a sunflower seed to paste in the corner of his mouth. Dee had a paper plate balanced on one knee, two burnt hot dogs and a heap of chips. Reem held a warm can of soda and watched Hollow across the street talking to two men near the bodega gate.

“You scared?” Reem asked Malcolm.

Malcolm snorted. “Of what?”

“Somebody yelling in your face at five in the morning. Crawling in mud. Getting sent someplace you can’t point to on a map.”

Malcolm drank from the bottle in his hand. “I been yelled at before.”

“That ain’t a no,” Isaiah said.

Malcolm looked at him. “Everybody scared of something.”

Luis cracked another seed. “I’m scared of heights and I just signed up to be on roofs.”

Dee laughed. “I’m scared of broke.”

“That one’ll keep you alive,” Malcolm said.

“Nah,” Reem said, still looking toward the bodega. “That one gets people killed too.”

For a moment nobody spoke. Across the street Hollow turned his head as if he had heard his name inside Reem’s thoughts. He lifted two fingers. Not a wave. Just enough.

Dee saw it first. “He want you?”

“Maybe later.”

Isaiah leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “You still doing runs?”

Reem took a drink. Flat syrup. “Sometimes.”

“That mean yes,” Luis said.

“It means I’m handling mine.”

Isaiah’s jaw worked once. He had learned by then that coming at Reem straight only made him lock up harder. “You don’t gotta prove nothing to us.”

“I ain’t proving it to you.”

Malcolm broke in before the words could sharpen. “He ain’t trying to hear church right now.”

“It ain’t church,” Isaiah said. “It’s math.”

Dee pointed his hot dog like a teacher. “Professor Bell has entered the chat.”

That got a laugh out of Luis. Enough to take the edge off, not enough to erase it.

Malcolm stood and stretched. “Listen. Everybody talking about leaving like the block gonna stamp our passports. We go, we go. We come back, we come back. Ain’t gotta make a funeral speech out of it.”

“Funny choice of words,” Dee muttered.

Malcolm ignored him. He put his fist out in the fading light. “No matter what, right?”

It was childish. Corny even. All of them knew that. Still, one by one, they put fists in.

Reem felt the old scar on his thumb brush somebody else’s knuckle and remembered dirt under sneakers, a stop sign ringing under a broomstick, the taste of pennies in his mouth from fear and being twelve. The oath had sounded bigger then because they were small enough to believe words could barricade a street.

“No matter what,” Luis said.

“No matter where,” Isaiah added.

Dee clicked his tongue. “Look at us. Hallmark.”

Malcolm held their fists there another second. “Say it with your chest then.”

They did.

A bottle broke somewhere around the corner. Nobody flinched until after.

The weeks after moved fast in the cheap, crooked way bad neighborhood time always moved—too slow while you were in it, gone once you looked back. Malcolm left first. Reem went with the others to the station before sunrise, the floor sticky under their sneakers, vending machine coffee scent in the air. Malcolm had a duffel bag, a shaved head, and a look on him like he had picked a fight with the whole world and finally found where it lived.

His mother cried without sound. He hated that more than tears.

“Don’t let nobody call me soft when I’m gone,” Malcolm told Dee.

“Too late,” Dee said, eyes red.

Malcolm hugged Luis, then Isaiah. When he got to Reem, he held on longer than either of them expected.

“Whatever they got you doing,” Malcolm said into his ear, low enough that his mother couldn’t hear, “don’t get too good at it.”

Reem pulled back. “Go catch your train.”

Malcolm smiled. “That mean you heard me.”

He left before Reem could answer.

Luis went two weeks later in his cousin’s rust-pocked van with a mattress tied to the roof and a lunch cooler wedged by his feet. Reem helped carry his duffel down the steps. Luis’s room had already started to look like nobody belonged in it—bare wall where a poster had been, dust rings on the dresser, one sock under the bed nobody claimed.

“You got enough?” Reem asked, meaning money.

Luis nodded. “Enough to start.”

“Call when you land.”

“It’s Newark, not the moon.”

Reem smirked. “Same thing to your mother.”

Luis’s smile faded. “You could come too, you know.”

“To do what?”

“Work.”

Reem looked out at Mercer through the crooked blinds. Hollow’s people on the corner, kids on bikes weaving around them, somebody arguing from a second-floor window with all the force of a marriage and none of the paperwork. Beneath it all, the pulse he knew by heart.

“I got something here,” he said.

Luis heard the lie inside the truth and didn’t press. At the van he hugged everybody quick, then grabbed Reem by the back of the neck before letting go.

“Don’t make me come back for no stupid reason,” he said.

Isaiah left in August with two bins of books, an iron his mother insisted on, and shirts hanging in a garment bag like he was about to become somebody who knew what dry cleaning cost. Reem helped haul his things to the borrowed Buick downstairs. The campus address was written on an index card taped to the dashboard in Mrs. Bell’s careful handwriting.

Inside Isaiah’s room, half stripped bare, the air felt different already. Less like a bedroom than a place vacated by planning.

“You really bringing all these books?” Reem asked, lifting a box that tried to tear at the bottom.

“I read them.”

“Once.”

Isaiah took the box from him before it split. “That’s not how books work.”

Reem stood in the doorway while Isaiah looked around one last time. Not sentimental. Just measuring. The bed. The desk. The window facing the alley. The piece of blue painter’s tape still stuck to the wall from some old science fair project.

“You happy?” Reem asked.

Isaiah took a second. “I’m not stupid enough to say that out loud yet.”

“That mean yes.”

“It means I know leaving and arriving aren’t the same thing.”

Downstairs Mrs. Bell called that they were running late. Reem carried the last bin out. At the curb Isaiah’s mother cried enough for both herself and Malcolm’s. Isaiah hugged her, embarrassed and tender, then turned to Reem.

“You still writing?” he asked.

“Every day.”

“You recording?”

“Some.”

That got his attention. “Where?”

Reem jerked his head toward Mercer. “Guy got a setup in a basement off Harlan. Blankets on the walls, little mixer, computer from the stone age. But it work.”

Isaiah smiled. “You say that like a review in a magazine.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know.” He looked at him hard then. “Just be serious about the other part too.”

Reem didn’t ask which part. He hated when Isaiah was right in general. It felt more insulting than if he’d pointed to a specific sin.

When the Buick pulled off, Mrs. Bell waving through the windshield, Isaiah leaned out the back window and slapped the roof twice. Reem lifted a hand. Then the car turned at the corner and was gone.

By September it was just Reem and Dee on Mercer often enough for people to say their names together.

Dee still worked the car wash some mornings, but he had Hollow’s boys nodding to him now, passing him rolled bills to place bets, hold something, ask no questions. He wore cleaner sneakers than before and checked his phone like messages paid interest.

“You staying smart?” Reem asked one night as they cut through the alley behind the Chinese spot.

Dee grinned. “You asking as a friend or as competition?”

“Neither.”

“Then mind your own route.”

He said it light. Reem didn’t like how light.

The basement studio sat under a corner store on Harlan, reached by a side door that stuck in damp weather and a set of wooden stairs with the middle caved thin from years of feet. Down there it smelled like dust, old cords, and somebody’s stale weed trapped in carpet. Egg-crate foam lined one wall. Two moving blankets hung over the furnace. The mic had a dent in the grille, but when the headphones sealed over Reem’s ears and the beat came up through the static, none of that mattered.

The first time he heard his own voice played back through those speakers, he stood still as church.

Not because it sounded polished. It didn’t. It sounded raw and close, a little too sharp on the s sounds, room noise underneath, the bass muddy as creek water. But it was him outside himself. Proof.

The engineer, a skinny man everybody called Wax because of his old crate-digging days, leaned over the keyboard and said, “You got grain in it. That’s good. Don’t iron it out.”

Reem recorded nights when Hollow didn’t need him and some nights when he did, slipping from one basement to another, one kind of labor to the next. Money from the corner paid for hours at the mic. Hours at the mic made the corner feel temporary. Temporary stretched.

Calls came in from the others, never all at once.

Malcolm from a pay phone first, voice flattened by distance and discipline. “They got us running till I dream in cadence.” He laughed once, then asked, too casually, “Everything quiet there?”

Luis on Sundays, tired enough to sound older, talking about splinters, nail guns, men on the crew who’d steal your lunch and pray over you in the same day. “I’m making bread, though,” he said. “Tell my ma that first.”

Isaiah less often than Reem expected, not because he forgot but because he was learning a place that asked things of him besides survival. When he did call, he asked about Nia’s school, Janice’s blood pressure, whether Dee was still messing around, whether Reem had new verses. He never asked directly about Hollow. That was its own kind of asking.

And each time, after the jokes and updates, after the sound of another city or base or campus breathed through the line, somebody said some version of Be careful.

As if care had ever been enough.

One Friday near midnight, Reem came up from the basement studio with his throat sore from recording and his notebook warm in his back pocket. Wax had played the track three times before letting him leave. A hook still half-built sat in Reem’s head like a lit fuse. He wanted a cigarette and didn’t even smoke.

Mercer was glossy from a fresh washdown somebody had done with a bucket, trash pushed into wet drifts against the curb. The bodega gate was halfway down. Hollow stood by the pay phone box with Dee and two other men Reem didn’t know. One had a scar trimming his lip into a permanent sneer. The other wore city utility coveralls too clean to have come from work.

Hollow saw Reem and lifted his chin.

“Studio?” he asked.

Reem nodded.

“You get something good?”

“Something.”

Hollow smiled without warmth. “Hope it’s worth all the disappearing.”

Dee looked away. That bothered Reem more than the words.

The man in the coveralls stepped off the wall and gave Reem a once-over that lingered too long at his face, as if memorizing it. Across the street a car idled with no headlights, engine low and steady.

Hollow pressed a folded piece of paper into Reem’s hand. Address. Time. No name.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “And wear something that don’t look like Mercer.”

Reem glanced at Dee. “What is it?”

Hollow’s smile thinned. “A way up, if you stop asking little questions.”

The headlightless car rolled forward ten feet, then stopped again.

Reem folded the paper once and slid it into his pocket. The hook he’d been carrying from the studio went cold. Dee still wouldn’t meet his eye. Hollow turned back to the men beside him as if the matter had already been settled.

From somewhere farther down the block, a train horn carried over the roofs, thin and long, the sound of something leaving that did not ask who it was leaving behind.

Reem stood in the shine of the streetlamp with the address in his pocket and the taste of metal rising in his mouth, wondering who, exactly, was waiting for him if he showed up dressed like he belonged anywhere else.

The address on Hollow’s paper took Reem to a narrow brick building wedged between a tax office and a storefront church with vinyl doves peeling off the window. The church sign promised DELIVERANCE AT 11. The tax office had a hand-lettered placard that said REFUNDS IN 24 HOURS. The brick building had no sign at all.

A buzzer sat beside the door, paint worn off the button. Reem pressed it and kept his hands out of his pockets like that mattered. He wore the cleanest things he owned that didn’t look borrowed from a funeral: dark jeans without the torn knee, a white tee with no logo, a charcoal button-down open over it, black sneakers he’d wiped with a damp rag. He felt dressed up and underprepared at the same time.

The lock clicked.

Inside, the hallway smelled like lemon cleaner trying to bully old cigarette smoke. Somewhere upstairs a woman laughed, short and sharp, then stopped. Reem climbed to the second floor and found a door standing open to a room with a desk, two folding chairs, and framed gold records that looked too expensive for the scuffed baseboards.

Not real gold records, he thought. Or not hers.

A woman sat behind the desk in a camel-colored blazer with the sleeves pushed up. She was white, maybe late thirties, with a silver chain at her throat and a pen balanced across two fingers like she didn’t need to look at it to keep it moving. Her hair was pinned back loose, some of it slipping free. On the desk sat a glass ashtray full of cinnamon gum wrappers, a legal pad, and a little speaker no bigger than a paperback.

She looked up at him, quick and measuring.

“You’re late by one minute,” she said.

Reem checked the wall clock before he could stop himself. “I’m on time.”

“That’s how I know you’re from around here.” She pointed to the chair. “Sit down, Kareem.”

Nobody called him Kareem unless they were family, school office, or trying to get something signed. He sat anyway.

She tapped her pen against the legal pad. “I’m Celia Voss. I help move records from places nobody respects into places people get paid.”

Reem looked at the gold frames on the wall again.

“You manage artists?” he said.

“I rescue them from being lied to in smaller rooms.” She smiled a little. “Sometimes I manage them after.”

He didn’t smile back. “Why’m I here?”

Instead of answering, she picked up the little speaker, hit a button on her phone, and set the speaker down between them.

His voice came out thin at first, then found its chest. The hook from Wax’s basement. The one he’d laid three nights ago after making Wax run the beat back twice and dim the room because bright light made him self-conscious at the mic. The bass was still muddy, the room still there underneath it, but that hook lifted clean. It had nerve. It sounded like a hand on a hot stove refusing to move.

Reem stared at the speaker.

Celia watched his face, not the device. “That’s you.”

“Where’d you get that?”

“You said yes to the wrong people before you said yes to the right ones.” She leaned back. “Don’t pout about it. Songs travel. Men talk. Assistants steal flash drives. Engineers have bills.”

Wax, Reem thought, then hated himself for it.

“You like it?” she asked.

“If you got it, you like it.”

“I like money,” she said. “This sounds like attention first. Money after, if nobody ruins it.”

The hook rolled into the verse. Reem heard every rough edge and still felt the old jolt under his ribs. Proof again. Different this time. Not just that he existed. That he could take up space outside Mercer without asking permission.

Celia lowered the volume before the first verse finished. “There’s a lounge across town on Thursday nights. Not glamorous. Not safe enough for suburban idiots, which helps. DJs, low-level A&Rs, club promoters, guys with just enough coke in them to say yes too fast. You do two songs there, maybe three, and people begin using your name in rooms where names turn into paperwork.”

“Thursday,” Reem said.

“Thursday.”

“That’s four days.”

“Then rehearse quickly.”

He looked around the room again. The gold records, the spotless desk, the fake calm. “Hollow set this up?”

“I don’t ask Darryl for more than an introduction.” She said Hollow’s first name without hesitation, like they’d crossed that bridge years ago. “And he doesn’t tell me who I should hear. He said you had something. He wasn’t wrong.”

Hollow had never once talked about Reem’s music like it mattered. He’d mocked it, tolerated it, used it to keep him hungry. The idea that he’d carried Reem’s name into another room made Reem uneasy in a way praise never could.

Celia slid a business card across the desk. Thick stock. Her name, a number, no address. “I need a clean recording by tomorrow night. Doesn’t have to be finished-finished. Has to hit. No lazy breath noises, no clipping, no cousin banging on the basement door in the background. If you can perform, I can put you on that stage.”

Reem picked up the card. “And then what?”

“Then I see if you can hold a room. People confuse good songs with careers every day.”

She rose, signaling the meeting was over, but when Reem stood she put a hand flat on the desk and looked at him a second longer.

“Listen carefully,” she said. “Men from your neighborhood will tell you loyalty is the only real currency. Men in mine say leverage. Both are trying to own your time. Thursday, if you want it, don’t come late and don’t come halfway.”

Outside, the church windows threw a blue reflection across the sidewalk. Reem put the card in his pocket with Hollow’s folded note and walked three blocks before he took either of them back out.

Wax answered his knock with a Newport in his mouth and a patch cable looped around one hand.

“You got money?” Wax asked.

“I got a problem that can pay.”

Wax stepped aside.

The basement under the corner beauty supply looked even smaller in daylight. Egg-crate foam sagged from the wall. A fan pushed hot air from one corner to another. On the stool by the mic stand sat a grape soda gone flat and a spiral notebook swollen from old damp. Wax killed his cigarette in a chipped saucer and swiveled to the computer.

“You writing or crying?” he said.

“Recording.”

“Good. Crying costs extra.”

Reem played him the little piece of what he wanted. Not from Celia’s speaker. From his own head, tapping the desk, rapping low while Wax hunted through drum kits and bass patches. They built it ugly at first, then better. A snare that cracked like a snapped ruler. A bassline that dragged for half a beat behind where your body expected it. A piano figure so sparse it almost wasn’t there. Space in the right places. The hook landed on top of it and changed shape, went from good to dangerous.

Wax stopped nodding and started listening with his mouth open a little.

“Again,” he said.

Reem ran it again.

By the fifth take sweat had darkened the collar of his shirt. By the ninth, he hit the hook with a rasp in the last line that made Wax slap the desk and swear.

“That,” Wax said, pointing through the glassless frame they pretended was a booth window. “That right there. Don’t clean that up.”

Reem bent over, hands on his knees, breathing through his mouth.

Wax rewound and played it through the speakers. The room seemed to tighten around the sound. Outside in the shop upstairs somebody dragged a box across tile. A woman laughed near the register. None of it touched the track.

“Feels like a siren with manners,” Wax muttered.

Reem took the notebook off the stool and wrote a line he’d almost lost, then crossed out three others. “Can you bounce this tonight?”

“Depends who’s asking. You? Or the version of you that still owes me from last month?”

Reem fished bills from his pocket and flattened them on the keyboard. Wax counted without pretending not to.

Near evening a few neighborhood kids wandered down the basement steps because sound leaked and curiosity was free. Then Dee showed up with a car-wash rag hanging out his back pocket and two girls from Harlan with bamboo hoops and bored faces. One of the girls asked whose song was playing before it even got through the first chorus. The other one said, “Run that back,” with one hand already on the rail as if she had to leave but didn’t.

By the third replay Dee was grinning in spite of himself.

“That’s yours?” he said.

Reem shrugged like he hadn’t been waiting years for that exact question.

Dee looked at him harder. “Nah, for real?”

Wax answered from his chair. “If it wasn’t his, he couldn’t say it like that.”

One of the girls pulled out a silver flip phone and held it up toward the speaker. Cheap little speaker, cheap little phone, bad room, bad recording, none of it mattered. The hook cut through anyway.

“Play that Thursday at the Blue Room,” she said.

“What Blue Room?” Reem asked.

She stared. “Across town? On Ellison? They do industry night.”

Dee’s grin faltered. “Why you asking like you got invited?”

Reem didn’t answer fast enough.

Dee’s eyes narrowed. “You did.”

Before Reem could decide whether to lie, a shout went up outside on the block. Not panic. Territory. That particular pitch men used when they wanted witnesses to know whose anger they were hearing.

Wax lowered the volume.

Another shout. Then the hollow smack of somebody kicking a car door. A bottle burst. Feet slapped pavement overhead.

Dee moved to the basement steps and looked up through the cracked door at street level. “They back.”

“Who?” one of the girls asked.

Dee didn’t turn around. “South Ave boys.”

Wax swore under his breath and reached to kill the monitors entirely.

From outside came a chorus of voices, too many to sort. Then one sharp sound that made everybody in the room freeze for half a second—not a gunshot, not yet, but close enough in the body to make backs straighten. A firecracker maybe, or a pipe hitting a signpost. Then a car peeled out.

Dee came down two steps, jaw set. “Hollow out there.”

That landed in Reem’s chest heavier than it should have. Hollow was always out there. Different now. Pressure had edges.

“You going up?” Wax asked him.

Reem listened. More shouting. Somebody running. The beauty supply owner above them yelling in a language Reem didn’t know, angry and scared in equal parts.

He went up.

Glass crunched under his sneakers at the top of the stairs. On the corner a tan sedan sat crooked with one window punched white. Three of Hollow’s boys stood in the street, shoulders up, one with blood running from his ear into his collar. Across from them, near the bus stop bench, three men Reem recognized only by block, not name, were backing away slow, pointing and talking big because distance made men brave.

Hollow stood between both groups with one hand lifted, not calming anything, just deciding when it got worse.

He saw Reem and crooked two fingers.

Reem crossed to him through a scatter of green bottle glass. “What happened?”

“Pressure test,” Hollow said, eyes still on the other side of the street. “They seeing what they can touch.”

The man with blood at his ear spat red onto the asphalt.

One of the South Ave boys barked, “Tell your little singers stop walking our side.”

Hollow smiled then, and it was the kind of smile that made space around him. “Come say it from closer.”

The men across the street didn’t. They climbed into a waiting Cutlass instead, doors slamming, engine revving too hard before they fishtailed off.

Nobody on Mercer moved for a moment after they were gone. The whole block seemed to hold its breath in public.

Then Hollow turned to Reem like he’d just remembered him. “Tonight,” he said. “You working.”

Reem kept his face still. “Doing what?”

“A pickup.”

“Where?”

“You like details when you ain’t earned them.” Hollow looked him over, taking in the button-down shirt, the clean jeans, the effort. “Heard you had a nice little meeting.”

So that was that.

Reem said nothing.

Hollow stepped closer. “You want extra opportunities, I’m not stopping you. But understand something. Before strangers clap for you across town, I need to know you don’t go soft in the knees on me.”

Dee had drifted near enough to hear. He stared at the ground.

“What kind of pickup?” Reem asked.

Hollow nodded toward the busted sedan. “A package got interrupted. Other side thinks they’re making us flinch. I need somebody who don’t look hot carrying the replacement.”

“Why me?”

“Because they know my usual faces.” Hollow brushed a fleck of glass off Reem’s shoulder like a father might, if fathers did that with threats tucked inside. “And because if I’m hearing what I’m hearing, you got places to be this week. Men get ambitious. Ambition should come with a receipt.”

The light was leaving the block. Storefront metal gates rattled down one by one. Somewhere up the street a baby was crying hard enough to wear itself hoarse.

“What time?” Reem asked.

“Ten-thirty.”

The Blue Room industry night, if the Harlan girl knew what she was talking about, started at eleven.

Hollow gave him an address in Westbrook and a name: Leon. “Don’t call, don’t linger, don’t open nothing. Bring it straight back to me.”

Reem thought of Celia’s card in his pocket. Thursday. Don’t come halfway.

“Can’t Dee do it?” Reem said.

Dee looked up, startled, hurt for a blink before he hid it.

Hollow laughed once. “Dee can do what I tell Dee. Tonight I’m telling you.”

He walked off before Reem could answer, his men folding in around him. The one with blood on his collar got into the sedan’s passenger side, cursing as the cracked glass shed into his lap.

Dee stayed behind.

“You should let that music thing sit a week,” he said.

“A week turns into another week.”

“I’m saying South Ave making noise right now. Hollow ain’t in the mood for split attention.”

Reem looked at him. “You worried about me or worried about him?”

Dee rubbed the back of his neck. “What difference?”

Enough not to answer.

By nine-thirty Reem was back in Wax’s basement with the rough mix on a burned CD, a flash drive in his sock, and his stomach sour with too many clocks ticking at once. Wax was on his second beer and pretending not to care.

“You leaving with the best thing you ever made in your pocket to go do nonsense for street goblins,” he said.

Reem tucked the CD into a plain sleeve. “Can you email it if I give you a number?”

Wax barked a laugh. “Email? To who, Atlantic Records?” Then he saw Reem’s face. “You serious.”

Reem gave him Celia’s card.

Wax whistled low. “Celia Voss. Huh.”

“You know her?”

“I know people who owe her favors. Same as everybody.” Wax turned the card over, then back. “This ain’t fake, if that’s what you asking.”

“Can you send it?”

“I can if my connection don’t die and if you stop standing there vibrating.”

Upstairs, the shop gate crashed shut.

Wax burned the file, sent the email from an ancient desktop that wheezed like it had asthma, then pointed at Reem with the empty beer bottle. “If you get famous, remember I made you say less.”

Reem almost smiled.

His phone buzzed once in his pocket. Unknown number.

He answered. “Yeah.”

Celia’s voice. “Got the file. Better than the clip I heard.”

Reem leaned against the damp wall. “So we good?”

A pause. Paper rustling on her end. Voices somewhere behind her.

“We’re good if you understand Thursday is not open mic amateur hour. You bring that exact energy. No freestyling. No extra friends on stage. And wear something smarter than whatever neighborhood loyalty costume you own.”

“I can do that.”

“Can you?” she said, not sharp, just interested. “Because I’m hearing there’s noise around your people tonight.”

He straightened. “You hearing a lot.”

“It’s my job.” Another pause. “You still want this slot?”

Yes came up so fast he nearly said it too loud. “Yeah.”

“Then be at the Blue Room by ten-forty-five Thursday. Ask for me at the side entrance.”

Ten-forty-five.

The same minute Hollow had just bought from him in another part of the city.

When the call ended, Wax was watching him.

“You look sick,” Wax said.

“I’m double-booked.”

“Then pick the one that doesn’t get you zipped in plastic.”

Reem pushed off the wall.

Outside, Mercer had gone tight and watchful. Men stood in twos instead of threes. Cars slowed without music. Somebody had swept most of the broken glass into a glittering ridge at the curb, but not all of it. The leftover pieces winked under the streetlamp like teeth.

At ten-fifteen Reem caught the bus toward Westbrook, one hand in his pocket around Celia’s card, the other on the seatback in front of him. He got off near a row of auto shops gone dark except for one office lit from inside by a green banker’s lamp. The address matched. No sign. A roll-up gate halfway open.

Leon turned out to be a thick man in a knit cap sitting behind a desk with a newspaper spread flat and untouched in front of him. He never asked Reem inside all the way. Just slid a duffel bag over the threshold with his foot.

“For Darryl,” Leon said.

“That’s what I got.”

Leon looked at Reem’s clothes, the nice shirt under the jacket he’d changed into, and smirked. “You on your way somewhere?”

Reem took the bag. It was heavier than it looked.

“Back where I came from,” he said.

Leon’s smile stayed a second too long. “Tell him they getting bold.”

On the bus back, the duffel sat on Reem’s knees like a sleeping dog he didn’t trust. He didn’t unzip it. Didn’t touch the side pocket. Hollow’s instructions. Also fear. The bus lurched through yellow light and over potholes, and every time the bag shifted his spine tightened.

At Harlan and Fitch, traffic locked up behind flashing reds.

Police.

Not close enough to see the stop itself, only the cluster of brake lights and the wash of blue against a storefront shutter. The bus driver cursed and opened the doors for anyone who wanted to walk. Half the passengers poured out.

Reem stood on the sidewalk with the duffel in one hand and checked the time on his phone.

10:41.

Mercer was twelve blocks east.

The Blue Room was nine blocks west.

His phone buzzed again. This time Hollow.

Reem looked at the screen until the buzz stopped. A second later it started again.

Across the intersection, another siren wailed closer. People on the sidewalk turned their heads toward it like sunflowers tracking light.

The bag pulled on his arm. West was clubs, a side entrance, Celia with her cool voice and the room he’d been hearing in his head since he first heard himself played back. East was Hollow, South Ave pressure, the kind of test that remembered your answer forever.

The phone kept vibrating in his palm.

Then, from somewhere behind him in the jam of cars, he heard his own hook leaking out thin from an open window—tinny, distorted, unmistakable.

Somebody he couldn’t see had his song on repeat.

Reem lifted his head, staring between the red-and-blue wash ahead of him and the dark streets branching off both ways, while Hollow’s name burned on the screen and the duffel bag seemed to get heavier by the second.

Reem cut east.

Not because he wanted to. Because the duffel was on his arm and Hollow’s name still lit his hand. Because men like Hollow never forgot the first no. Because the Blue Room had a side entrance and a guest list and maybe another Thursday after this one, but Hollow’s world worked in the ugly little present tense of right now.

He shoved the phone back in his pocket and started fast, skirting the knot of people craning toward the police lights ahead. A delivery truck idled half across the lane, diesel thick in the air. Somewhere behind it his own hook kept playing, the beat rattling inside a car he couldn’t see. For one stupid second that sound reached right into his chest. Then another siren climbed over it and the feeling snapped.

He walked hard for half a block, then ran.

The duffel slapped his thigh. His good shirt stuck between his shoulder blades. He cut down a narrow service lane behind a shuttered discount store, hopped a chain drooping across two bent posts, and came out on Finch. Hollow called again. Reem answered without slowing.

“I’m moving.”

“You with it?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t say names on this,” Hollow snapped. Wind roared over the line, traffic and voices close. “Take it to the old car wash on Bream. Back lot. Not the front.”

“That changed.”

“You got a problem with changed?”

Reem crossed against light, brakes barking at him. “No.”

A beat.

“Then move like it.”

The line went dead.

Old car wash on Bream sat three blocks south of Mercer, cinder-block bays with busted vacuums and a weed-cracked lot where people dumped mattresses and stripped bikes. Reem knew it. Everybody did. He also knew it was stupid. Too open in the back, too many ways in and out. The kind of place boys shot at each other because there was enough room to miss twice before they got it right.

He kept going.

At Fitch, the first drops hit—fat, warm, and scattered, darkening the sidewalk in coins. By the time he reached Bream, the rain had found its rhythm. Not a storm. Just a steady midnight drizzle that slicked the blacktop and brought up the smell of old oil, wet trash, and rust.

The car wash sat in a row of darkness between a boarded takeout and a fenced plumbing yard. One security bulb glowed over the rear lot, weak and jaundiced. A green Crown Vic was parked nose-out by the fence. Engine running.

Reem stopped under the broken frame of a vacuum station and looked.

No Hollow.

No Leon.

A thin man in a hooded sweatshirt leaned against the driver-side door of the Crown Vic smoking a cigarette down to the filter. Another shape moved inside the car, just a shoulder shifting behind fogged glass.

The smoker looked up. “You late.”

“I got held.”

“Everybody held tonight.” He flicked the cigarette into a puddle. “Bring it.”

Reem stepped forward but didn’t close all the way. Rain tapped the metal bay roof over his head.

“Darryl said direct,” he said.

The man smiled without warmth. “You saying I’m not direct enough?”

From inside the car somebody opened a door. A boot touched pavement.

Reem’s neck prickled.

Too quiet around the fence. Too little traffic on Bream even for this hour. And the man by the car had asked for the bag too fast, like he’d been rehearsing the line.

He tightened his grip on the duffel. “Call him, then.”

That was as far as he got.

The first shot cracked from somewhere behind the wash bays. Not movie-loud. Sharper. Meaner. It punched the smoker backward into the Crown Vic with a sound like somebody dropping meat on a counter. The cigarette flew from his mouth in a small orange arc. Glass burst from the windshield. The person inside the car screamed once and then the rest of the shots came, a jagged handful from two directions.

Reem hit the ground.

Wet concrete slammed his palms. The duffel yanked his arm straight. Bullets smacked cinder block, ripped through the hanging strips in the wash bay, shattered the security bulb. Darkness fell hard and sudden, broken only by muzzle flashes—white stutters by the fence, another burst near the alley mouth.

South Ave, his mind said, stupid and clear.

The person in the car tried to crawl out and got dragged back by the shoulder by nobody Reem could see. More gunfire. A car horn stuck on, blaring steady. Reem curled behind the low curb base of the vacuum island, cheek in gritty water, and did the fastest math of his life: stay with the bag and die where they expected him, or leave it and maybe die explaining.

A voice barked from the dark. “Bag! Bag!”

Not Hollow. Not anybody he knew.

Reem moved.

He belly-slid through the runoff, came up on one knee, and sprinted for the opening between the last wash bay and the fence. Somebody saw him. Gunfire chased his shoulder, hot and close. He threw the duffel through the gap first, then dove after it, scraping his back on twisted chain-link. His jacket snagged. He ripped free and landed in the alley beyond on both hands.

The duffel had split half open.

Inside, under a layer of folded painter’s tarps, were two taped bricks and a square parcel wrapped in gray plastic. Not money, then. Not just.

Headlights flooded the alley mouth.

Police.

“Down! Down! Let me see—”

Reem grabbed the bag and ran before the beam could pin his face.

Behind him the alley exploded with noise: officers shouting, somebody firing again, the blare of the Crown Vic’s horn, sneakers slapping water. Reem cut left into a corridor between a body shop and a rowhouse garage, hurdled a crate of empty antifreeze bottles, and nearly went down on a slick of mud. He caught himself on a brick wall and kept pumping.

His phone rang inside his pocket. He ignored it. Then it buzzed with a text. Then again. He didn’t check.

The alley opened onto Ellison, and suddenly he was a block from the Blue Room.

Its vertical sign glowed cobalt over the rain. Men in fitted coats smoked under the awning. A woman in silver heels laughed with one hand over her hair as a town car edged to the curb. Music thumped through the walls, clean and expensive. Reem slowed without meaning to, chest tearing, shoes wet, one sleeve ripped open at the seam. He could have crossed right there. Could have gone to the side entrance and said Celia’s name and tried to become somebody else before the sirens rounded the corner.

Then he looked down.

His hands were black with alley water and streaked with blood that wasn’t his.

A police cruiser screamed past the far end of the block toward Bream.

Reem kept moving.

He cut behind a bakery, through a gate chained but not locked, into the service alleys that stitched Ellison back toward Mercer. Steam rolled from basement grates. Rats skittered along a wall silvered by rain. Twice he flattened himself behind dumpsters while patrol lights washed the cross streets blue. Once he heard two men running on the other side of a fence, one of them laughing too hard, the sound sharp as broken glass.

When his lungs started to cramp, he pulled his phone at last.

Seven missed calls. Four from Hollow. Two unknown. One Dee.

A text from Hollow: WHERE YOU AT

Another: WHO WAS THERE

Another: ANSWER THIS PHONE BEFORE I THINK FOR YOU

Dee had sent one message only.

u good?

Reem stared at it while rain beaded on the screen.

Then he called Dee.

Dee picked up on the first buzz. “Where.”

No greeting. No surprise.

“By Kessler’s old warehouse cut,” Reem said. “Heading north.”

“You got company?”

“Maybe.”

“You got the thing?”

Reem looked down at the torn duffel. “Yeah.”

Dee swore softly. “Don’t come Mercer.”

“Then where?”

A pause. Reem could hear a TV in the background and someone yelling at a game.

“Car wash on Tilghman,” Dee said. “The one closed since the fire. Back office. Five minutes.”

“You alone?”

Another pause, smaller this time. “You asking a lot for somebody breathing hard.”

“You alone, Dee?”

“I’m alone. Move.”

The line clicked off.

Reem stood under a leaking loading dock and listened to the city around him. Sirens farther now. Rain pattering on corrugated metal. Somewhere a dog flinging itself at a fence. Dee had always sounded most serious when he was half joking, and tonight the joke had been cut out clean.

Reem went.

The burned car wash on Tilghman was smaller than Bream, half collapsed, tagged up with loops of silver paint and phone numbers for tow trucks. The office out back had no windows left, only plywood over the frames and a door hanging off one hinge. Reem came in through the rear lot, stepping around a mattress gone dark with rain.

Dee was inside with a flashlight and a gallon jug of water. He wore his car wash jacket zipped to the throat and a knit cap pulled low, though he was indoors.

“Damn,” Dee said when he saw him. “You look like you climbed out a drain.”

Reem dropped the duffel on a desk coated in gray ash and old plaster dust. “I need a ride.”

Dee didn’t answer that first. He shined the flashlight over Reem’s jacket, his hands, the tear at his shoulder. “You hit?”

“No.”

“That your blood?”

“I don’t know.”

Dee handed him the water. “Wash your hands first. You look like evidence.”

Reem poured water over his fingers. Pink ran down onto the warped linoleum.

“What happened?” Dee asked.

“Set-up.”

“By who?”

“If I knew, I wouldn’t be here.”

Dee squatted by the bag and touched the torn seam. “You open this?”

“It opened.”

“Uh-huh.” He glanced up. “You look?”

“Enough.”

Dee sat back on his heels. Rain drummed on the roofless part of the bay outside. His face in the flashlight glow looked younger for a second, almost like the lot on Mercer, milk crate under him, running his mouth about nothing. Then it changed back.

“Hollow gonna say you brought heat,” Dee said.

“Hollow sent me there.”

“Hollow sent you to a handoff. He ain’t send police and South Ave both.”

“You sure that was South Ave?”

“Who else bold enough right now?” Dee stood and shoved the flashlight between his shoulder and cheek so he could unzip his jacket pocket. He took out a prepaid phone, already lit. “He called me.”

Reem’s stomach tightened. “Why?”

“Said if I heard from you, keep you still.”

Still.

Dee held the word there between them without saying it.

“Keep me still till what?” Reem asked.

Dee looked at him. Then at the bag. Then back. “Till he got there, probably.”

“Probably?”

“You want me to lie sweet?”

Reem wiped his hands on his pants. “So why call me here?”

A siren passed two streets over. Dee waited until it faded.

“Because if Hollow thinks you sold the route, you dead. If South Ave thinks you still got whatever they were shooting for, you dead. And if police caught your face near Bream, you dead slower.” He scratched at his jaw. “So I figured we talk before anybody else do.”

Reem took one step toward him. “Talk about what.”

Dee’s eyes flicked to the duffel again. “About whether I should call him back and say I found you.”

Silence filled the office thick as smoke.

Reem had known Dee since second grade, since stolen mango icees and fistfights over nothing and trying to hoop with a ball worn nearly smooth. He knew the scar near Dee’s ear from the time Malcolm swung a rusted gate too hard. Knew the sideways grin he used when he was scared. Knew he owed people money every time he started cleaning his sneakers too carefully.

He also knew Dee wouldn’t meet his eyes now.

“You in debt?” Reem asked.

Dee’s mouth twitched. “Everybody in debt.”

“To who.”

“That matter tonight?”

“It matter if they own your answer.”

Dee barked a laugh with no humor in it. “Man, don’t start sounding like Isaiah.”

“Then look at me and say you ain’t already talked too much.”

That landed. Dee’s face went flat.

“I told Hollow you called,” he said. “That’s all.”

“When?”

“After the first missed call.”

Reem felt the room narrow.

“You gave him my number?” he said.

“He had your number.”

“You gave him my location.”

Dee shrugged once, tiny and ugly. “Not exact.”

“Dee.”

“What you want from me?” Dee snapped. “I’m the one still here, same as you. Malcolm gone, Isaiah gone, Luis gone. You think staying on Mercer free? You think Hollow don’t ask questions if my phone light up and I act dumb? I bought you five minutes. Maybe ten.”

Reem stared at him.

Rain ticked through a hole in the roof into a bucket somebody had left years ago. Tinny. Steady.

Dee’s voice dropped. “If I was giving you up clean, I’d have told him Bream before Bream.”

That was true enough to be dangerous.

Reem picked up the duffel.

Dee moved fast then, hand out. “You can’t walk with that.”

“Watch me.”

“You don’t even know what’s in it.”

“Neither do you.”

“I know enough.” Dee lowered his hand slowly. “Listen to me. There’s a basement on Maypole behind Ms. Rene’s beauty shop. Old boiler room. Stay there till daylight.”

“And then.”

“And then Hollow decides if you a soldier who got caught in crossfire,” Dee said, “or a problem he gotta solve.”

The words sat colder than the rain.

“You helping me or parking me?” Reem asked.

Dee looked offended for half a second, which answered plenty by itself. “I’m helping you be alive when the question get asked.”

From outside came the crunch of tires over broken glass.

Both of them froze.

Another set of tires. A car door shut. Then another.

Dee killed the flashlight.

Dark dropped over them whole.

Voices outside. Men, close. One laugh Reem recognized from Mercer corners, one of Hollow’s older boys with a smoker’s rattle in it. A beam crossed the plywood over the window and made the nail holes glow.

Dee whispered, “Back door.”

Reem didn’t move. “You said you were alone.”

“I was.”

“You told him.”

“I told him not here. I swear to God, not here.”

The front door scraped inward on its hinge.

A voice from the next room: “Dee?”

Not loud. Certain.

Reem lifted the duffel. Dee reached for his sleeve, missed, and caught air.

The back of the office opened into the burned wash bay, then the lot, then a fence half fallen into an alley full of water. Reem ran bent low, shoes splashing through black puddles. Behind him he heard Dee say, louder now, “I ain’t seen him,” and then another voice asking, “Then why you here?”

Reem hit the fence, shoved through the gap, and landed ankle-deep in runoff on the other side. His phone vibrated again in his pocket as he ran.

Not a ring. A message.

He ducked behind a dented trash hopper long enough to look.

Unknown number.

don’t take that bag to mercer

A second message came before he could breathe.

they’re saying you opened it

He stared at the screen, rain gathering at the edge of his jaw, while behind him men shouted Dee’s name again and a flashlight beam sliced across the alley, hunting.

By the time Reem pulled up on Mercer, the block had already dressed itself for grief.

Double-parked sedans lined both sides of the street, wet leaves pasted to their tires. Men in dark coats stood with their hands folded in front of them, talking low. Women moved in little clusters toward New Hope Baptist with foil pans balanced on their palms. The church steps had been swept, but the cracks still held old cigarette ash and the white ghost of summer dust.

Reem sat behind the wheel a second longer than he needed to.

His song had put a little shine on his name these past months. Not the kind that changed neighborhoods. Not yet. But enough that people looked twice. Enough that two kids on the corner nudged each other when they saw him get out of the rental with tinted windows and dealer plates. Enough that his jacket cost more than what he used to make in a week standing around for Hollow.

He shut the door and heard one of the kids say, “That’s him,” under his breath.

He kept moving.

Inside, the church was hot with bodies and starch and flower water. Somebody had overdone the lilies. The smell sat high in the air and turned sweet at the back of his throat. Luis was up front in a bronze casket under low yellow light, face powdered into peace. That was the first wrong thing. Luis had never looked peaceful a day in his life. Even as a kid he’d slept like he was listening for trouble through the wall.

Reem stopped halfway down the aisle.

Luis’s mouth had been arranged into a softness that didn’t belong to him. His eyebrows looked too neat. His hands were crossed over his chest, fingers thick and still, and Reem remembered those same hands splitting sunflower seeds, palming a basketball, flashing quick little signs from across the block when somebody’s mother was coming.

A woman in the front pew was crying into a handkerchief. Luis’s mother. Smaller than Reem remembered. Bent a little.

Reem swallowed and kept walking.

He touched the casket once, just with two fingers against the polished edge. Cold varnish. No feeling in it.

“Boy.”

His mother’s voice. Janice. Low, already tired.

He turned. She stood at the aisle in a black hat with the netting pulled back from her eyes, one gloved hand wrapped around her pocketbook. Nia stood beside her in a plain dark dress, grown now, hair pressed and pinned back. Not a little girl anymore. That hit him harder than the flowers did.

Janice looked him over in one sweep. Expensive coat. Watch. Chain tucked, but not hidden enough. Then her face changed and she pulled him into her.

He let her.

“You came,” she said against his shoulder.

“Of course.”

She leaned back. “You look thin.”

Nia snorted softly. “Ma say that to everybody at funerals.”

Reem touched her cheek. “You taller than me now?”

“Not yet.” But she smiled, and for one second Mercer loosened in his chest.

Then he saw Malcolm.

He was coming through the side door near the choir stand, broad across the shoulders in a dark suit that fit like he’d fought with it. Hair close. Jaw set hard. There was a scar near his chin Reem had never seen before, pale against dark skin, and the way Malcolm scanned the room before he picked a seat made him look less like a mourner than a man checking exits.

Their eyes met.

Malcolm gave one nod.

Reem nodded back.

A minute later Isaiah came in, and every old woman in the church turned to look without meaning to. He carried himself different now. Clean camel overcoat, good shoes, glasses with thin frames, haircut sharp enough to leave a line in the air. He looked like the kind of man people handed business cards to. The kind that lived in buildings with desks downstairs.

He still had the same careful face, though. Same watchful eyes.

He saw Reem, then Malcolm, and there was a quick break in all that polish. Something young came through. Then it closed again.

Dee arrived last.

He slipped in from the side like he didn’t want the room to remember him all at once. Too skinny in a charcoal suit, collar a little crooked, hands moving before the rest of him did. He hugged Luis’s mother too long, then stepped back wiping his nose though he wasn’t crying. His gaze ticked around the church and skipped over Reem once before landing on him for real.

That sideways grin came and went.

The organ swelled. Everybody sat.

The service passed in pieces. Scripture. A solo from one of the church women whose voice cracked on the high note. The pastor talking about young men and roads and how death never asks permission before entering a house. Reem heard half of it. He kept staring at the back of Luis’s casket and thinking of Newark roofs, nail guns, winter wind. Thinking how sudden was a word people used when they didn’t have the truth yet.

At one point Luis’s cousin stood and said it had been “just a fall at the site,” and Reem felt Dee shift two pews over. Not much. Enough.

After the benediction, the sanctuary turned noisy the way funerals do, grief breaking into logistics. People stood. Coats rustled. Somebody whispered about the cemetery. Somebody else asked where the repast trays should go. Reem got caught by neighbors, old teachers, women who had known him at twelve and now looked at him with curiosity threaded through condolence.

“You on the radio now, ain’t you?”

“We seen that clip online.”

“Your mother must be proud.”

Janice, hearing that, kept her face still and adjusted one glove.

By the time he reached the church basement, Malcolm and Isaiah were already there.

The basement had not changed. Same low ceiling with water stains like old maps. Same metal chairs dragged around folding tables. Same refrigerator humming too loud in the corner. Somebody had laid out baked ziti, fried chicken, white bread, potato salad sweating under plastic wrap, and a supermarket sheet cake with LUIS piped in blue frosting.

Malcolm stood near the coffee urn with a Styrofoam cup in one hand, not drinking from it. Isaiah was helping an older deacon move extra chairs against the wall.

Reem came down the stairs slow.

“Look who remembered the block,” Malcolm said.

It was almost a joke. Almost.

Reem pulled out a chair and turned it backward before sitting. “You still start talking with your chin first.”

Malcolm’s mouth twitched. “And you still arrive like somebody should announce you.”

Isaiah came over, wiping his hands on a napkin. “You two gonna do this in a church?”

“Church basement,” Malcolm said. “Different rules.”

That got the first real laugh. Small, but real. Enough that for a second they were boys again, crowding a milk crate, elbows touching.

Then Dee came down the steps carrying two paper plates he didn’t seem to want.

“There he is,” he said. “Mercer’s own.”

Reem looked at him. “You look bad.”

“Good to see you too.”

“It means I missed you,” Reem said.

Dee barked a laugh and put the plates down. His fingers drummed against the table. Tap-tap, stop. Tap-tap-tap.

Isaiah noticed it too. His eyes dropped, then lifted.

For a minute they made the old effort. Malcolm asked Nia, when she came down, whether she still cheated at cards. Dee told the story about Luis getting chased by Mr. Kessler for knocking a garbage-can lid down the front steps like a sled. Reem added the part where Malcolm swore he could outrun the old man and almost got caught by his own hoodie. Even Isaiah laughed at that, a quick sound through his nose.

But every story had a place where it snagged.

Too much time had gone by. Too much had happened offstage.

Malcolm asked Isaiah where he was at now.

“Philly,” Isaiah said. “Compliance work.”

Dee blinked. “That mean you a cop?”

“It means companies pay me to tell them what kind of trouble they’re in before the government does.”

Malcolm sipped his coffee at last. “So. Rich cop.”

Isaiah let that pass. “And you?”

“North Carolina for a while. Then overseas. Then back. Security contracting now.”

Dee whistled. “Listen to us. Compliance. Contracting.”

He looked at Reem. “And superstar.”

Reem picked at the seam of his cup. “Not that.”

“Nah?” Dee said. “Heard your hook in a barbershop in Easton. Some little boy told me you was famous like he knew you.”

Malcolm watched Reem over the rim of the cup. “You still recording with that old basement man?”

“No.” Reem shook his head. “Bigger rooms now.”

“Bigger trouble too?” Malcolm asked.

Nobody spoke for a beat.

Then Isaiah said, soft, “This not the day.”

Malcolm set the cup down. “Maybe it is.”

Luis’s mother was across the room talking to two church women, too far to hear. A little girl in white tights ran past with a plastic spoon. Somewhere upstairs a casket latch clicked shut, faint but sharp.

Dee reached for a drumstick and didn’t eat it.

“What happened to him?” Reem asked.

The question landed flat in the middle of the table.

Dee looked down first. Malcolm looked at Isaiah. Isaiah looked at nobody.

“His cousin said he fell,” Reem said.

“On a site,” Malcolm added.

Isaiah folded his napkin once, carefully. “That’s what the family was told.”

“Told by who,” Reem said.

Isaiah’s eyes cut to him. “Same way you ask things now? Like every answer owe you extra?”

Reem leaned back. “If you got something to say, say it plain.”

“Plain?” Isaiah said. “Plain is you disappear for years and come back with a car nobody here can afford and that look on you like every room might turn. Plain is Dee won’t stop shaking. Plain is Malcolm checks every door before he sits down. Plain is Luis is dead at thirty and everybody keeps choosing words that don’t touch it.”

Malcolm’s jaw worked once. “He called me three weeks ago.”

That stopped the table.

Dee’s head came up. “For what.”

Malcolm ignored him. “Asked me if I still knew anybody in insurance. Said a friend needed to move money clean.”

Isaiah stared. “Luis asked you that?”

Malcolm nodded. “Didn’t sound like a joke either.”

Reem felt something cold move under his ribs. “He call me too.”

Three faces turned.

“When?”

“Couple weeks back.” Reem kept his voice even. “Late. I was in the studio. Missed it.”

“You call him back?” Isaiah asked.

“He didn’t pick up.”

Malcolm said, “He leave a message?”

Reem shook his head.

Dee let out a breath through his teeth. “He came by me.”

Nobody had expected that. You could hear it.

“When?” Isaiah asked.

“Twice.” Dee rubbed his palms down his thighs. “First time just talking regular. Second time, not regular.”

“What’d he want?” Malcolm said.

Dee glanced toward the stairs, toward the fellowship hall door, anywhere but at them. “He was asking about names.”

“What names.”

“Street names. Who still around. Who moved what where. Who was tied to who now.”

Reem went still.

Malcolm’s voice sharpened. “And you told him?”

“I told him what everybody know.”

“That ain’t an answer.”

Dee’s chin came up, hurt and anger mixed together. “You leave for years and come back talking like command. Don’t do that to me.”

Malcolm stood so fast his chair legs shrieked on the floor.

Half the room looked over.

Isaiah got up too, one hand out. “Sit down.”

Malcolm didn’t move his eyes from Dee. “Luis dead because he was curious or because somebody made him curious?”

“You asking me like I pushed him off something,” Dee said, too loud.

A church mother glanced over from the cake table.

Reem stood between them before the next word could get larger. “Enough.”

Malcolm looked at him. “Move.”

“No.”

For a second Reem saw it plain: the old version of them, five boys in a lot, blood drying on their thumbs. Then the new version, all edge and distance and separate damage.

Dee laughed once under his breath. Bad sound. “See? This is why none of this work. Everybody came back wearing whatever they had to become.”

Isaiah said, “What was Luis into, Dee?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t lie to me in a church.”

Dee slapped one hand on the table. Plastic forks jumped. “I said I don’t know what he was into. I know he was asking. I know he said he seen something in Newark that didn’t make sense. I know he kept saying names from here like they reached that far.”

Reem heard the room thin around him.

“What names,” he said.

Dee shook his head too fast. “I’m not doing this here.”

“Then where.”

“Not here.”

Malcolm took one step around Reem. “You got real careful all of a sudden.”

Dee’s face changed. A little fear leaked through. “You think I’m the only one should be careful?”

That line hung there.

Reem looked at him hard. “What’s that mean.”

Dee licked his lips. “Nothing.”

“Dee.”

“Nothing, man.”

Upstairs, the sanctuary doors opened and more people started down toward the basement. Noise came with them. Women asking for plates. Men talking burial times. A kid crying because somebody took his slice of cake.

The moment broke without ending.

Luis’s sister came halfway down the stairs then stopped, scanning the room. She was older than all of them by a few years, still beautiful in that tired way grief gives people. Her eyes found Dee first, then Reem, and held on Reem a beat too long.

“Y’all all right?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Isaiah said quickly.

She didn’t believe him. “Mijo wouldn’t want all this in here.”

Nobody answered that either.

She came down carrying a cardboard box of memorial programs and set it beside the cake. When she straightened, she said, to no one and everyone, “He told me he was coming home before Thanksgiving. Said he had something to put in the right hands first.”

Reem felt the words like a hand on the back of his neck.

Malcolm said, “What hands?”

She looked at him blankly, then seemed to realize what she’d said. “I don’t know. Just talking. He was tired.” She smoothed the box flaps down though they didn’t need smoothing. “Y’all eat something.”

She walked off.

Isaiah watched her go. “He was scared.”

“You know that how?” Reem said.

“Because people making plans to come home don’t usually do it in pieces like that.” Isaiah adjusted his cuff, a small neat motion that didn’t hide anything. “He was trying to finish something.”

Malcolm finally sat back down, but only because too many people were close now. “You got that from one sentence.”

“I got it from his face at the viewing,” Isaiah said. “His mother knows more than she said. So does his sister.”

Dee muttered, “Everybody always think they can read rooms just because they left the block.”

Isaiah turned to him. “And everybody who stayed thinks confusion is cover.”

Reem caught Dee’s eye then.

There it was again, the skip. The not-looking. The same old tell, sharpened by years.

“You talked to him last,” Reem said quietly.

Dee’s jaw tightened. “Probably.”

“What’d he ask you exactly.”

“I said not here.”

“You keep saying that.”

“Because this place got ears.” Dee gave a quick glance toward the basement windows, those narrow strips of street-level glass fogged by people passing outside. “And because some names don’t belong under church lights.”

Malcolm followed the glance. So did Reem.

A shape crossed one of the windows and paused.

Just legs at first. Dark slacks. The hem of a coat. Then the silhouette shifted and a face dipped near the glass from outside, trying to look in past the condensation. It was only for a second, but Reem knew the posture. Knew the stillness in it. Street stillness. Waiting stillness.

The face moved on before he could place it.

Dee had gone pale.

“You know him,” Reem said.

Dee kept staring at the window. “I know enough.”

Isaiah’s voice dropped. “Who was that.”

Dee swallowed. “If Luis saw what I think he saw, then this funeral ain’t just a funeral.”

Malcolm pushed his untouched coffee away. “Start talking.”

People pressed in around them for seats, for napkins, for condolences, but the table had gone cold and separate from the rest of the room, like glass had dropped around it.

Dee leaned in, eyes on the basement door.

“He called me from Newark scared out his mind,” he said. “Said he recognized a Mercer face up there with men who weren’t supposed to know each other. Said he wrote some things down in case he—”

The basement door opened again.

Every one of them looked up.

A man none of them knew stood on the last step in a black overcoat, carrying no food, no flowers, no folded program. He scanned the room once and landed on their table like he’d been given a map.

Then he started down.

By the time the man in the black overcoat reached their table, the church basement had filled up enough to make a scene expensive.

He stopped beside the pan of baked ziti, one hand resting near his coat buttons, and looked at each of them as if matching faces to a list he already knew by heart. He wasn’t old. Mid-forties maybe. Hair clipped close. No grief on him anywhere.

“My condolences,” he said.

Nobody thanked him.

His eyes settled on Luis’s sister across the room, then came back to Reem. “I worked with Luis a little up in Newark.”

Malcolm leaned back in his chair and let one arm hang wide, not accidental. “What site?”

The man’s mouth twitched, almost a smile. “Different ones.”

Isaiah said, “Then you won’t mind naming a company.”

The overcoat looked at Isaiah like he’d found the college boy without trying. “Won’t matter now.”

Dee had gone still enough to disappear.

Reem kept his voice low. “You came down here for what.”

The man reached into his coat. Malcolm’s chair scraped hard against the tile.

It was only a business card.

Plain white. No logo. No company name. Just a number and a last name stamped in black: Vane.

“If any of Luis’s belongings turn up,” the man said, setting the card beside a sweating cup of fruit punch, “work papers, a spare phone, notebooks, anything that doesn’t belong with family keepsakes, call me first.”

“Why would we do that?” Reem asked.

“Because grief makes people curious,” Vane said. “Curiosity can turn a fall into something worse.”

The room noise thinned around Reem for a second. Not silence. Worse. Forks against paper plates, a folding chair snapping open somewhere by the wall, somebody laughing too loud because they needed to.

Malcolm stood up.

Vane didn’t move, but something in him tightened. Not fear. Readiness.

Luis’s sister came over carrying a stack of foam plates like she had business there. “Can I help you?”

The man turned toward her and dipped his head just enough to pass for respectful. “Just paying respects.”

“I don’t know you,” she said.

“No reason you should.”

She looked at the card on the table, then at Reem. “Family only now.”

Vane held her eyes one beat too long, then nodded. “You all have a peaceful afternoon.”

He walked away without hurrying, climbed the basement steps, and was gone.

Malcolm snatched up the card.

Dee said, “Throw that away.”

Isaiah said, “No. Keep it.”

Reem watched the doorway. “He said spare phone.”

Nobody spoke for a moment.

Luis’s sister put the plates down with more force than she meant to. “Outside,” she said to Reem without looking at him. “After.”

Then she picked the plates back up and moved off before anybody could answer.

The burial passed under a hard gray sky and the smell of wet dirt. Reem heard almost none of it. The pastor’s words came thin through the wind. Dust flecked the polished lid before they lowered it. Luis’s mother made one sound that seemed to come from somewhere beneath her ribs, and then she covered her mouth with a black glove and folded into the women holding her up.

Men shifted on the fake grass matting. Shoes sank at the edges where the earth was soft. Malcolm stared straight ahead, jaw knotted. Isaiah bowed his head, but not like prayer; more like he was listening for a detail the rest of them had missed. Dee stayed toward the back, one hand inside his coat pocket, eyes working the line of parked cars along the cemetery road.

Reem felt watched even when he wasn’t looking up.

After the last condolences and the handshakes and the murmured drive safe, the crowd began to bleed away. Cars coughed to life. Wipers clicked across windshields. The funeral home men stood off to the side in dark suits, patient as crows.

Luis’s sister caught Reem near the row of cars with fogged windows and florist ribbon still trapped under wipers.

“Not them,” she said, glancing at Malcolm and the others. “You.”

She led him past a gray minivan and a plumber’s van with rust around the wheel wells to an older Accord parked crooked near a bare maple. When she opened the passenger door, heat and stale coffee smell rolled out. A child’s booster seat sat in back beside two supermarket bags full of folded church clothes.

She reached under the passenger seat and came up with a zip-top freezer bag.

Inside was a phone wrapped in one of Luis’s white work socks.

Reem looked from the bag to her face. “He gave you this?”

“He hid it in my laundry room the last time he came down.” Her voice had gone flat, efficient, like if she put any feeling in it she’d drop the whole thing. “Behind the paint cans. Taped under the shelf.”

“When?”

“Ten days before he died.” She swallowed. “He told me if anybody asked, I never saw him. If something happened, I was supposed to give this to somebody who loved him before they loved being scared.”

Reem took the bag through the open car door. The plastic crackled loud as candy wrap.

“Why me?”

She gave him a look that said don’t insult me. “Because he wrote your name on a church envelope and put it in with the phone. Not Malcolm. Not the smart one. You.”

That landed crooked inside him.

“Did you open it?”

She shook her head. “I charged it. That’s all. A man called twice from blocked numbers after Luis died. Then that one in the basement tells me ‘spare phone’ like he knew exactly what he was fishing for.” She leaned closer. “If you take this, take it all the way. Don’t come asking me later if I’m sure.”

“You tell anybody else?”

“No.”

“Not even your mother?”

A quick flash across her face. “My mother buried her son today.”

Reem nodded.

She pressed a charger cord into his hand too, wrapped neatly with a rubber band. “Passcode is his birthday backward. He changed it from the old one because he said too many people knew his easy habits.”

Reem tucked the phone under his coat.

Her hand caught his wrist before he could step back. “If he died over whatever is on that thing, then whoever killed him won’t stop at him.”

He looked at her fingers, then at her eyes.

“I know,” he said.

“Do you?”

He didn’t answer that.

Malcolm called his name from across the lane. Dee was already looking over. Isaiah too.

Luis’s sister let go. “Don’t stand around with it. Go.”

Reem left the cemetery in Isaiah’s rental because Isaiah insisted on not splitting up “stupid and sentimental,” and Malcolm followed behind in a dark Charger borrowed from somebody military or pretending to be. Dee said he had his own ride and peeled off at the light without waving.

That stayed with Reem.

They didn’t talk in the car until they crossed back into the city and the cemetery’s clipped lawns gave way to check-cashing windows, bus shelters slick with old ads, and a mural with half its face peeled away by weather.

Isaiah drove one-handed, careful even at yellow lights. “She gave you something.”

Reem kept his eyes out the side window. “You always this nosy.”

“Yes.”

From the back seat Malcolm said, “If it’s from Luis, we’re past polite.”

Reem took the freezer bag out and held it up between two fingers.

Isaiah exhaled through his nose. “Well.”

Malcolm leaned forward. “Phone?”

“Looks like.”

“Turn it on.”

“Not in traffic.”

“Why not?”

“Because if something’s on it, I’d rather not have my face lit up in a car with three windows and a hundred places to get boxed in.”

Isaiah glanced at him. “That answer’s why she picked you.”

Reem hated that it felt good to hear.

They ended up at Isaiah’s short-term apartment in West Philly, six floors up over a nail salon and a tax place with metal bars over the glass. The hallway smelled like mop water and cumin. Inside, Isaiah’s place looked borrowed from a cleaner man—gray couch, narrow dining table, no clutter except a stack of policy binders and a bowl with keys arranged like he wanted company to think he’d just set them there by habit.

Malcolm checked the hall before shutting the door. Then he checked it again.

Reem laid the phone, still in the sock, on Isaiah’s table.

Nobody sat down.

He unwrapped it. Cheap Android. Hairline crack across one corner. Drywall dust ground into the case seams. Luis, always carrying things in the same pocket as screws and folded receipts.

Reem plugged in the charger. The battery icon blinked red, then held.

“Birthday backward,” he said, more to himself than them.

He keyed it in.

The home screen came up to a photo of Luis in a hard hat making a stupid face at the camera, one eye squeezed shut against the sun.

Malcolm looked away first.

There were dozens of unread messages. Missed calls. A notes app. Gallery. Voice memos. One folder marked with a period at the front like Luis had learned some small trick from somebody and trusted it more than he should have.

Isaiah pulled a chair out and sat. “Airplane mode.”

Reem did it.

“Now start with messages,” Isaiah said.

Most of them were ordinary enough to hurt. Site supervisor texts. An ex asking about child support from two years back. His mother reminding him to call Sundays. Then the threads changed.

Unknown numbers. No names saved. Tight little messages that read like men standing too close.

YOU BACK IN TOWN YET

DON’T WRITE SHIT DOWN

WHO ELSE SAW YOU THERE

Luis had answered some, ignored others.

One thread had no replies from him at all:

KEEP YOUR HEAD DOWN
NOT YOUR JOB
THEY KNOW YOU FROM MERCER

Malcolm tapped the table. “That was from who?”

“No name,” Reem said.

Isaiah was already taking notes on a legal pad from his kitchen drawer. “Read me the numbers.”

Reem did.

Then he opened the hidden folder.

Inside were six photos, two video files, and a note titled IF ANYTHING.

The first photo was blurry, taken through dirty glass. Men in a back room somewhere. Folding table. Counting machine. Stacks of cash banded in ugly pink rubber bands. One face half turned.

Dee leaned over Reem’s shoulder in his memory for a second, but it wasn’t Dee. It was one of Hollow’s older runners from years back, a broad man everyone called Stacks because he once slapped somebody with a wrapped brick and laughed while doing it. Reem hadn’t seen him in maybe three years.

The second photo showed the same room from another angle. A whiteboard with columns written in marker: venues, dates, percentages. Beside it, a woman in profile, light hair cut just below the jawline, black blazer.

Reem’s thumb stopped moving.

Malcolm saw it too. “Who’s that.”

Reem didn’t answer fast enough.

Isaiah looked from the photo to Reem’s face. “You know her.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

Reem zoomed in. The image broke into grit, but the line of her cheek and the sharp way she stood at the board were enough.

“Celia,” he said.

The room shrank.

Malcolm said, “Music lady?”

Reem nodded once.

Isaiah sat back. “How connected.”

“I don’t know.”

“That sounds like a lie.”

Reem flared. “I said I don’t know.”

Nobody pushed him for a beat.

The third photo was worse because it was clearer. A sheet of paper on a table. Names and arrows. Darryl written in block capitals. Beneath it: Leon. Stacks. Bream. Across the top, another name circled twice—VOSS. Under that, three venue names Reem recognized from flyers and Celia’s talk: Blue Room, Ellison Loft, Port 44.

Malcolm cursed under his breath.

Isaiah said, “This isn’t corner money.”

“No,” Reem said.

He opened the note titled IF ANYTHING.

Luis wrote plain, the way men texted when they didn’t think anybody would ever read it out loud.

If this phone gets where it should, I seen something wrong. Not drug wrong. Bigger. They bringing dirty money through fake show dates, deposits, canceled acts, cash tickets that never had real people in the room. Construction cash too. Payroll names dead or made up. Darryl got pieces moving but ain’t the top. White lady from the office on Mercer paper is in it. Saw Mercer people in Newark with music people and a union dude. Same money counting in all rooms. I think they washing through events and job sites both. I took pics because one of them recognized me and smiled too long like he knew I wouldn’t understand what I was seeing.

At the bottom Luis had listed names. Some Reem knew. Some he didn’t.

Darryl Hollow.
Leon.
Stacks.
Celia Voss.
M. Vane.
Rico Bell Transit.
North Jersey Site Services.
Blue Room.
Port 44.
“Dome” / maybe accountant?
Ask why Newark and Mercer use same drop numbers.

Isaiah read over his shoulder. “Jesus.”

Malcolm pointed at one name. “Vane. Basement man.”

Reem felt a cold line slide under his ribs.

There were two videos.

The first was only eleven seconds and mostly black screen, the lens covered while Luis moved. Then it flashed open on a doorway. Men talking. The camera angle low and crooked, probably from his jacket pocket. A voice said, “Keep the artist payments separate from Darryl’s side until after quarter close.” Another voice answered, “Celia already fixed the venue paper.” Then the image jerked and cut.

Reem played it again.

And again.

The second video was thirty-four seconds. Better light. Luis must have been outside looking in through wired glass or a gap in plastic sheeting. Reem saw the back room from the photos. Counting machine chewing bills. Stacks at the table. Vane with his coat off, shirtsleeves rolled. And Celia—clear this time—pointing at the whiteboard.

He turned the volume up.

“…can’t keep routing everything through the same Mercer names,” Celia was saying. “It spikes. You spread it through talent advances, door splits, consulting. If Darryl wants more moved, he needs cleaner faces.”

A man off camera laughed. “He’s got a rapper for that.”

Even before anybody looked at him, Reem knew they would.

The video wobbled. Luis must have shifted, or realized too late what he’d caught. Vane turned his head toward the door. For half a second the frame caught his face direct, eyes hard on wherever Luis was hiding.

Then the picture slapped sideways and ended in static.

Nobody said anything.

The refrigerator in Isaiah’s kitchen clicked on. Water moved through old pipes in the wall.

Malcolm broke first. “A rapper for what.”

Isaiah answered before Reem could. “For legitimacy. For cash that can be explained. For venues, features, appearance fees, equipment invoices. All the numbers get prettier if there’s an artist attached.”

Reem kept staring at Celia frozen on the screen. The same woman who had sat behind that desk between the tax office and the church, tapping his hook through little speakers, telling him not to be late Thursday.

He remembered how naturally Hollow had handed him that address. How little surprise there’d been on Celia’s face when she knew his name before he spoke it.

Not a coincidence. Not ever.

Malcolm was pacing now, hand skimming his close-cropped hair over and over. “So Luis sees this, they know he sees it, and then he falls off a site.”

Isaiah said, “Or gets helped.”

“Everybody on this list is hot?”

“Everybody alive on this list,” Isaiah said.

Reem scrolled back to the texts. One of the unknown threads snagged his eye because he hadn’t opened the oldest messages.

He clicked.

The number with the warning—KEEP YOUR HEAD DOWN—had sent more.

DON’T GO TO THE UNION GUY
HE’S IN IT

IF YOU GO HOME DON’T GO TO DEE FIRST

BURN THE PAPER

The last text came the night before Luis died.

IF THEY OFFER TO FIX IT, RUN

Reem felt the room tilt a little.

Malcolm saw his face. “What.”

Reem held up the phone. “Whoever was warning him told him not to go to Dee.”

Isaiah’s head came up sharp. “Read it.”

Reem did.

Malcolm stopped pacing. “That don’t mean Dee set him up.”

“It don’t clear him either,” Isaiah said.

Reem thought of Dee at the church window going pale, Dee saying some names didn’t belong under church lights, Dee being the one Luis talked to last, maybe. Or probably. Always with Dee it was probably, maybe, almost.

“Call him,” Malcolm said.

“No,” Isaiah said immediately.

“Why not?”

“Because if he’s dirty, we tell him what we found. If he’s scared, we tell on ourselves. Either way he stops being useful.”

Malcolm didn’t like that, but he knew logic when it bit him.

Reem opened the call log instead. Last week of Luis’s life. Several unsaved numbers. One to Malcolm. Two missed to Reem. Three calls, same number, to Dee. Four calls to a number saved only as WAX.

Reem frowned. “Why would Luis call Wax?”

Isaiah leaned in. “The studio guy?”

“Yeah.”

Malcolm said, “You sure it’s him?”

Reem knew the number. Had it burned in from old sessions, late invoices, bounced files, favors called in after midnight. “It’s him.”

That sat worse than the rest somehow. Too many roads crossing at the same intersection.

Isaiah wrote the number down anyway. “Either Luis thought Wax knew something, or Wax connected him to somebody who did.”

Reem looked again at Celia in the video. Then at Vane. Then at the whiteboard with venue names and percentages.

Blue Room.

Thursday.

He checked the time without meaning to, calculating days by instinct. Not long. Too close.

“They’re still expecting me,” he said.

Malcolm turned. “For what.”

“For the showcase.”

Isaiah’s pen stopped moving. “You’re not going.”

Reem almost laughed, but there was nothing funny in him. “If I don’t go, they know something changed.”

“If you do go,” Malcolm said, “you walk into the same room Luis died for looking at.”

“Maybe.” Reem locked the phone and held it in his palm. It was warm now from charging, from use, from Luis’s last bad decisions. “Maybe that’s the room we need.”

Isaiah stood up so quickly his chair legs skipped. “Don’t start that hero nonsense.”

“This ain’t hero.”

“What is it then?”

Reem looked at the frozen black screen of Luis’s phone and saw, for one ugly second, the burned lot on Mercer, five boys pressing bloody thumbs together because they thought vows could keep shape around them if they said them hard enough.

“Leverage,” he said.

Malcolm dragged both hands over his face. “Man.”

Isaiah was already moving, crossing to the window, pulling the blind two inches aside with one finger. The street below was ordinary—delivery bike chained to a signpost, woman with two grocery bags, a SEPTA bus groaning at the corner.

Then Isaiah held still.

“What?” Reem said.

Isaiah didn’t answer right away.

He let the blind fall and turned back slow. “Black sedan. Two doors down. Engine running.”

Malcolm went for the hall closet on reflex though he had no reason to think Isaiah kept a weapon there.

Reem’s phone buzzed in his pocket.

Not Luis’s. His own.

Unknown number.

The room tightened around that little rectangle of light.

He answered without speaking.

For a second there was only engine noise and something rattling like a turn signal left on too long.

Then a woman’s voice, cool as if they were confirming dinner.

“You should really stop opening dead men’s files, Kareem.”

Celia.

Reem didn’t blink.

Across from him, Isaiah’s hand had gone flat on the table. Malcolm was mouthing, Who is it.

Celia said, “Now the important question. Did Luis give the phone to you before he fell, or did his sister wait until after they put him in the ground?”

Celia waited through his silence like she had all afternoon.

From the window, Isaiah lifted two fingers and pointed down at the street. Still there.

Reem turned his back to the room and walked into the apartment’s narrow kitchen, past a dish rack full of upside-down mugs and a stack of unopened mail bound with a rubber band. “You got a lot of questions for somebody calling from a parked car.”

A smile moved through the line. You could hear it without seeing it. “And you sound nervous for somebody whose song is climbing by the minute.”

That caught him.

He looked at his own dead reflection in the black microwave door. “What song.”

“Don’t play slow with me. The hook is out. Local pages grabbed it last night. Somebody clipped your Blue Room rehearsal audio and now every little account with a city skyline banner is posting it like they discovered fire.” Papers rustled on her end. “You’ve got traction, Kareem. Real traction. Which means the next hours matter.”

In the living room Malcolm mouthed again, Who is it, already knowing.

Reem kept his voice flat. “You called to brag?”

“I called because men who are scared make bad choices. I’d rather you make profitable ones.” She let that sit. “Tomorrow. Eleven-thirty. Mercer & Hall Records building, twelfth floor. I’m putting you in front of people with checks. Wear something that doesn’t look like grief.”

“You parked outside to tell me that?”

“To remind you that if I can find you, other people can too.”

The line clicked dead before he could answer.

He stood there a second with the phone against his ear. The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere below, a bus breathed at the curb and pulled off.

When he came back into the room, Isaiah had already moved away from the window. Malcolm was on his feet.

“That her?”

Reem nodded.

“What she want?”

Reem held up his phone. Notifications were breeding across the screen—mentions, tags, little red circles piling over one another. He hadn’t checked them since the funeral. Since Luis’s phone. Since that first call. He tapped one at random.

His own voice burst tinny out of the speaker. That same hook from Wax’s basement, but ripped rough from somewhere live, crowd noise under it, a hand in the frame throwing up fingers, comments flooding under the clip.

Nah who is this
He next up
This the Mercer boul?
Need full version now

Reem lowered the volume and watched the number under the post jump while he was looking at it.

Malcolm gave a low whistle. “Damn.”

Isaiah didn’t. He just stuck his hand out. “Let me see.”

Reem passed the phone over. Isaiah scrolled hard, expression tightening instead of loosening the way Reem’s wanted to. “This one tags the club. This one tags the bar next door. This one got your face clean as a school picture. These idiots love telling strangers where they are.”

“It’s a song,” Malcolm said. “That’s the point.”

“It’s also a map.”

Isaiah handed the phone back like it had started to heat up. “If Celia’s telling the truth, this is the part where everybody gets interested at once. Labels. Hollow. Whoever was around Luis. Anybody who thinks proximity is money.”

Reem looked down again. Another clip. Another repost. A girl in a puffer vest lip-syncing his hook into her front camera while her friend laughed in the passenger seat. A guy at a gas station playing it out of a charger speaker balanced on the hood. The sound was bad in every version and still it cut through.

He should have felt simple joy. The kind he used to feel on the roof over Mercer with a notebook and a city full of dumb hope under him.

Instead his stomach tightened.

Malcolm rubbed his jaw. “You still going?”

“Yes,” Reem said.

Isaiah made a short, disgusted sound.

“I’m not asking permission.”

“No,” Isaiah said, stepping closer, voice low now, colder. “What you’re not doing is pretending this is separate. That woman calls while a sedan idles under my window. Luis leaves a phone naming her. Hollow already thinks everything dirty in this city touches his hand first. And now your face starts traveling. You don’t get to act surprised when all of them arrive at once.”

Reem pocketed the phone. “Then don’t let me go stupid.”

Malcolm barked a humorless laugh. “That’s the first smart thing you said.”

By morning the song had outrun the neighborhood.

It was on two city blogs and a radio host’s page with a caption talking about “raw urgency” and “a hook like a switchblade.” Somebody had taken the clip and laid a beat cleaner under it. Somebody else had posted old Mercer photos behind it like they were already building his legend. His DMs filled with fake managers, local girls, old classmates, dudes asking for features, dudes asking for loans before there was even any money.

He sat in Isaiah’s borrowed button-down at the edge of the bed and watched numbers climb until they stopped meaning anything.

Then Hollow called.

No name on the screen. Didn’t need one.

Reem answered.

A breath. Street noise. A lighter striking.

“You getting hard to reach.”

“I been around.”

“Not around me.”

Reem said nothing.

Hollow exhaled smoke into the phone. He always did that like punctuation. “I hear your little song in a Chinese store this morning. Congratulations.”

“Appreciate it.”

“That ain’t appreciation.” Hollow’s voice stayed almost friendly, which made it worse. “That’s me noticing you loud while my business still got your fingerprints in the story.”

“I ain’t touch your story.”

“You ran with my bag.”

“Your people set that.”

A beat.

Too far, maybe. But it was said now.

Hollow laughed once, short and dry. “You hear me accuse you? No. I said fingerprints. Which means your name is in mouths I don’t enjoy. So while these office people buying lunch and shaking your hand, don’t forget who made sure you had bus fare to start telling lies over drums.”

Reem stared at the motel print behind Isaiah’s bedroom door, some beach scene with gulls and dead-looking water. “You calling for a speech or a meeting.”

“Three o’clock. Kessler’s old garage off Mercer. Come alone.”

The old man’s garage had been empty since his son sold the tools and left the block. Hollow choosing that place meant he wanted memory in the room too.

Reem said, “I got business.”

“Now you all business.” Hollow clicked his tongue. “Three o’clock. Don’t make me come celebrate with your mother.”

Then he was gone.

Reem sat a moment, phone still in his hand.

In the kitchen Isaiah was making coffee in a dented aluminum pot that smelled faintly of burnt grounds no matter how much he washed it. He looked up once and knew from Reem’s face.

“Hollow.”

“Three o’clock.”

Isaiah poured black coffee into two chipped cups. “Then whatever Celia has for you needs to happen before that.”

Reem took the cup and burned his fingers because he forgot to use the handle. “You still coming?”

“I’m not walking into the room. But I’m not letting you get packaged up and sold without reading the small print either.”

The records building wore old money badly. Marble lobby floor with salt stains at the revolving door. Brass directory plates with names that sounded invented. Upstairs, the twelfth floor had frosted glass and framed album covers lit to look holy.

Celia met him near reception in a cream blouse and dark slacks, phone already in hand, talking before she reached him.

“Good. The beard works. Shoulders back. Don’t look like you expect to be thrown out.”

She kissed air near his cheek, then glanced past him toward the elevators where Isaiah stood pretending to examine a fire evacuation plaque.

“Your friend can wait.”

“He’s with me.”

“He’s in the building. That’s generous enough.”

She moved him down a corridor lined with photos—men in leather jackets, women with lacquered hair, platinum plaques, one gold record catching the overhead lights in a way that made Reem slow half a step. His face must have shown it.

Celia didn’t smile this time. “Don’t stare too long at the wall. It tells on hunger.”

She ushered him into a conference room with a walnut table and a bowl of green apples nobody touched. Two men and a woman were already inside. Expensive watches. Soft shoes. Teeth like they got maintained professionally.

The older man stood first. “Rick Haskell. A&R.”

The woman gave him a firmer shake. “Tanya Lowe. Marketing.”

The younger guy just nodded from his chair, tapping at a tablet. “Dev.”

No last name. As if everybody in rooms like this became one name once enough money sat down.

They asked him where he was from though they knew. Asked what he wanted to say in his music. Asked whether he had more songs. Asked if the hook was a fluke. Tanya wanted to know if he wrote alone. Rick wanted to know if he could be in L.A. next week if needed. Dev asked what his follower count had been yesterday morning versus now.

Celia answered some of it for him when it suited her and cut him off once when he started to talk too long about the song itself.

“We’re interested in the voice,” Rick said finally, steepling his hands. “The grain in it. People hear a life in there.”

A life.

Reem almost looked down at his knuckles.

Tanya slid a one-page memo across the table. Numbers. Meeting language. Advance range if everything moved. Recording commitments. A line about image strategy that made his lip twitch.

“What’s image strategy,” he asked.

Dev looked up from the tablet. “Means we don’t let the internet define you before we do.”

“And how would you define me?”

The room held that a second.

Then Tanya, smooth as wet paint: “A real artist with a real story.”

Celia broke in. “And one smart enough not to tell every part of that story to everyone who asks.”

Reem took the paper but didn’t sign anything. The numbers were bigger than anything he had ever seen attached to his own name. Enough to move Janice out. Enough to buy studio time until his ears quit. Enough to mistake a trap for blessing if you squinted.

His phone buzzed in his pocket.

Once. Then again.

He left it there.

Rick was still talking. “Momentum’s the word, here. We can capitalize on momentum. But that means no mess. No public drama. No local nonsense clipping your rise.”

Local nonsense.

That was what the block became once men in blazers smelled profit on it.

Celia walked him out after, hand light at his elbow, steering him past the gold records.

“Don’t spook,” she said. “They like you.”

“Do they.”

“They like money. At the moment, that includes you.”

At the elevators she lowered her voice. “There’s a dinner tonight in Center City. Smaller room. Better room. People who can move faster than those three if they feel urgency.”

“Why would they feel urgency.”

“Because another label already called.” She studied him. “And because danger makes art sell, but only if the artist remains available.”

The elevator doors opened.

Isaiah was inside already, jaw tight. He must have caught enough from across the lobby to hate it on sight.

Celia looked between them and smiled without warmth. “Three hours, Kareem. I’d use them carefully.”

In the cab back, Reem finally checked his phone.

Two missed calls from Hollow.

One text.

3 PM. DON’T DRESS LIKE THEM FOR ME.

He looked out the window as they crossed back toward familiar streets, towers flattening into old brick and pawn signs and bus shelters marked with razors and phone numbers. For two miles nobody spoke.

At a red light Isaiah said, “Did they put paper in front of you.”

“Yeah.”

“You sign?”

“No.”

“Good.”

“That’s all you got?”

Isaiah kept both hands on the wheel. “What you want, a parade?”

“I want you to say this might be what I said it was.”

Isaiah turned and looked at him then. Not annoyed. Something sadder. “It is. That’s why it’s dangerous.”

He looked back at the light before it changed. “You think money makes you harder to touch. Sometimes it just means more people can afford to try.”

Kessler’s old garage still smelled faintly of oil under the mold. The roll-up door was halfway open. A strip of gray daylight cut across the concrete, stopping just short of Hollow’s shoes.

He was alone except for one kid Reem didn’t know posted by the side door with a hood cinched tight and one hand in his pocket. Hollow leaned against an empty tool chest, coat unbuttoned, expression unreadable.

“Look at you,” he said when Reem stepped in. “Office fresh.”

Reem stayed near the door. “You asked for me.”

Hollow nodded toward the phone bulge in Reem’s pocket. “Play the song.”

Reem didn’t move.

“Play it.”

Reem took the phone out, found the cleanest version, and hit play. His own voice filled the stale garage, sharper than it had sounded in Wax’s basement, expensive somehow even through a phone speaker. Hollow listened without moving his face.

When it ended, the silence felt staged.

“That’s what all this is?” Hollow said. “A hook.”

“It’s a record.”

Hollow smiled a little. “See. That right there. That’s how people start dying in nicer clothes.”

He pushed off the tool chest and came closer, not rushing, just making the room smaller. “You got attention now. Good for you. Attention attracts questions. Questions drift backward. Backward gets to me. So here’s what happens next. You keep my name out your mouth. You keep Mercer out your interviews unless I like how it sounds. And if anyone asks you about that night on Bream, you don’t know where east is.”

“I already don’t.”

Hollow studied him. “Smart answer.” His eyes dropped to the phone. “Now the part you won’t like. Whatever deal comes, I get taken care of.”

Reem laughed before he could stop himself.

The kid by the door shifted.

Hollow didn’t. “Say it better.”

“For what. Twenty dollars and errands?”

Hollow’s hand moved so fast Reem only understood it after the sting. Open palm across the face, not enough to drop him, enough to place him.

The garage went very still.

Hollow spoke softly. “For introduction. For protection. For the years you got to dream on my block while other boys got buried halfway through learning how.” He tilted his head. “You think these people found you in spite of me.”

Blood came warm into Reem’s mouth where his teeth had cut the inside of his cheek. He swallowed it.

“Maybe they found me because I was good.”

That earned him something like respect. Or maybe just calculation.

Hollow stepped back. “Then be good. Good enough to remember who can still reach your front door.”

He nodded once to the kid. The side door opened.

Meeting over.

The dinner room had white tablecloths, low lamps, and a waiter who explained water like it was wine. Reem wore the same borrowed shirt, freshened with a wipe-down in a gas station bathroom and a jacket Celia had sent to the lobby through some assistant. Too soft. Too narrow at the shoulders. It made him feel dressed for somebody else’s arrest.

This room had better smiles than the afternoon room. Worse eyes.

A woman from streaming asked him what his audience felt when they heard him. A man with silver at his temples talked about branding opportunities and “leveraging authenticity.” Celia kept one hand on the stem of her glass and directed the conversation with tiny interruptions, shaving off anything ragged before it could land.

Reem gave them enough. Not stories. Shapes.

When his phone buzzed, he ignored it. When it buzzed again, Celia glanced down.

“You should decide which life is calling you more often,” she said.

He took the phone out under the table.

No name.

A photo loaded slow.

Janice, his mother, halfway up the steps to their building with two plastic grocery bags pulling long at the handles. Evening timestamp in the corner. Taken from across the street.

Second message under it.

TELL YOUR OFFICE FRIENDS CONGRATS.
3 PERCENT IS CHEAP FOR FAMILY SAFE.

Reem’s hand went numb first. Then cold.

Across from him, the silver-haired man was still talking about rollout strategy, his fork resting beside a neat square of salmon. Celia was watching Reem now, not the screen, but his face.

Isaiah had insisted on waiting downstairs in the car.

Reem slid the phone across his lap and stood up so abruptly his chair legs skidded on the hardwood.

“Excuse me,” Tanya-from-lunch said from the far end, confused, but this wasn’t lunch and this wasn’t Tanya and none of that mattered.

Celia rose slower. “Kareem.”

He looked at her.

For the first time all day, her expression lost its polish. Not guilt. Not surprise either. Just recognition, like two trains seeing each other too late on the same track.

“What did he send you?” she asked.

Reem didn’t answer.

He was already walking for the door, phone clenched so hard the edge bit his palm, one thought pounding above the restaurant hush and the clink of expensive plates:

How many people had his mother under surveillance before the song even finished climbing?

The phone buzzed once on the coffee table and all three men looked at it.

Not because it rang loud. Because everything in Isaiah’s apartment had started sounding like a trigger.

Reem crossed the room first. The blinds were already crooked from how many times they’d been pulled aside and let go. Down on the street, a delivery van idled at the curb with its flashers winking. A woman in pink scrubs dragged two trash bags to the corner. Nobody in the sedan across from the hydrant moved.

“Leave it,” Isaiah said from behind him.

“It might be him.”

“It might be exactly who wants you reaching for it.”

Reem kept his fingers off the phone. The screen went black before he got there anyway.

Isaiah sat at the small dining table with Luis’s phone plugged into a braided charger, legal pad open, columns of names and times in his tight print. He’d changed into a gray Temple sweatshirt sometime after midnight, but he still looked dressed for work: neat, flat-voiced, eyes moving too fast. Malcolm stood by the kitchenette with a hand wrapped around a mug he hadn’t drunk from in ten minutes. He had that stillness he got when he was deciding whether to hit something or save it for later.

The apartment smelled like stale coffee, cold radiator dust, and the takeout containers sweating grease into the cardboard.

Isaiah tapped the legal pad with his pen. “Listen.”

Reem turned from the window.

Isaiah said, “Luis leaves Newark Tuesday morning, right? According to the toll photo and the gas receipt picture. He texts that union guy at ten twelve. He sends that video of the board with Celia in the back at eleven. Then after that—” tap “—three missed calls from Dee’s number between one-oh-six and one-eighteen.”

Malcolm finally drank. Made a face. “That don’t prove a thing.”

“No,” Isaiah said. “It doesn’t.”

He flipped to the next page. There were screenshots spread around the phone like cards in a rigged game. One showed a transfer app with a red negative balance. Another showed a text thread Luis had apparently screen-grabbed from somebody else’s phone. Most of it was partial. Names cut off. Amounts. A lot of numbers that meant more once you kept staring at them.

Reem picked up one printout. “What is this.”

“A collections text.” Isaiah held his hand out for it, then changed his mind and just leaned over. “Not to Luis. To Dee. Luis must’ve taken a picture when Dee left his phone out, or somebody sent it to him. Read the bottom.”

FINAL NOTICE BEFORE WAGE GARNISHMENT.

Below that, another one from a different number.

MISSED TWO WEEKS. BRING CASH OR KEYS.

Malcolm put his mug down harder than he needed to. “Dee always owed somebody.”

“Not like this.” Isaiah slid over another screenshot. “See the date.”

Two days before Luis died.

Reem stared at the cracked edge of the image. He knew Dee’s messes. Everybody did. Dee borrowed twenties in high school and repaid fifteen with a joke. He could make owing money sound social. But these weren’t corner debts. These were repo notices. Short-term loans. A betting app balance in the dark red. One text from an unsaved number that just read: YOU PICKED A SIDE WHEN YOU PICKED SILENCE.

His stomach tightened.

Malcolm said, “Or somebody wanted Luis thinking Dee was dirty.”

Isaiah nodded once. “Possible.”

“But.”

Isaiah looked at Reem instead of answering. “He lied in the basement.”

“How.”

“He said Luis came asking names and he shut him down because church ears were around.” Isaiah turned Luis’s phone and brought up a voice note. “Listen.”

The recording opened with cloth rubbing the mic, then traffic, then Luis’s voice low and impatient.

You keep saying later. I need to know if Dee knows this man or he just knows of him.

A second voice answered too far away to catch clean. Male. Not Dee. Then Luis again.

No, because if Dee put me in front of him on purpose, that’s different.

The note cut there.

Malcolm cursed under his breath.

Reem took the phone. Played it again. Luis’s voice came through tired, wired, trying not to panic in front of whoever he was with. The line that stuck was not the man. It was on purpose.

He thought of Dee in the fellowship hall, stirring ice in paper punch like he needed his hands busy. Not meeting anybody’s eyes. Saying some names didn’t belong under church lights. Reem had heard fear in it. Now he heard rehearsal.

The phone on Isaiah’s table buzzed again.

This time Isaiah reached first. Unknown number.

WHERE YALL AT WITH IT?

No punctuation. No signature.

He set it down without replying.

Malcolm rubbed a hand over his scalp. “So what now. We run down every text and every fake job site in that phone while Hollow’s people count breaths?”

“We talk to Dee,” Reem said.

Isaiah’s eyes cut up. “And say what?”

“The truth.”

“The truth gets people defensive. Defensive gets loud.”

Reem grabbed his jacket off the chair back. “Then we keep him somewhere open.”

Malcolm pushed away from the counter. “I’m coming.”

“No.” Reem didn’t look at him. “If he sees all three of us, he bolts before he gets close.”

Isaiah stood. “If you go alone, you’re stupid.”

“That ain’t new.”

Isaiah came around the table and lowered his voice. “Reem.”

There it was. Not Kareem, not some careful tone for outsiders. Reem. The old one.

“He might not be the only person coming,” Isaiah said. “If Dee has really been passing things, then somebody is already waiting to hear what he says next.”

Reem zipped his jacket. “Then I gotta hear him before they shut his mouth.”

He left before either of them could make it into an argument.

Dee told him to meet at the old court behind Mercer Rec, the one with the fence peeled back at the far corner and weeds growing through the paint where the foul line used to be. Said he ain’t got long. Said don’t bring church boys.

That last part made Reem smile without humor. Church boys. Malcolm in his broad shoulders and bad temper. Isaiah with his legal pad and clean apartment. Dee still sorted people by the versions he needed from them.

The walk there was short and too exposed. Every passing car felt slow on purpose. He cut behind the shuttered dollar store, crossed the alley by the busted bottle bins, and came up on the court from the side where the chain-link sagged. The backboard still wore a spiderweb crack from when Malcolm had thrown a cinder block at it one summer after losing three straight games and swearing the rim cheated.

The neighborhood had changed its paint and not its bones. New mural on the rec wall. Same piss smell behind the handball court. Same little mountain of fly-tipped mattresses by the lot.

Dee was already there, sitting on the lowest row of concrete bleachers with both elbows on his knees. Black puff vest over a hoodie, one sneaker unlaced, phone in his hand. He looked up when Reem stepped through the gap in the fence, then looked past him, checking for company.

“You came solo.”

“For now.”

Dee snorted and put the phone face down beside him. “That sound like a threat.”

“You hear one?”

Dee’s jaw moved. Gum or nerves. “You got any cigarettes?”

“You don’t smoke.”

“Today maybe I do.”

Reem stayed standing. The rim above them clicked in the wind, loose metal tapping the pole. Somewhere out on Mercer, a dirt bike whined and faded.

“Luis had your number all over his last day,” Reem said.

Dee leaned back slow. “So that’s what this is.”

“That’s one thing this is.”

Dee looked out over the court instead of at him. “You remember when Malcolm swore he was gonna dunk on that rim by senior year?”

“He almost got a finger over it.”

“He said if one of us got rich first, he was fixing all this.” Dee gave a short laugh. “Lights. Nets. New blacktop. Talking all that ownership shit at sixteen.”

Reem took two steps closer. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what.”

“Start where we was little so you can lie easier now.”

That landed. Dee’s face tightened.

“I ain’t lying easier,” he said. “I’m trying to talk to you without you already deciding.”

“Then help yourself.”

Dee bent, picked up his phone, turned it over in his hand, then set it down again. Couldn’t keep still. “Luis called me because he was scared.”

“And you told him what?”

“Nothing he didn’t ask for.”

“That ain’t an answer.”

“It’s the only one you got right now.”

Reem came to the bleachers and stood over him. “He thought you put him in front of somebody on purpose.”

Dee looked up then. Real surprise or good acting. On Dee it was always hard to tell for the first two seconds.

“Who told you that.”

“Luis.”

“Luis dead.”

“And he left enough.”

Dee blew air through his nose. “Of course he did.”

“You were in debt.”

“That everybody know.”

“Not like this.”

A flicker in his eyes. There and gone.

Reem kept going. “Repo men. loan apps. people texting your phone like they own your front door. Calls from you the day he died. Calls after. You looking through windows at church like guilt got hands.”

Dee stood up too fast, knees bumping Reem’s. “I was looking because somebody was looking at us.”

“You.”

“Not me.”

“Then who.”

Dee turned away and paced three steps toward the sideline, then back. The court made every footstep hollow. “You ever owe so many people your phone start sounding different?”

Reem said nothing.

“They call in the morning nice. By noon they joking. By night they talking to your mother by her government name.” Dee rubbed both hands over his face. “I was trying to keep shit from spilling.”

“You spilled Luis.”

“No.” He snapped it so hard a crow lifted from the fence. Softer, he said, “No.”

Reem waited.

Dee swallowed. “Luis came around asking about Newark names. About who knew who from Mercer. About a lady in office clothes and some white dude that talked like a funeral home. He was saying too much too fast. I told him slow down. He wouldn’t.”

“So you called somebody.”

Dee looked at the court again, at the dead grass pushing up through the key. “I called a man I thought could scare him off it.”

“What man.”

Dee’s mouth pressed thin.

Reem grabbed the front of his vest and shoved him back against the bleacher rail. Metal clanged. “What man.”

Dee didn’t fight him. That made it worse.

“I never said kill him,” Dee said.

Reem’s grip tightened.

“I said he’s asking,” Dee rushed on. “That’s what I said. He’s asking names, he’s back in town, he thinks he seen money moving through jobs and shows and he won’t let it go. I thought they’d put fear on him. I thought they’d make him go back to Newark or shut up.”

“Who is they.”

Dee shut his eyes.

“Who.”

“You know who.”

“Hollow?”

Dee opened his eyes but didn’t answer.

That was answer enough and still not enough.

Reem let go of his vest just to hit him. One hard shot to the jaw. Dee stumbled sideways into the bleacher step and nearly went down. He held the side of his face and looked at Reem with water in his eyes, not from pain alone.

“You sent Luis to Hollow.”

“I passed information.”

“You sold him.”

“I was trying to buy time.” Dee’s voice cracked on the last word. “For me. For everybody. You think you the only one people lean on? You leave a street open long enough, every rat and king wanna tax your breathing.”

Reem stepped toward him again. Dee lifted both hands.

“I didn’t know Vane was in it that deep,” he said. “I didn’t know Celia was tied all the way through. I swear to God, Reem, I thought it was just Hollow wanting to know what Luis had.”

“Then why lie at the church.”

“Because Malcolm would’ve killed me in the basement.”

“That might’ve saved you.”

Dee laughed once. Ugly, broken. “From who.”

There was the thing underneath it. Reem heard it and went still.

“Who ordered the hit on Luis,” he said.

Dee shook his head immediately, too quickly. “I don’t know.”

Reem took one step.

“I don’t know for sure.”

“For sure.”

“I heard pieces.” Dee looked toward the street again. “I heard Hollow was mad, but not funeral mad. More like cleanup mad. Then I heard another name on the back end.”

“What name.”

Dee hesitated.

A car door shut beyond the rec wall.

Both of them turned.

Nothing visible through the slats of the fence. Just the sound, then another door, then shoes on gravel.

Dee went pale under his brown skin. “I told you not to bring nobody.”

“I didn’t.”

“That’s worse.”

Reem moved toward the court opening and stopped. Two men came around the mural side in dark jackets, walking with purpose but not rushing, one with his hand sunk deep in a pocket like it was cold when it wasn’t. At the far fence gap, another shape cut off the exit.

“Dee,” Reem said without looking back. “Who.”

Dee’s voice came thin. “The one I heard was M—”

The first shot cracked the rim above them.

Metal screamed. Reem dropped flat behind the bleachers as more shots tore through chain-link and concrete, spitting gray dust into his mouth. Dee shouted something he didn’t catch. Sneakers pounded on asphalt. Somebody on the street started yelling.

“Move!” Reem barked.

He crawled low, came up on one knee, and saw Dee frozen by the bottom bleacher row like his body had forgotten every instruction except regret. Reem lunged, caught the back of his vest, dragged him down as another round chewed sparks off the handrail.

The shooters split wide. One on the mural side. One drifting center. The third staying by the fence gap in case they ran.

Smart.

Too smart for neighborhood panic. This was arranged.

Reem pulled Dee toward the scorer’s table shed, a plywood box with one wall caved in and old soda cups fossilized under it. Dee was breathing in fast little cuts.

“I can’t—”

“You can.”

Blood slicked Reem’s hand.

Not his.

He looked down. A dark bloom spreading through Dee’s hoodie near the ribs.

“Damn,” Dee said, almost politely, like he’d noticed a stain.

“Stay up.”

More shots. The backboard burst a fresh white star and dropped glassy pebbles over the paint. Reem shoved Dee behind the shed and stripped his own phone from his pocket.

No time for numbers. He hit Isaiah.

It picked up on the first ring. “Yeah.”

“We at Mercer Rec. Three shooters. Dee hit.”

Isaiah was already moving; Reem could hear keys, a door, Malcolm in the background saying what happened, what happened. Reem ended the call because a shadow slid across the shed opening.

He snatched up a broken length of fence pipe from the dirt and swung as the first shooter came around. The pipe cracked wrist bone. The gun went off wild into the sky. Reem rammed his shoulder into the man’s chest and both of them hit the court hard. Asphalt shaved skin from his knuckles. The man was smaller than he’d looked, masked, smelled like gun oil and laundry powder. They fought at close range, ugly and breathless, neither getting room enough to do it clean.

Reem got his hand over the gun. Turned it outward.

It fired once.

The shooter jerked and went slack.

Reem didn’t check where the bullet went. He shoved the body off and rolled just as the second man fired twice into the shed wall. Splinters stung his cheek.

Dee made a wet sound behind him.

“Dee!”

No answer.

Reem grabbed the dead man’s gun, rose into a crouch, and fired toward the mural side where movement flashed between the benches. The second shooter ducked. The third one at the fence must’ve decided the shape of things had changed, because feet pounded away instead of coming closer.

Then tires screamed outside the rec.

Then Malcolm’s voice, raw and huge: “Reem!”

The surviving shooters broke.

One vaulted the low wall and vanished toward the alley. The other cut for the fence gap, firing blind over his shoulder. Reem chased three steps and stopped himself. Trap if he kept going. Always the next angle. Always the part after anger.

Malcolm came through the opening with Isaiah right behind him, both breathing hard, Malcolm with a service pistol in hand that made Isaiah curse as soon as he saw it.

“Put that away,” Isaiah snapped.

“You got a better idea?”

“Yeah. Surviving the next thirty seconds.”

They dropped beside the shed.

Dee had curled half onto his side, one hand pressed to his stomach, the other pawing weak at Reem’s sleeve when he got close. Blood soaked the hem of his hoodie and spread under him in a shape too fast to argue with.

Malcolm looked once and turned his face away.

Isaiah knelt opposite Reem and pressed both hands to the wound. Dee sucked in air so sharply his teeth clicked.

“Stay with me,” Isaiah said.

Dee wasn’t looking at Isaiah. He was looking at Reem, pupils blown wide, face gray.

“I ain’t know,” he whispered.

Reem leaned close. “Tell me now.”

Dee tried to wet his lips. Failed. “He… he ain’t the top.”

“Who.”

“M.” His eyes moved, fighting for focus. “Not Hollow. Hollow take orders same as… same as…”

His chest hitched.

“Same as who?” Reem said.

Dee’s fingers closed on Reem’s jacket for one second with the old grip of playground fights and stoop jokes and borrowed bus fare and a hundred dead little loyalties.

Then they loosened.

Isaiah kept pressure on the wound another few seconds anyway, like effort could shame the body into staying. Sirens rose somewhere close, then closer, climbing the block.

Malcolm stood and looked through the fence toward Mercer. “We gotta move.”

Reem didn’t.

On the blacktop beside Dee’s hand lay his phone, screen cracked, still lit from a message that had come through during the shooting.

One line.

U TALK TOO MUCH.

No name. No number saved. Just the words glowing over fractured glass while the sirens came on.

“Gun away,” Isaiah said.

Malcolm kept one hand on the wheel and tucked the pistol under his thigh without looking down. His jaw worked once. Blood from Dee was drying in a dark half-moon on Reem’s sleeve, stiffening the cloth every time he moved.

They blew through two red lights and a stop sign on Fulton, cut behind the clinic, then took streets Reem hadn’t used since he was fifteen and trying not to be seen by Hollow’s older boys. Closed halal spot. Check-cashing place with the metal gate half bent. A bus shelter full of blue-white ad light and nobody in it.

“Phones,” Isaiah said.

Reem already had Luis’s phone in one pocket, his own in the other, Dee’s cracked one in his hand.

“All of them,” Isaiah said. “Now.”

Malcolm drove one-handed while Isaiah leaned over the center console and yanked the case off his own phone with his teeth, popped the back, thumbed at the battery. Old habit. Old caution. He threw the battery into the footwell and held his hand out.

Reem passed him Dee’s phone first.

The screen was still lit.

U TALK TOO MUCH.

Isaiah looked at it, expression flattening, then killed it too. Reem gave up his own. Luis’s last.

“We need that one on,” Reem said.

“We need to live long enough to read it,” Isaiah said.

Malcolm took a corner too fast. The car fishtailed, caught, and shot forward.

“Where?” Reem asked.

Malcolm looked at him in the rearview. Not scared. Not calm either. Just narrowed down to function. “Out.”

“That ain’t a place.”

“It is tonight.”

Sirens braided somewhere behind them, then peeled off another way. Reem twisted in his seat and looked through the rear glass. A pair of headlights stayed back three car lengths, then six, then gone when Malcolm swung under the rail bridge.

Nobody said Dee’s name again. Not because they didn’t want to. Because there wasn’t room in the car for one more dead friend.

Malcolm took them to a parking structure near the freight district where the concrete sweated rust through the seams. Third level. Empty except for a white work van backed into a corner and a shopping cart with one wheel folded under.

He killed the engine.

“For what?” Reem said.

Malcolm was already out.

The trunk popped. Inside was a duffel, a folded canvas jacket, a gallon jug of water, and plates wrapped in newspaper. Reem stared.

Isaiah did not.

“You had this ready?”

Malcolm stripped off his overshirt and pulled the canvas jacket on. “I got trained to think ahead. Try not to sound shocked.”

The joke died where it landed.

He switched plates with quick practiced movements, wrench in one hand, cigarette tucked behind one ear though he never smoked. Isaiah moved to help, then stopped and looked over the lip of the garage.

“What.”

Isaiah raised two fingers for silence.

Below them, down on the street, a black sedan rolled past once. Slowed. Kept going.

Reem felt something cold open under his ribs. “The same one from your apartment?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe ain’t good enough.”

“No,” Isaiah said. “It ain’t.”

Malcolm slammed the trunk shut. “Get in.”

They came down out of the structure in a different car than the one they’d arrived in, but Reem couldn’t shake the feeling that all they’d done was change shirts in front of a firing squad. Malcolm kept off the main roads, moving south through warehouse blocks where broken windows reflected the headlights in chopped-up pieces.

At a light near the river, Reem’s dead phone buzzed in Isaiah’s hand.

All three of them looked at it.

Isaiah held it by the edges like something dirty. “Battery’s out.”

“It ain’t yours,” Malcolm said.

Dee’s phone.

Cracked black glass. No battery. Still buzzing once against Isaiah’s palm before going still again.

Nobody spoke for two full seconds.

Then Malcolm drove through the red.

They crossed under the old billboard by Tasker. Passed the mini-storage place with the painted key on the wall. Passed a club with its sign dark and a line of cigarette butts shining wet along the curb. Reem watched for the black sedan and saw instead a silver SUV turn when they turned, keep pace when Malcolm sped up, disappear when Malcolm cut through a service road, then show up again two blocks later on the cross street.

“You got them,” Reem said.

“I know.”

“How?”

Isaiah was already turning in his seat, scanning behind them, then checking the side mirror. “Street side or office side.”

“Speak plain.”

“Somebody from Mercer saw us move. Or somebody from Celia’s side had enough pieces to guess where we’d run.” He looked at the dead phone again. “Or both.”

Malcolm said, “Don’t matter which if they coordinate.”

That landed harder than shouting would have.

Ahead, the on-ramp curled up toward the expressway. Freedom if they made it. State line in twenty minutes if traffic held. Reem could almost feel the city loosening its hand.

Then brake lights flared.

A box truck sat sideways across the ramp mouth, hazard lights blinking amber in the dark.

“Shit,” Malcolm said softly.

A horn blew behind them. The silver SUV rushed the gap, too fast to be lost traffic now, headlights flooding the backseat.

Malcolm jerked the wheel right and sent the car over the curb into a weed lot fenced with bent chain-link and chunks of broken pallet. The undercarriage screamed. Reem’s shoulder slammed the door.

Gunshots cracked from behind. Rear window burst inward in a glittering spray.

“Out!” Malcolm roared.

He braked so hard Reem bit his tongue.

Isaiah kicked his door open before the car fully stopped. Reem came after him into sour mud and crushed bottles, the air suddenly huge and loud around them. More shots. Muzzle flashes from the SUV. Another from near the cab of the box truck.

Malcolm leaned across the seat, grabbed the trunk release, and shouted, “Warehouse. Two blocks east. Red loading doors. Go!”

He shoved the pistol into Reem’s hand so hard the barrel banged Reem’s knuckles.

“What about—”

“Go!”

That voice. Marine-yard voice. Schoolyard voice. The same one Malcolm used when somebody had to move before fear got democratic.

Isaiah caught Reem by the jacket and dragged him toward a break in the fence while Malcolm fired twice through the blown rear window. The shots were measured, not wild. A man by the truck ducked back.

They ran.

Not straight. Never straight. Between concrete barriers, around a stack of split tires, over tracks gone dull with weeds. Reem heard Malcolm’s gun behind them. Heard a different gun answer. Heard Isaiah breathing through his teeth.

The warehouse showed itself all at once past a row of dead docks: a long brick building with painted letters half flaked off the top story and three rust-red loading doors chained shut. One side door hung crooked under a security lamp with no bulb in it.

Isaiah hit it shoulder first. The door gave an inch.

Behind them, Malcolm shouted.

Reem turned.

He saw Malcolm out in the lot by the abandoned car, one knee down behind the engine block, firing toward the SUV while two men moved wide to flank him. For one insane second it looked playable. Like if Reem ran back now, if he cut left, if he—

Malcolm looked straight at him across the dark and shook his head once.

Then the flank shot came from somewhere Reem hadn’t seen. A dry flat crack from the roofline of the storage office by the ramp.

Malcolm folded sideways before the sound was done.

Reem started back.

Isaiah hit him hard enough to drive the air out of him and shoved him through the side door just as bullets smacked brick around the frame.

Inside smelled like old paper, mouse nests, and machine oil. Isaiah slammed the door and dropped the steel bar into place. They stood in blackness broken only by a few high windows glazed with streetlight.

Reem stumbled forward, turned, and grabbed for the bar.

Isaiah put both hands on his chest and held him there.

“He’s down!”

“I know.”

“We can get him—”

“No.”

“You don’t know that.”

Isaiah’s face came in and out of shape in the weak light from above. Sweat on his forehead. A cut at his jawline he hadn’t had ten minutes ago. “Listen to me.”

Outside, somebody yanked the handle. Once. Twice. Then a boot hit the metal and made the whole door ring.

“He bought the minutes,” Isaiah said. “Don’t waste them.”

Reem stared at him.

Another kick. A man’s voice outside, muffled.

Then nothing.

Not peace. Listening.

Isaiah moved them away from the door and into the warehouse belly, stepping around coiled cable and smashed cases. As his eyes adjusted, the place assembled itself. A recording distribution space from another decade, maybe two. Empty pallet racks. Plastic bins. A glass-walled office up on a mezzanine with the company logo still ghosted on it: STERLING SOUND LOGISTICS. In one corner, a stack of warped acoustic panels leaned like tombstones. In another sat a shrink-wrapped mound of old CD jewel cases gone yellow at the edges.

Reem bent over and put his hands on his knees.

He could still see Malcolm dropping.

No dramatic movie grace to it. Just structure leaving flesh.

Isaiah found a battery lantern on a shelf, slapped it until it flickered on, then set it on an overturned crate. The yellow light pooled low, making everything else look farther away than it was.

“You hit?”

Reem shook his head.

Isaiah checked anyway, efficient hands patting jacket, ribs, thigh. “You’re cut here.” He pressed a rag from some long-dead packing station into Reem’s hairline. “Glass.”

Reem took it and pressed.

Isaiah walked the perimeter without rushing, testing doors, checking windows, finding another exit under the mezzanine chained from the inside. He came back with an old fire extinguisher and set it by the main door.

“You know this place?” Reem asked.

“Luis mentioned it in the note. Old distribution shell. Used to process promotional stock, then sat empty after the tax thing.” Isaiah looked up toward the office. “Nobody should think of it first.”

“Except you did.”

“That’s why we’re here.”

Reem slid down against a pallet stack and finally looked at the pistol in his hand. Malcolm’s grip tape around the butt. One strip peeling at the corner.

Isaiah crouched by him. “We got maybe an hour before they either commit or pull back and wait for us to get stupid.”

“They killed him.”

Isaiah didn’t answer.

“They killed Malcolm.”

Isaiah’s mouth tightened once. Then he reached into his jacket and brought out Luis’s phone and the charger block. “We finish this now.”

Reem laughed without sound. “Now?”

“Yes. Now. Before grief starts making decisions for us.”

He found an outlet by the office stairs, and after a breathless second the charging symbol lit. They sat on milk crates in the old yellow lantern light while the phone woke up slow, carrying the dead inside it.

There were more files buried deeper than they’d played at the apartment. Audio notes with no names. Videos shot by accident and on purpose. Photos of receipts, freight slips, handwritten columns. Luis had sorted some into a folder marked LAST.

Reem opened the first audio.

Static. Truck engine. Luis’s voice low, as if talking into his sleeve.

“If I’m wrong, burn this. If I’m right, don’t take no meeting where they choose the door.”

A scrape. He breathed out.

“They taking cash from Mercer work and South Ave work both. Hollow front it to show money. Appearance fee, promo budget, venue deposit, merch advance. You hear music words, it look clean. Only it ain’t your song paying. It’s them washing dope through nights that never happen and crowds bought by they own people.”

Reem sat still as concrete.

The recording kept going.

“Reem’s name good because he real. That’s why it work better now. First it was little—studio hours, fake feature payments, shell invoices to Wax’s room and two other spots. Then Celia start packaging it bigger. Showcase lists, canceled sets, sponsorship cash. M. Vane signs the back end through Newark companies and site vendors. Same money twice if you smart enough and mean enough.”

Isaiah was writing in the dark on the back of an old inventory sheet.

Reem played the next file.

Luis again, closer to the mic, fear making his whisper sharp. “Celia ain’t the whole roof. She know enough to drown, not enough to own it. The one inside her circle doing books is the young one. Dev. Smiles too much. Watches numbers more than faces. He catches what spikes, what disappears, where to route it so streams and show deposits hide each other. Vane clears it. Hollow feeds it. If Reem blows, they print legitimacy off him until the feds call it art.”

Reem shut his eyes.

Wax’s basement. The bounced hook. The first thrill of hearing himself come back through cheap monitors sharper than life. Hollow outside with his hand out. Celia saying industry night like she was granting him air. All that time he’d thought the music was the one clean thing dragging behind him.

Isaiah reached over and lowered the volume before the next file started. “There’s more.”

“Play it.”

It was video this time. Shaky. A conference room somewhere, caught through a narrow opening like Luis had hidden the phone in a lunch bag or jacket pocket. Celia’s profile. Vane, black suit, one hand moving over a ledger board mounted on an easel. And Dev in shirtsleeves, pointing to columns on a printout.

No sound for the first few seconds, then enough.

“…ticketing discrepancy works in our favor,” Dev was saying. “If the clip stays organic, we can bury cash injections under reactive spend.”

Vane said, “And Hollow?”

Celia answered that one. “He gets told what keeps him useful.”

The frame jostled. Lowered. Ended.

Reem looked at Isaiah. “She knew.”

Isaiah nodded once. “Maybe not every body. Enough numbers.”

Outside, metal clanged somewhere along the loading docks.

Both men went silent.

A flashlight beam slid pale under the side door and moved on.

Reem thumbed to the last audio.

Luis sounded tired in a way Reem had never heard from him back when they were boys. Not sleepy. Finished.

“If Kareem gets this, listen. They already using your road out as they road in. Don’t run where they point you. Don’t ask the one who talks sweet in the office. And don’t go to police empty. They make confusion for a living.”

The recording clicked. Then, like Luis had put the phone down and picked it back up because something still hurt inside him:

“Tell my mother I was trying to bring something clean home.”

The file ended.

Neither of them moved.

Up on the high windows, the city gave off its weak orange glow. Dust floated through it. A drip somewhere counted time badly.

Reem set the phone down with both hands.

Isaiah said, “We can still go federal. With this, with the calls, with Vane showing up at the funeral—”

“And wait where? Under whose camera? Under whose paperwork?” Reem looked at him. “Malcolm just died trying to get us to a road.”

Isaiah didn’t flinch. “So what are you saying.”

Reem stood.

Not fast. Not theatrical. He stood like a man getting up from a floor he understood too well.

He took the inventory sheet from Isaiah and looked at the names, arrows, dates, shell company initials, venue lines. Blue Room. Mercer & Hall. Newark contractors. Promo transfers. Ghost showcases. Hollow’s corners feeding figures into offices with clean glass and bottled water.

“They think I only move when I’m pushed,” Reem said.

Another flashlight beam crossed the crack under the door and paused there, thin and white as a blade.

Isaiah watched him carefully. “That’s because you have.”

Reem looked down at Malcolm’s pistol in his hand, then at Luis’s phone, then toward the dark loading doors where whoever was outside waited for fear or hunger or grief to make them sloppy.

“For the first time,” he said, “they’re right behind me and I ain’t running.”

Isaiah’s eyes narrowed. “Then say the next part.”

Reem looked up at the ghosted office logo, at a building built to move music from one place to another, to make copies, to make records travel farther than the people who made them.

“We make them come where the lights are on,” he said.

Outside, a key scraped metal at the side door. Slow. Patient. Like whoever held it expected to get in.

The bass was already thudding through the cinder-block wall when Reem came in through the Blue Room kitchen and nearly clipped a bus tub full of melted ice and lime rinds.

A prep cook looked up from a cutting board, took one second too long on Reem’s face, then went back to dicing cilantro like none of this had anything to do with him. Beyond the swinging door, the club was all cobalt light and bodies tightening toward the stage. Glassware clinked. Somebody laughed too hard. Somebody else was already drunk enough to shout the hook before the DJ even teased it.

Wax stood at the side of the stage in a black zip hoodie, headset crooked over one ear, staring at the soundboard tablet like it might spit on him.

“You late,” Wax said.

“I’m breathing. That’s on time.”

Wax’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile. He handed Reem a wireless mic, then bent and clipped the bodypack at the back of his jeans. His fingers shook once. “Don’t mute this unless I tell you.”

Reem looked at him. “Thought that was the whole point.”

“Whole point,” Wax said, eyes still on the pack. “Just don’t get creative without telling me first.”

Onstage, the DJ brought the crowd down with both palms, let the room hush in pockets, then slammed another beat into the floor. The room answered with a ragged yell. Somewhere up front, girls were already holding their phones high enough to catch the lights off the screens. To the right, the VIP balcony ran above the bar in a horseshoe. Frosted bottles on the ledge. Men in button-downs leaning like they owned the rail. Women dressed sharp enough to look expensive in the dark.

Reem glanced up there and saw Celia first.

Cream suit. No coat. One hand around a lowball glass she wasn’t drinking from. Beside her, Dev in slate gray, looking younger than his job had any right to make him. He kept checking his phone and then the floor and then the side entrance near the bathrooms. Not nervous, exactly. Accounting for movement.

Vane wasn’t beside them.

That meant he was coming.

Reem took the burner from his pocket. One message from Isaiah waited on the lock screen.

Package sent. Confirmed receipt. They want chain, not ghosts. Keep them in place.

Another came in while he was reading.

If you see a white windbreaker near the side bar, that’s ours.

He deleted both texts and gave the phone back to his pocket.

Wax said, low, “You still sure?”

Reem kept looking at the balcony. “You still guilty?”

Wax flinched like something small and sharp had gone into him. “I sent tracks. Dates. That’s what I did. I told myself it was promotion. Somebody asks what night, what venue, who’s on the bill, I say it. I never touched money.”

“But you smelled it.”

Wax looked toward the booth. Toward the stage. Toward anywhere but Reem. “Yeah.”

Reem nodded once. That was all he had for him.

A security guard in a burgundy jacket moved over. “Two minutes.”

Reem rolled his shoulders and stepped into the slit of darkness between curtain and speaker stack. The crowd looked bigger from there. Hotter. Packed shoulder to shoulder all the way to the back columns. Sweat, perfume, fryer grease from the kitchen, sweet rot of spilled liquor gone sticky on the floor. His face was on the flyer screens by the bar, grainy and huge and not quite him.

For a second he thought of Mercer. Not in some soft way. Not memory like sunlight. The block had never given sunlight easy. He thought of the old lot dirt under his sneakers, the stop sign ringing from a broomstick, the boys he’d once lined up with cut thumbs and big mouths, all of them dumb enough to believe a promise spoken out loud could bar the door against the world.

Wax touched his elbow. “If you say ‘run it back,’ I’ll switch source A to the house and balcony fills. If you say ‘Mercer forever,’ I dump everything live.”

“Everything?”

Wax swallowed. “Everything.”

The DJ shouted his name.

The room cracked open.

Reem stepped into the lights.

The first roar hit him in the chest harder than any punch Hollow had ever thrown. It wasn’t clean. It wasn’t pretty. It came in pieces from a hundred throats and phones and tables and the back bar, and it all reached for him at once. He felt it under his ribs. Felt why men sold their souls for it. Felt why he nearly had.

He let the beat breathe one bar too long, then came in sharp.

The hook landed and the room knew it before he finished the first line. They were with him immediately, mouths moving ahead of the track, girls leaning over the rail, one guy down front pounding the stage edge with his fist like he could help hold the rhythm up. Reem moved across the boards and took it all in without staring too long anywhere. Balcony. Bar. Left exit. Security by the sound cage. White windbreaker near side bar, just like Isaiah said. Woman, short hair, no drink in her hand. Watching the room, not the stage.

Federal, or fed-adjacent. Good enough.

Second verse. Reem cut half the old words and drove the new ones harder.

I learned real quick clean hands still count dirty money /
same smile at the table, same grave when it come for me /

A noise went through the room. Not booing. Not confusion. Recognition trying to catch up.

At the balcony rail, Celia stopped pretending to sip. Dev said something to her. She didn’t answer.

Reem kept going.

South side of the contract, north side of the gun /
if your office too bright, then your shadow hiding someone /

The DJ looked over. That verse wasn’t in the version they rehearsed. Reem didn’t look back.

He gave them the hook again, bigger this time, and the crowd took over enough for him to breathe inside it. Up on the balcony, another figure finally came through the side hall and into the low blue wash.

Black suit. White shirt. No expression from this distance.

Vane.

He stayed one step behind the rail, not offering himself to the room. That alone told Reem everything. Men like that understood sightlines.

Reem finished the song to a wall of noise. Arms up. Phones up. The DJ crashed into the tag. Reem paced back, chest heaving, sweat cooling under the stage lights.

The stage manager rushed in with a towel. Reem ignored it.

“Run it back,” he said into the mic.

Wax heard him.

There was half a second of dead air.

Then, instead of the beat dropping again, Dev’s voice came through the Blue Room sound system so clean it felt like he was standing in the center of the club.

“…ticketing discrepancy works in our favor. If the clip stays organic, we can bury cash injections under reactive spend.”

The room froze on the inhale.

Reem didn’t move.

Up on the balcony, Celia’s head snapped toward the booth. Dev went white, then lunged for the rail, scanning for whoever he could blame first. Vane didn’t flinch. He looked straight at Reem.

On the house speakers, Vane’s own voice followed.

“And Hollow?”

Then Celia, flat as paper: “He gets told what keeps him useful.”

The crowd broke into noise all at once. Not cheering now. Questions. Curses. People turning to each other, phones held higher. Someone near the back laughed because that’s what people did when fear and entertainment touched in the same place. The DJ backed away from his table with both hands up.

Security started pushing toward the stage.

Celia vanished from the rail.

Vane was already moving for the side stairs.

Reem spoke into the live mic before anybody could cut him. “Keep recording.”

That sent another surge through the room. Every phone still up got steadier.

His burner vibrated against his thigh. He didn’t check it.

From stage left, a broad hand closed on his arm.

“Off,” the security guard said. “Now.”

Reem jerked free. “You want your club on every page tomorrow, let me walk.”

The guard hesitated because he recognized the math. That was enough.

Reem cut behind the curtain, through a narrow hall stinking of bleach and old beer lines, and nearly ran into Celia coming the other way. Up close she looked less polished. Hair at one temple damp. Jaw tight enough to show the hinge under the skin.

“What did you do?” she said.

Reem kept the mic in his hand. “Asked for a better intro.”

“You have no idea what room you’re standing in.”

He leaned in, close enough to smell her citrus perfume over the sweat. “I know Luis died trying to bring your room into daylight.”

Her eyes changed then. Not guilt. Irritation. The kind a person gets when a problem they thought was contained starts speaking in complete sentences.

Behind her, Dev rounded the corner with Vane and two men Reem hadn’t seen before. One heavy through the chest, one wiry with a shaved head and a hand already inside his jacket.

Vane stopped three paces away. “Kareem.”

Nobody used that name unless they wanted something from him or over him.

“You should have taken the deal,” Vane said.

Reem lifted the mic. “You should’ve stayed at the funeral.”

Vane’s gaze flicked to the microphone, then to the bodypack wire under Reem’s shirt. He understood immediately.

“Kill the feed,” he said, not loudly.

Wax’s voice came through the hall monitor speaker instead.

“No.”

Everybody in the corridor looked up.

For one strange beat, Reem saw all of them register Wax at the same time—the harmless basement man, the engineer, the little rat they had each used for different reasons—and none of them had bothered to imagine him with a spine.

Dev swore and took off toward the booth stairs.

Reem moved first. He shoved Celia hard into the wall, not to hurt her, just to break the shape of the corridor, then drove his shoulder into the wiry man reaching for the gun. They hit a stack of folding chairs. Metal clattered. The pistol came free and skidded under a linen cart.

The heavy man drew.

Vane stepped back fast, practiced at clearing space around violence. Celia ducked low with both arms over her head.

The first shot went off so close the flash lit the hallway white.

People screamed out in the club. Through the curtains, the crowd sound changed from confusion to stampede.

Reem slammed the heavy man’s gun wrist against the cinder-block corner. Once. Twice. The third time the man lost his grip. Reem caught the gun, turned, and Hollow came through the service door at the far end like a storm that had finally found the address.

He had two men with him and murder already plain on his face.

Everything narrowed.

Hollow took in the hall in one sweep—Celia on the floor, Vane backing off, one of his own people not there, the crowd noise boiling outside, Reem with a gun and a live mic in his fist—and his mouth curled not with surprise but insult.

“You put me on speakers?” Hollow said.

Reem heard Wax on the monitor, breathing hard. Still live.

Hollow heard it too.

Vane’s voice cut in, cool and useless. “Darryl. Listen before you make this—”

“Make?” Hollow barked out a laugh. “That office lady got me fed to every hot corner in this city and you talking make?”

He swung his pistol toward Vane.

Vane’s heavy man went for his own weapon.

The hall exploded.

Reem dropped flat as rounds chewed plaster and punched sparks off a metal doorframe. Celia crawled for cover and vanished under the linen cart. One of Hollow’s men spun and folded against the wall. Vane was yelling something Reem couldn’t hear because the corridor had become one long metallic scream.

On the monitor speaker, Wax shouted, “Move, Reem, move—”

Then a new sound split through everything. Not the speaker. Real. Close. Wax’s voice from the stairwell itself.

Reem twisted and saw him halfway down from the booth, one hand on the rail, the other clutching a flash drive like that mattered anymore.

“Isaiah said the feds—”

The bullet hit Wax in the throat.

It took his sentence away like it had never belonged to him.

He went backward into the rail, sat there for one impossible second with both eyes wide in pure offended shock, then slid down the steps leaving a dark, fast stripe.

Reem got to his knees.

Hollow was still firing, not at Wax, not at anybody with any plan except whoever was left in front of him. Years of orders and percentages and being told what kept him useful had finally reached the place where a man either swallowed it or started killing everybody in sight.

Vane had his own gun out now. Small, black, expensive-looking. He shot once from behind the heavy man’s shoulder.

Hollow jerked.

Not down. Not yet.

He looked almost confused, then angry at his own body for failing him. Blood spread across the front of his jacket in a fast, dark flower. He lifted his weapon again anyway.

Reem fired before he could.

One shot.

Hollow hit the wall hard enough to rattle the framed liquor poster behind him, then slid down it crooked, leaving a red drag. His gun dropped beside his knee. His eyes found Reem through all the noise and for a second they looked almost young, stripped of performance, stripped of legend, just a Mercer man who had reached too greedily for every room and bled out in a service hallway that smelled like stale beer and bleach.

Then his focus went.

Sirens hit the block outside in layers.

Not one car. Many.

Vane saw the same end Reem did and turned for the rear exit. Dev was already gone. Celia came out from under the cart on her hands, shoes abandoned somewhere behind her, face set in a hard animal line.

“Don’t let him leave,” Reem said into the mic, though he didn’t know if anyone in the room, on the street, or in the law was still listening.

The answer came not from the hall speaker but from his burner, buzzing again and again in his pocket.

He snatched it out.

Isaiah, voice clipped, no greeting. “Front and side are sealed. Task force took two from the balcony. Vane’s headed loading dock if he’s moving. Are you hit?”

Reem looked at Wax crumpled on the stair, blood pumping slower now but still coming. Looked at Hollow dead against the wall. Looked at Celia wiping somebody else’s blood from her cheek with the back of her hand as if she could erase being present.

“I’m up,” Reem said.

On the club side of the curtain, the crowd was still breaking apart in waves, hundreds of feet and voices and dropped glasses and phones pointed backward now, toward the place where the music had opened and shown its wiring.

Isaiah said, “Then get to the dock.”

Reem tightened his grip on the gun and the mic, one in each hand, and ran toward the red-lit corridor at the back while the sirens climbed and somebody behind him—maybe Celia, maybe Wax trying to breathe, maybe one of Hollow’s men not done yet—made a sound that stopped being human halfway through.

The loading dock door slammed the wall and bounced back at Reem’s shoulder.

He hit it again with his forearm and came through into a spill of white security light, pallets stacked crooked beside the bay, a hand truck on its side, busted shrink-wrap fluttering under somebody’s shoe. The whole back of the Blue Room smelled like fryer grease, diesel, and the sour leak from a dumpster that needed emptying two days ago.

Vane was twenty feet ahead of him, cutting toward the chain gate.

No overcoat now. Just a black suit jacket hanging open, shirt collar dark with sweat, one hand clamped around that little pistol like he still believed neat things could save a man in a dirty place. Celia came behind him barefoot, one heel in her fist, hair loose for the first time since Reem had known her. Dev was nowhere.

“Gate!” somebody shouted from the alley mouth.

Not Vane. Not Celia. Law.

Men in dark raid jackets poured in from both sides at once, hard and fast, shoulders low, guns up. The word FEDERAL flashed across one back in yellow block letters as he slid across the hood of a parked sedan and came up aiming.

Vane stopped.

For one second it almost looked like calculation might still work for him. He turned halfway, tracking exits, measuring bodies, weighing the little gun against the rifles pointed at his chest. Then his eyes landed on Reem.

“You,” Vane said, breathing hard. “All this for a song.”

Reem still had the mic in one hand.

Its green light was on.

Somewhere inside, or out on the street, or on a hundred phones held by strangers who didn’t know his name yesterday and were screaming it tonight, that dock was still listening to him breathe.

“It wasn’t the song,” Reem said.

Vane’s mouth moved like he had another clean sentence ready. A better one. The kind spoken over desks, over contracts, over men who never got invited upstairs. He never got it out.

“Drop it!” an agent barked.

Celia let the heel fall. It clacked across the concrete and spun under a pallet.

Vane raised the gun instead of dropping it.

Three red dots climbed his shirt. Chest, throat, cheek.

He saw them. Reem saw him see them.

Then Vane opened his fingers.

The pistol hit the ground.

Everything happened ugly after that. Hands on heads. Knees kicked apart. Celia cursing at a woman agent while her wrists got pulled behind her. Somebody behind Reem shouting for medical. Another voice yelling that the balcony pair were secure, the accountant wasn’t found, search the kitchen, search the office, search every vehicle in the lot. Through it all the mic kept carrying his breath and the sirens kept sawing at the block.

Isaiah came through the gate last, suit jacket gone, shirt stuck to his back, phone still in his hand. He looked at Reem once, quick, making sure the holes in his clothes weren’t the kind that bled.

Then his eyes shifted past him, to where the bodies were still inside.

He didn’t ask which ones.

Reem lowered the mic.

“You got him,” he said.

Isaiah looked at Vane face-down on the concrete with his hands zip-tied behind him, gray hair full of dock dust. “We got tonight,” he said. “That’s different.”

A camera flash went off from somewhere past the police tape. Then another.

By morning the whole city knew the hook.

By afternoon they knew the names they were allowed to print and the names they were still “verifying through sources.” Celia’s booking photo ran first because it was cleaner. Vane’s came after, his expression already back under control, as if jail was just another room he meant to dominate. Hollow made the news for six hours and then got folded into a phrase about gang ties and retaliatory violence, the kind of sentence that took a whole life and flattened it to fit a lower-third graphic.

Wax died before sunrise.

Malcolm got full honors and a folded flag that looked too crisp for what it meant.

Dee’s mother kept saying her son wasn’t no headline and then flinching every time a car door shut outside the funeral home.

Luis had already been buried, but his name came back through every affidavit, every clipped report, every chain of blame men tried to hand each other once they learned the walls were finally listening. The dead crowded the room even when only two people stood in it.

Reem gave statements until his throat felt lined with sand. He sat in one federal office with a paper cup of bad coffee and watched agents pause the same hallway footage over and over, freezing faces he’d once crossed streets for, faces he’d once nodded to under summer streetlights like that meant belonging. Isaiah did most of the talking when the questions got lawyer-shaped. Reem answered the rest and kept his hands flat on the table.

Outside, the record moved like fire through dry trash.

The labels came back different after the indictments started. Less slick. More careful. Rick Haskell sent flowers to Janice’s apartment and a new term sheet to Isaiah’s email. Tanya wanted to “honor the story without exploiting trauma,” which made Isaiah laugh so hard he had to mute the phone. Dev, once they picked him up trying to book a flight with a shaved beard and no checked luggage, started bargaining in pieces. Names. Percentages. Routing. Ticketing. Venues. Construction invoices. Promo budgets. Enough for the papers to say enterprise instead of rumor.

Reem signed nothing for eleven days.

On the twelfth, he sat in a conference room with windows that looked over the river and crossed out three clauses himself before sliding the contract back. No ownership of his masters after a set term. No morality language broad enough to turn grief into breach. Touring delayed until Janice and Nia were moved and the security team answered to him, not the label.

Rick blinked at him.

His lawyer started to object.

Isaiah, sitting one chair over in a dark tie he still wore like it offended him, said, “You heard him.”

The lawyer shut up.

The single kept climbing anyway. Then the live clip from the Blue Room leaked in full, raw audio, crowd screams under it, Celia’s voice caught just enough to ruin her forever. People called it brave. People called it genius. People called it street opera, confession, blood art, the sound of a city eating its own tail. Reem stopped reading after the third day.

At night he still heard Wax trying to finish a sentence.

Two months later, with the first real check cleared and the last signatures on Janice’s new place done, Reem drove back to Mercer in a rental that still smelled like dealership plastic.

Isaiah rode beside him with a banker’s box on his lap and a roll of packing tape wedged by his thigh. He had cut his hair shorter since the showcase. He looked leaner now, more expensive maybe, but the set of his mouth at certain intersections belonged to the same boy who used to count cop cars from the stoop and pretend it was a game.

Neither of them spoke when Mercer came into view.

The block had shrunk.

That was the first ugly trick of leaving: nothing got smaller except what used to hold your whole life. The corner store’s awning was newer but just as crooked. The rec fence still leaned inward where kids had climbed it for years. Somebody had painted over the mural on the side wall and already lost half the battle; old names and colors bled through the fresh coat like bruises surfacing.

Reem parked in front of his mother’s building.

Not his mother’s anymore, really. The windows were dark. Janice had taken what she needed. Nia had taken more than anybody expected and still complained the whole time. What was left upstairs were the things nobody reaches for until moving day forces the truth—milk crates of school papers, a lamp with no shade, a broken CD tower, winter coats too thin to save.

Isaiah got out and stood with the box in his arms, looking up at the brick.

“You still got the key?”

Reem held it up. Brass worn smooth, blue tape wrapped around the top from years ago so Janice could tell it from the others.

“Thought she’d throw this out before me,” he said.

Isaiah almost smiled. “She tried. You know that.”

The hallway inside smelled the same: mop water, old cooking oil, radiator heat trapped in cinder block. On the second-floor landing somebody had added a ring camera above their door. The apartment across from theirs still had the dent where Malcolm once shoulder-checked it by accident running from a bottle rocket gone wrong, then argued for a week that physics should apologize to him.

Reem opened the door.

Silence inside had a shape.

The kitchen table was gone, leaving a pale square in the linoleum where the legs had spared the floor from sun. The refrigerator hummed to itself. Janice had cleaned before leaving because of course she had; even the empty cabinets looked judged. On top of one counter sat the salt shaker she used to keep money under, packed in newspaper now, ready to go.

Isaiah set the box down.

Reem walked to the back bedroom.

The walls were stripped except for one square of tape near the window where a flyer had hung too long. His mattress was gone. So was the milk crate studio stand he’d built from stolen plywood and bad ambition. In the closet he found an old spiral notebook under a sneaker box, cover swollen from damp years back. When he opened it, whole pages of bars stared up at him in the handwriting of a boy trying to sound older than his lungs.

He flipped until he found one line he barely remembered writing:

If I leave this block breathing, I’ma owe it everything.

He shut the notebook.

From the front room Isaiah said, “You got company.”

Reem came out.

Two boys stood in the doorway, maybe fifteen, maybe younger pretending hard. One wore a puffer vest over a school hoodie. The other had a phone already half-raised, not filming yet, just testing whether the moment belonged to him.

“Yo,” the taller one said. “That’s really you.”

Reem leaned against the doorframe. “Seems like.”

The boy with the phone looked past him into the apartment. “You moving back?”

Isaiah snorted.

Reem said, “No.”

The boys took that in. The word sat there between them heavier than it should have.

The taller one nodded toward the notebook in Reem’s hand. “My cousin say you used to rap on the roof for free.”

“Your cousin lie?”

“Nah. He say you ain’t have no beats half the time. Just did it over sirens.”

Reem looked at him. Something open, almost hopeful, flickered and got hidden fast.

“What you do?” Reem asked.

The kid shrugged. “Whatever.”

“That ain’t a thing.”

The shrug hardened. Mercer teaching posture in real time. “Music some. I cut hair. My man got me doing drops here and there.”

Isaiah shifted his weight once. Nothing else.

Reem said, “Drops for who?”

The boy’s eyes went flat. “Ain’t your business.”

“No,” Reem said. “It used to be.”

Nobody moved.

Down on the street a car horn chirped twice. Somewhere a woman yelled from a window for somebody to bring her baby inside. The kid with the phone lowered it a little.

Reem handed him the notebook.

The boy took it with both hands before he realized he was doing that.

“Keep that,” Reem said. “Read the bad pages too.”

The taller one frowned. “Why you giving me this?”

“Because if you copy the wrong parts of my life, they bury you before you learn the right ones.”

The boy looked at the cover, then back at Reem. “You made it though.”

Reem glanced past them, down the hall, toward the stairs that led out to Mercer.

Three gone.

Two left.

He said, “That depends what you count.”

They carried the last boxes down without speaking much after that. A fan with two blades bent. Janice’s church programs tied with a rubber band. Nia’s spelling tests. A photo album with the vinyl cracking at the corners. Reem found one picture tucked loose between pages: five boys on the block, shoulders touching, all knees and elbows, sweating through white tees, trying not to grin too hard because the camera was there. Malcolm looked defiant even sitting still. Luis had one eye half closed like he never trusted flashes. Dee’s arm was slung around Isaiah’s neck. Reem himself was in front, chin lifted, already performing for a future that hadn’t agreed yet.

He slipped the photo into his jacket pocket.

By the time they loaded the trunk, streetlights had begun to buzz on one by one.

Isaiah shut the last box in. “That it?”

Reem looked up the block.

The stoop where they used to sit was empty now except for a grocery flyer plastered to one step by old rain. The bodega gate was half down. A cluster of girls passed laughing, one of them humming his hook without knowing he could hear her. Across the street, two little kids bounced a flat ball against a wall and argued over a foul nobody called.

“It’s enough,” Reem said.

They didn’t get in the car right away.

Isaiah leaned against the trunk. “You ever feel like leaving late is its own punishment?”

Reem took his keys out, rolled them once across his knuckles. “Late compared to who?”

Isaiah watched a patrol car crawl through the intersection and keep going. “Compared to who we were supposed to be.”

Reem let that sit.

Then he said, “You were always supposed to leave.”

Isaiah shook his head. “That’s what people say when they need one of us to make the brochure.”

“And me?”

Isaiah looked at him then, direct as ever. “You were supposed to die for somebody else’s business and get called complicated after.”

A laugh came out of Reem before he could stop it. Short. Rough. True.

“Yeah,” he said. “Probably.”

Isaiah’s face softened for half a second. “But here you are.”

Reem looked down Mercer one more time. Not for permission. Not for blessing. Just to see it plain. The boarded rowhouse with the spray-painted saints on the plywood. The cracked sidewalk seam where Luis once split his chin wide open racing Malcolm. The fire escape Dee used to climb because he never carried keys. The corner where Hollow first told him small trips lead to bigger ones, and bigger ones to what, exactly, nobody said out loud because boys will say yes to a door before they ask who built the room behind it.

He opened the driver’s door.

Isaiah got in on the passenger side, careful with the photo album on his lap.

Reem started the car but kept it at the curb a second longer.

“You think they’d be mad?” he said.

Isaiah didn’t ask who.

“For what?”

“For us being the ones.”

Isaiah looked down at the album, thumb resting on the worn edge. “Some days,” he said. “Some days I think they’d tell us to quit wasting the chance.”

Reem nodded.

At the corner, the taller boy from upstairs had come out to the sidewalk with the notebook tucked under his arm. He didn’t wave. He just watched the car the way kids on Mercer always watched anything leaving, measuring whether it was escape or just distance.

Reem put the car in gear.

They rolled past the stoop, the rec, the half-painted wall, the church where grief had kept finding them, and then the light at the end of the block turned yellow.

He could have made it.

Instead he braked.

Isaiah looked over. “What?”

Reem watched the yellow burn into red. Watched cross traffic cut through. Watched Mercer hold still around them one last time.

Then he said, “Nothing.”

His foot stayed on the brake until the light changed for real.

When it did, he drove.

“Stop it there.”

The conference speaker clicked dead.

Everybody in the room looked at Reem except the court reporter, who kept her fingers moving over the steno keys like rain on tin. Isaiah sat to his right in a dark tie he hadn’t loosened all day, one hand flat on a yellow pad. Across the polished table, an assistant U.S. attorney with a navy suit and a tired mouth reached for the remote again.

“We still need the portion after the balcony voices,” she said.

“I heard it.”

“We need you on the record identifying what you heard.”

Reem leaned back. The chair had too much give in it. The room smelled like copier heat and old coffee baked onto a burner somewhere down the hall. No windows. Just a wall clock with a red second hand jerking around the face like it had somewhere urgent to be.

“You want me to say that was Celia.” Reem kept his eyes on the dead speaker. “I said that already.”

“We want you to say whether the male voice underneath hers is Dev Mercer.”

Isaiah’s pen tapped once on the pad. Stop there. Not out loud. Just enough.

Reem looked at the assistant U.S. attorney. “You know his last name too now?”

She didn’t answer that. A federal agent near the door shifted his weight and looked down at his file instead.

The attorney folded her hands. “Mr. Mercer, there are differences between what the public heard and what the full recording contains.”

“That ain’t news.”

“Then help us make it admissible.”

He laughed once. No humor in it. Just breath and teeth.

On the far end of the table sat a woman from the label’s outside counsel office, there as an observer and pretending not to be one. Cream blouse. Sharp pen. Expensive silence. Since the raid, rooms had started filling with people like that—people who knew how tragedy could be itemized, cleaned up, turned into rights, exposure, leverage.

Reem said, “You trying to build a case or an album rollout?”

The label woman looked down at her notes fast enough to count as guilt.

Isaiah spoke before the attorney could. “Play the stairwell segment.”

The attorney hesitated. “That section is under seal pending—”

“Play it,” Isaiah said, and for a second his voice lost all office softness. The room heard the old part under it. The part that did not make suggestions.

The agent by the door passed a glance to the attorney. She hit the remote.

Static first.

Then the Blue Room came back to life in pieces—crowd noise smeared by distance, bass humming through the floor, somebody shouting for security, the thud of shoes in a corridor. Reem felt his jaw set before the voices even arrived. He knew the shape of this sound now. It had started living in his body separate from memory.

A man’s voice, tight and low: “Kill that feed. Kill the feed now.”

Another voice, closer to the mic, breathless. Wax.

“Don’t touch—”

The next sound was a scuffle against metal, cable snap, a grunt, and then the gunshot. Close enough to clip the signal. Close enough that the reporter flinched and missed a stroke.

The room stayed still.

Then a third voice came through, half swallowed by the stairwell echo. “Vane said now, stupid.”

The attorney paused it.

Nobody talked.

Reem stared at the black speaker grille on the table as if it had a face.

Isaiah said, “That’s not Hollow’s voice.”

“No,” the attorney said carefully. “Our audio team agrees.”

“Then say it plain.”

She drew in a breath. “The working conclusion is that Mr. Wax was shot by one of Vane’s men in an attempt to terminate the live transmission.”

Working conclusion. Like the man had not bled to death with his throat open under club lighting while girls in heels screamed in the next room.

Reem rubbed his thumb against the edge of the table until the skin went hot. Wax, with his ashtray laugh and his milk-crate throne and his habit of tapping the side of a headphone cup before saying run it back. Wax, who had known enough to be scared and still left the mic up.

The attorney said, “Mr. Mercer, for the record, do you recognize the speaker saying ‘Vane said now’?”

“I recognize what happened.”

“That’s not responsive.”

Reem looked up finally. “Then write this. Y’all cut a leak for the news and left the bones out. Now you want me to fill in the missing blood so the paperwork got a cleaner shape.”

The reporter stopped typing. The room held.

Isaiah put a hand over Reem’s forearm, light enough to deny if anyone mentioned it later.

“Answer what you can,” he said.

So Reem did. He gave them Celia’s voice, because there was no point pretending. He gave them Dev too, heard under her, naming route language like he was ordering lunch.

Back-end tickets.
Phantom venue holds.
Job-site cash washed through vendor reimbursements.
Smaller markets first so nobody asks.

The words had sounded bloodless on the tape. Worse that way.

When it ended, the attorney switched off the speaker and the room exhaled.

“We’ll need you again next week,” she said.

“I’m busy.”

“With what?”

Isaiah answered for him. “Staying alive. Court-approved relocation logistics. A mother who didn’t ask for any of this. Pick one.”

The attorney’s mouth tightened. “We are trying to protect your family.”

Reem stood before she finished.

His chair rolled back and kissed the wall. The label woman looked up, alert now that the meeting was moving toward what she was really here for.

“Before you go,” she said, “there’s concern around secondary ownership of the live capture.”

Isaiah didn’t even sit straighter. He just turned his head toward her. “Say that again slower so I can hear how shameless it sounds.”

She colored, but not much. “The recording has market value independent of criminal use.”

Reem put both palms on the table and leaned in enough to make her stop writing. “That tape got dead men inside it.”

Her pen stayed still.

He straightened, took his coat from the back of the chair, and walked out before anybody could turn grief into bullet points again.

In the hallway, Isaiah caught him at the elevators.

“Don’t swing on a federal building,” he said.

Reem jabbed the down button hard enough to light it twice. “Wasn’t planning to.”

“You were thinking it.”

“I was thinking a lot.”

Isaiah held a slim folder against his side. He had started carrying folders everywhere. Gray ones, blue ones, manila ones bowed with copies and signatures and names of people who now needed aliases to book a flight. He looked thinner than he had on Mercer, but not weaker. Just stripped down to function.

“Janice’s new lease got approved this morning,” Isaiah said.

Reem looked over. “For real?”

“Third-floor walk-up. Southwest side. Quiet block. Pharmacy on the corner, decent church two streets over, no direct line to anybody we know.”

“No direct line,” Reem said. “You talk like witness protection.”

Isaiah glanced at him. “Maybe because men with clean shoes keep trying to learn your rehearsal schedule.”

The elevator came. Inside, the mirrored wall caught them both and flattened them into courthouse versions—one in a charcoal suit he still wore like it had insulted him, the other in a white shirt gone soft at the collar from too many long days.

As the doors shut, Isaiah opened the folder.

“You’re not going home tonight.”

Reem was already shaking his head. “I got a session at eight.”

“It moved.”

“Who moved it?”

“I did.”

Reem gave him a look. “You enjoy this?”

Isaiah flipped to a page and started reading. “Driver pickup changed. Hotel under different name. Tomorrow’s studio uses rear loading access only. No livestreams, no geotags, no same-day schedule on any assistant’s phone. Janice’s church transfer gets handled through a post office box, not online. You show up to court with two men in front, one behind, and none of them hired by the label.”

“You building Fort Knox around a hook.”

“I’m building a chain of command because the last time people improvised, three blocks and a nightclub turned into a morgue.”

The elevator opened to the lobby.

Reem walked out first. The floor was marble veined like old bruises. Security guards by the revolving door watched everybody without seeming to. Outside, traffic pushed past in a dirty ribbon. A food cart on the corner smoked with onions and fryer grease.

Isaiah caught his sleeve before he hit the sidewalk. “I know you hate this.”

“You don’t know half.”

“I know enough.”

Reem pulled free, but not hard. “You ain’t my manager.”

“No,” Isaiah said. “I’m the reason your mother isn’t still sleeping under that same window Hollow had photographed.”

That landed. Clean.

Reem looked out through the revolving glass. A bike messenger cut between cabs. A woman dragged a roller bag over a crack and swore under her breath. Life, busy with itself.

He said, quieter, “Did she like the place?”

Isaiah let go of his sleeve. “She asked if the kitchen gets good light. She asked where she was supposed to put the casserole dish with the blue flowers on it. So yes. I think she likes the place.”

Reem nodded once.

Then Isaiah added, “She also asked why nobody lets her know anything until after.”

Reem almost smiled. “That sound like her.”

“It does.”

They stepped outside.

A black SUV waited at the curb with the engine on. New driver. Broad shoulders. Collar too tight. Reem clocked him, then the second man across the street pretending to study his phone with a coiled earpiece disappearing into his jacket.

“You hired him?” Reem asked.

Isaiah said, “No. I fired the people who would’ve.”

Late that night, in a rented apartment three neighborhoods from the address anybody had on file, Reem sat alone at a folding table with Luis’s phone, a pair of studio headphones, and the full audio export on a government-issued drive.

The place had almost nothing in it. One lamp with a dented shade. A couch that smelled faintly like bleach. Two paper grocery bags on the counter holding water bottles, crackers, a jar of peanut butter, and oranges with their stickers still on. Somebody had tried to make safe feel practical.

Isaiah had gone to meet a deputy clerk about sealed filings and witness windows and some other phrase that turned men into scheduling problems. The security outside the door had strict instructions not to bother Reem unless the building caught fire or bullets started introducing themselves.

He clicked play.

No crowd this time. No press-cut version with the peaks smoothed out and names bleeped for broadcast. This was the whole ugly thing. Green room hum. Stage chatter. Mic fabric scrape. Hollow’s voice from farther back than Reem had understood that night, not kingly at all, just irritated, waiting for someone else’s nod.

“Do what she said and keep him moving.”

A pause.

Then Dev, casual. “He trends better if he thinks this is his break.”

Reem took the headphones off and set them on the table.

For a long second he just stared at them.

Then he put them back on.

The tape rolled.

Celia’s heels on concrete. Vane speaking low enough that the mic only caught every third word. Numbers. Hold times. Newark. Insurance language. Vendor shells. It all fit uglier now. Hollow hadn’t been sitting at the top of anything. He’d been a neighborhood knife handed to cleaner hands, told where to cut, praised when he cut deep, blamed when blood got visible.

Reem let the tape keep going.

There was the onstage moment. His own voice, rawer than he remembered, coming back at him from the room. He could hear the crowd taking half a breath to decide whether they were watching a performance or a confession.

Then corridor noise. Running. Somebody crying. Somebody laughing because panic sometimes wears the wrong face.

Wax again, before the shot. Softer this time, barely there under the static.

“Reem, if you hear—”

That was all. The rest got torn open by the stairwell scuffle and the gun.

Reem closed his eyes.

He saw the basement under Harlan instead: carpet scraps pinned to the wall, dust on the mixer, Wax holding up one finger when a take mattered. Run it once more. Don’t push the top note. Let the ugly stay.

The tape moved on.

Hollow came in hot, cursing, not sounding powerful, sounding late. One of his men asked, “They ain’t tell you?” and Hollow snapped back, “Shut up and move.” Then Vane’s voice, clear as day, flat as poured cement:

“You were useful. Don’t get confused.”

Reem opened his eyes.

There it was. No spin left in it. No myth. All that terror on Mercer, all that borrowed fear Hollow wore like a fur coat, and some man with cuff links had still been talking to him like hired muscle in a hallway.

Reem kept listening until the dock section, until federal commands flooded in and the feed broke into sirens and metal and bodies hitting the ground.

Then past that too.

There were sounds nobody should archive. Breath trying to stay in a throat. Somebody saying no to nobody who was listening. A wet choke. Shoes slipping.

He should have stopped it.

He didn’t.

By the time Isaiah came back, Reem was still at the table, elbows on his knees, headphones around his neck, the room gone dim except for the lamp and the blue bar of the audio file sitting at its end.

Isaiah set a takeout bag down without asking if Reem wanted it. “You ate?”

Reem shook his head.

Isaiah looked at the headphones, then at his face. “You ran the full thing.”

“Yeah.”

“How bad?”

Reem sat back. “Worse because it’s regular.”

Isaiah took that in. He pulled out the second chair and sat across from him.

“They filed motions to keep parts sealed,” he said after a while. “Graphic content. Ongoing related cases. Families.”

Reem laughed under his breath. “Families. Now they remember.”

Isaiah didn’t answer.

Reem reached for the drive, turned it over between his fingers. Small thing. Gray plastic. Could fit under a tongue. Could ruin lives in a courtroom. Could make strangers cry online for three days and then move on to the next ruin.

“They want pieces,” Reem said. “You know that.”

“I know.”

“The label wants redemption content. The feds want cooperation content. Blogs want survivor content. Everybody want some shape they can sell.”

Isaiah folded his hands. “And what do you want?”

Reem looked toward the dark window over the sink. It reflected the room back at him—lamp, table, two men sitting with old damage between them.

“I want Malcolm to cuss me out for this apartment,” he said. “I want Luis to walk in with those work boots on my floor and say he found one more thing. I want Dee to lie better. I want Wax to finish the sentence.”

Isaiah let him say it.

After a minute, Reem said, “Since that ain’t happening, I want them to stop making this sound clean.”

Isaiah nodded once. “Then we don’t let them.”

He slid a sheet of paper from his folder and pushed it over. Tour draft. Venue security clauses. Driver rotation. Hotel aliases. Family blackout dates around hearings. Janice’s relocation address redacted even here, the line blacked thick.

Reem scanned it, jaw tight. “You wrote all this?”

“I wrote what happens if we plan like they’re still trying.”

“They are still trying?”

Isaiah met his eyes. “A sealed case leaks by accident. An old runner gets nervous. A cousin talks in the wrong bar. Men don’t stop because indictments got printed.”

The takeout smell finally reached them—rice, pepper, grilled chicken going cold in foil.

Reem dropped the page back on the table. “You ever think about doing something normal?”

Isaiah actually smiled at that. Small. Brief. “Too late now.”

A buzz came at the apartment door.

Both men froze.

Not loud. Just the intercom on the wall giving one short electric bark.

Isaiah stood first, already reaching inside his jacket. “Stay here.”

Reem was up too. “Don’t start with me.”

The buzz came again. Then a knock. Three quick hits. Not police. Too impatient.

One of the security men outside said something muffled in the hall. Another voice answered, low, insistent.

Isaiah moved to the door and checked the peephole without putting his face against it.

His shoulders changed.

“What?” Reem said.

Isaiah didn’t answer right away.

Another knock. This time followed by a woman’s voice through the wood.

“Mr. Mercer,” she said. “You need to hear this before they bury it.”

Reem knew the voice.

Not from Mercer. Not from the Blue Room.

From the twelfth-floor conference room with the walnut table and the term sheet and the woman who had written while everybody else bled around the edges.

The label lawyer.

Isaiah looked back at him, hand still inside his jacket.

The woman outside said, “I’m alone. And I have a copy of a call that isn’t on the government drive.”

Neither of them moved.

On the table behind Reem, Luis’s phone lit up from sleep to black glass and, for one second before it dimmed again, showed a blocked incoming number trying him after midnight.