Page 38 of Make Them Bleed (Pretty Deadly Things #1)

Arrow

We park a block down from Paul Felder’s split-level like three badly behaved civics teachers.

Ozzy kills the headlights and the hatchback settles into the curb’s shadow.

Gage checks the neighborhood twice through his lens and once through that extra sense he has that tells him which porch cameras are real and which are Amazon miracles that recorded nothing but moths.

I shouldn’t be here without telling Juno.

I promised her honesty, and here I am cutting a corner and calling it strategy.

I can’t risk Paul recognizing her. My phone sits facedown in the cup holder, buzzing once with a text I won’t read yet.

I can feel the weight of it, the way you feel a loose tooth.

“I’m just going to say it,” Ozzy murmurs, flicking a gaffer-taped battery pack in his hands like a stress toy. “We look stupid.”

“You look stupid,” Gage corrects, which is rich, considering he’s cradling a paper grocery bag that contains three latex masks of presidents no one remembers unless there’s a quiz.

I tug my own down long enough to glare at them through Hoover’s eyeholes. “Hoover’s ready to get some answers.”

“Literally,” Ozzy says, and jams Chester A. Arthur up onto his head like a crown. “I still wish we’d wear Ghostface.”

“Brand confusion,” Gage says.

Paul’s sedan turns onto Pinecrest exactly when Knight said it would.

The headlights wash the street a bland, municipal white.

The car noses into the driveway with the careful optimism of a man who didn’t plan to be interesting tonight.

He kills the engine. Porch light on. A neighbor’s dog yips once and then thinks better of it.

“Positions,” I say, and my stomach does that thing it does when I steer into a plan I hate but will execute clean because that’s who I am.

We move. By the time Paul’s juggling keys and mail at the door, we’re close enough to grab him without anyone noticing.

Ozzy takes the elbow, Gage the keys, and I cover his mouth with one gloved hand and whisper, “We’re not here to hurt you, Paul.

We’re here to ask questions you already know the answers to. ”

His eyes go big and human and wet. “What— mmph?—”

Inside. Door shut. The deadbolt knocks home with a sound that always makes me feel like I’ve done something irreversible. We don’t smash lamps or break his pictures. We aren’t here for theater. We’re here for names.

The living room smells like lemon cleaner and guilt.

There’s a bowl of wrapped mints by the door.

The thermostat is set to seventy-two like a man who’s found his comfort and refuses to negotiate.

We sit him in a dining chair that’s probably seen many Thanksgivings.

Gage ties him off with nylon. Nothing fancy, nothing that leaves more than time as evidence.

Ozzy flicks on a single lamp and leaves the overhead off.

I keep my Hoover mask on. You’d be amazed what latex and a voice modulator will extract without anyone laying a finger.

Paul’s a mid-tier guy in Bob’s office, all the right polos at cookouts and the passive-aggressive email etiquette of a man who has studied the Reply-All button and chosen caution. Right now he’s trying to breathe through his nose like a swimmer. His chest shudders.

“Okay,” he says, once he has air and a sense that we’re not going to drop him in a trunk and take him to a second location where a shovel is. “Okay. I don’t— Who are you? Why?—”

Ozzy leans in, the Arthur chin bobbing in a way that would be funny if my heart weren’t tripping over itself. “This the part where we say ‘we ask the questions’ or do you want to guess first?”

Paul blinks at the masks, bewilderment cutting through fear. “Is that… are you… Chester A. Arthur?”

Gage, deadpan from behind Polk: “Yep.”

“I can’t believe this is happening,” Paul says, voice pitching up. “Am I being haunted by AP U.S. History?”

“We’re your remedial class,” I say, Hoover frowning in sympathy. “Pop quiz. You were at Club Greed, Pride room last night. You saw five men walk in. One of them shot you a little finger gun like a sixth grader who never learned manners. You know them.”

He tries for indignation. “I don’t?—”

I throw a printout on the coffee table—a still from Greed’s mirror, stabilized, thermal noise cleaned just enough to make the silhouette of Man One unmistakable. The onyx ring flashes like an eclipse. Paul flinches so hard the chair legs squeal.

“You do,” I say.

He squeezes his eyes shut. For a second I wonder if he’s going to make me choose between being the guy who keeps promises and the guy who gets results. Then the dam cracks and it’s not even elegant. He cries. Not movie tears. Ugly, panicked, loud sobbing that makes Ozzy go still.

“I don’t want to die,” Paul says. “I don’t want to be in the river. I didn’t— I never— I don’t know. They’re hired men to do dirty deeds. I don’t want to die.”

My pulse punches my ribs. I unclench my hands. “Then don’t die,” I say, quietly. “Talk. Who hires them?”

He’s belligerent. “They own everything,” he says, words tumbling over themselves. “They own every thing. The marina board, the permitting office, the clubs, the donor dinner where if you don’t show up you lose your budget next cycle. You think Procurement is clean? Nothing’s clean.”

“Names,” I say, and he shakes his head like he’s trying to shake water out of his ears.

Ozzy produces a clean dish towel and sets it gently against Paul’s shoulder like we’re at a diner and he spilled coffee. “You’re doing great, sweetie,” he says, which should not work and does anyway. Paul laughs once, sharp and broken.

“Names and how you know them,” I repeat.

He swallows. His voice drops, and his shoulders drop with it. “Man with the ring,” he says, eyes flicking to the printout. “That’s Coleman . Stanley Coleman. He runs half of Gracewood’s shadow. Says he’s a consultant. He’s a choreographer. If there’s a dance, he wrote it.”

Coleman. I hear Juno’s breath in my head going sharp as glass. I nod once. Gage writes neat block letters on a legal pad he pulled from a drawer with the kind of confidence that says I live here now.

“Bald one,” Paul says, sniffing hard. “That’s Rook. Rook Salazar. Ex-military, or something. Rumor is he left a program with no name and kept the skills. He works the docks like they’re chessboards.”

“Tattoo?” Gage asks.

“Anchor under the collar,” Paul says. “Low. He doesn’t show it unless he’s sending a message.”

“Pretty boy,” Paul continues. “Beau Latham. Hedge fund a mile wide, morals a centimeter deep. He thinks he’s the face of the group because he owns shirts that fit.”

“Pinky ring,” I say.

“There’s a B on it,” Paul says. “Or a 13. He jokes about both. He’s the one who thinks the finger gun is funny.”

Polk’s eyebrows can’t move but I can feel Gage’s disapproval through the rubber. “Hilarious.”

“Short one,” Paul says. “Merritt Voss. Fixer. Smiles like a knife.”

“And the last one,” I say.

“Devin Pike,” Paul whispers, and now he looks ashamed. “His family did half the city’s first big condo projects. He’s got a YouTube channel he pretends he doesn’t run. He wants to be Coleman when he grows up.”

Gage underlines each name once, then draws a thin box around them like he’s putting them in a terrarium. Ozzy leans back on the couch arm, Fillmore grinning goofily at the ceiling. On anyone else it would be comedy, however, on us, it’s a weapon.

“Why did Coleman shoot you the finger?” I ask.

Paul laughs, a shred of hysteria still clinging. “They call it a check . Like, ‘bang-bang, you’re complicit.’ It’s an in-joke. He did it when he greased procurement for a marina add-on and I signed like a good boy.”

“And Nico?” I ask, even though I know. I need to hear it. I need to hear it enough times that when I say it to Juno, there’s no wobble.

“Nicolas Armand,” Paul says. “They call him the ferry. He moves things across water and pretends he’s poetic about it. Sometimes it’s art. Sometimes it’s people. Sometimes it’s… other things.” He swallows like he swallowed a knife. “He thinks girls are puzzles.”

Ozzy’s hands curl. “We’re going to break his face.”

Paul cries again, shorter this time, like his body hit the reserve tank and found it wanting.

“I didn’t know what they were going to do to her,” he says.

“I swear. I thought— I thought the live thing was a scare. I thought they’d shut off the feed and scare her.

I didn’t—” He chokes, coughs, sags. “I’m not a murderer. ”

I step closer, squatting so Hoover’s face is at Paul’s eye level.

“Listen to me. We’ll get you out. Not clean—you don’t get clean —but out.

You’re going to do three things. One: you’re going to keep breathing.

Two: you’re going to keep your mouth shut about this talk.

If you so much as breathe a word of this to anyone you’ll be on our shit list. You do not want to be on our shit list, Paul.

Three: you’re going to deliver a packet to Detective Chloe Huxley with your name on it and enough breadcrumbs that she can say she found them herself. ”

Paul nods too fast. “Okay. Okay.”

“Plus addresses,” Gage says. “Where do they meet when it isn’t Club Greed or the marina?”

Paul scrubs his face on his shoulder. “Stonehouse, back room. That new speakeasy behind the flower shop— Cicely’s .

And there’s a warehouse by the train spur, near the river.

Unit 14. They think no one knows it exists.

There’s a door with a keypad and a camera with a blind spot at the southeast angle. ”

Ozzy’s head snaps. “Do not give us keypad talk,” he says. “We are not doing anything illegal in this legal conversation.”

Paul huffs a hysterical laugh that breaks open into a sob again. “I’m sorry.”

“Done,” I say. “Last thing: why were you in Pride?”

He exhales like a balloon dropped. “I’m trying to feel something,” he admits, eyes red. “My wife left in June. I walk through my house like something’s missing. Club Greed is—” He gestures helplessly. “It… It felt safe.”

No one says anything for a beat. Sometimes the truth is the worst sound in the room.

Ozzy raps the Fillmore chin with a knuckle. “Are we done scaring the substitute teacher?”

I stand. “We’re done.”

Paul looks at us and reaches for humor the way a drowning man reaches for the lip of the pool. “If anyone asks,” he sniffles, “I was interrogated by some old presidents”

Ozzy, solemn: “Not even that.”

We cut the ties. He sits there, transfixed by freedom like he doesn’t know what to do with it. I slide a business card onto the table—it’s blank except for a handwritten note on the back: FOR C. HUXLEY .

“You have until morning,” I tell him. “We won’t come back if you do the packet. If you don’t?—”

“I will,” he says, too fast. “I will.”

We leave him in his chair with a glass of water because we aren’t monsters; we’re just tired of how many the city manufactures. Outside, the night is clean and empty.

In the car, Ozzy peels off Arthur and groans. “I’m sweating in places I didn’t know had pores.”

Gage sets Polk on the dash like a dashcam mascot and clicks his pen once. “Coleman. Rook Salazar. Beau Latham. Merritt Voss. Devin Pike.” He ticks the names like a rosary. “We have a nice little boy band.”

My phone buzzes again—two texts this time. I flip it over.

Juno: I’m awake.

Juno: You alive?

I type and erase three versions of I’m with the presidents getting names , then settle for:

Me: Alive. We got movement. I’ll tell you everything in the morning.

Dots. Stop. Dots.

Juno: Bagels and truth. 8 a.m. Don’t be late.

I stare at the screen until my reflection looks like a different man.

Ozzy nudges me, gentler than he acts. “You going to tell her you played CIA with Bob’s coworker?”

“Yes,” I say. “And I’m going to tell her I’m sorry I didn’t tell her first.”

Gage buckles in, voice quiet. “You picked the speed that kept her out of an arrest. You tell her that, too.”

“Names to Huxley tonight?” Ozzy asks, already composing the anonymous courier plan he will tell me is extremely legal and absolutely not.

“Tonight,” I say. “She gets a present on her desk that says ‘follow the ring.’”

The masks stare at me from the seatbacks like disappointed history teachers. I flip Hoover around so he doesn’t have to watch me figure out how to be the man I promised Juno I’d be.

We pull away from Pinecrest, the city opening its usual maze of roads and bad decisions.

Ahead of us: Stonehouse, Cicely’s, a warehouse with a keypad and a blind spot.

A saint named Gray who doesn’t like sharp edges.

A ferry with a ring. And five men who waltzed into Pride like they owned the room and finger-gunned a public servant like it was a joke.

“Let’s go write names on mirrors,” Ozzy says.

“Let’s go teach tassel loafers what humility looks like,” Gage adds.

“Bagels at eight,” I say, and the promise sits in my mouth like something I can keep.