The rain hadn’t washed away the blood. Not the kind Tariq St. Patrick could see, anyway. It was the kind that lived under his fingernails, in the silences between heartbeats, in the way his mother, Tasha, now looked at him through the thick glass of the visitation room.
“Then I’m fine.”
The door to the club burst open. Detective Whitman stood there, badge out, rain dripping from his coat.
Tariq picked it up. The file was already downloaded.
But the angle was wrong. The timestamp was wrong. And the face beneath the hood — blurred, but not enough — was his own.
“Breathing. Not incarcerated. Still in possession of all major organs.”
Back in his penthouse — still paid for by Monet Tejada’s dirty money, still smelling like his father’s ghost — Tariq pressed play on the laptop. The screen flickered, then resolved into crystalline h.265 clarity: a figure in a hoodie, moving through a parking garage. A muzzle flash. A body dropping. His father’s body.
The rain hadn’t washed away the blood. Not the kind Tariq St. Patrick could see, anyway. It was the kind that lived under his fingernails, in the silences between heartbeats, in the way his mother, Tasha, now looked at him through the thick glass of the visitation room.
“Then I’m fine.”
The door to the club burst open. Detective Whitman stood there, badge out, rain dripping from his coat.
Tariq picked it up. The file was already downloaded.
But the angle was wrong. The timestamp was wrong. And the face beneath the hood — blurred, but not enough — was his own.
“Breathing. Not incarcerated. Still in possession of all major organs.”
Back in his penthouse — still paid for by Monet Tejada’s dirty money, still smelling like his father’s ghost — Tariq pressed play on the laptop. The screen flickered, then resolved into crystalline h.265 clarity: a figure in a hoodie, moving through a parking garage. A muzzle flash. A body dropping. His father’s body.