Chapter 7: The Ledger Under the Floor
Malik stood so fast the booth shuddered.
Dana stayed seated. “If Wade is coming, we don’t go where he expects.”
“He doesn’t know where it is,” Malik said. His eyes kept returning to the diner window. “Not unless Vance got it out of me.”
“Did he?”
“No.”
I slid out of the booth. “Then let’s not give him time to guess.”
Malik looked at me, jaw tight. “You don’t know what you’re walking into.”
“I know what I’m not walking in for,” I said. “I’m not there to hurt anybody.”
His gaze dropped to my hands, then came back to my face.
Dana rose and tucked her phone away. “We go together. If you change your mind, say so. We turn around.”
Malik gave a short, humorless laugh. “You make it sound simple.”
“It isn’t,” she said. “That’s why you get to choose.”
For a beat, the three of us stood beside the table, with the diner’s coffee smell and frying oil clinging to our clothes. Then Malik headed for the door.
We took separate cars. Malik drove first, Dana followed him, and I stayed behind her. No one talked over the engines. The road led past shuttered storefronts and a row of warehouses, then narrowed into a strip of gravel between metal buildings.
Malik turned into a storage facility enclosed by a chain-link fence. He punched a code into the keypad and waited until the gate rattled open.
He glanced back at us through his rear window.
“Unit thirty-eight,” he said when we gathered beside his car. “If I open it and you see something you don’t like, you leave it alone.”
Dana nodded. “Understood.”
The unit’s corrugated door scraped upward. Inside, cardboard boxes and a battered dresser sat under a bare bulb. It smelled of dust, cold metal, and old fabric. Malik shut the door behind us, leaving a narrow bar of daylight at the bottom.
He didn’t move toward the boxes. He crossed to the far wall and crouched beside a stained rug. When he pulled it aside, I saw a seam in the concrete floor.
“You keep a ledger under a floor?” I asked.
“Not the whole ledger.” He took a thin pry bar from a shelf. “Just the copy I could carry.”
He worked the tool into the seam. The concrete panel lifted with a soft scrape. Beneath it lay a plastic-wrapped bundle.
For a moment, Malik only stared at it.
Dana didn’t reach for the bundle. “You want me to take it?”
“No.” He swallowed. “I want you to see it. I’ll hand it over.”
He pulled the bundle free and set it on the floor. His fingers trembled as he peeled away the plastic. Inside was a small ledger, its cover scuffed and its pages bent at the corners.
Dana crouched beside him. “Is this the copy you told us about?”
“Yes.”
She studied the book without touching it. “Can you tell me what’s in it?”
“Names. Fights. Amounts. Who got paid and which way a bout was supposed to go.”
I watched Malik’s face as he opened the ledger. He turned past several pages, then stopped at a set of columns marked with dates and fighters’ names. Beside some names were numbers. Beside others, short notes: hold back, take fall, settle after.
Dana leaned closer. “And these initials?”
Malik’s finger hovered over the margin. “W.C. Wade Cole.”
The initials appeared beside multiple entries. Not on every page, not beside every payment. But enough to put Wade’s hand across the scheme, again and again.
My anger rose, hot and familiar. I pressed my palms against my thighs until it passed through me without choosing what I did next.
Dana noticed. She didn’t tell me to calm down. She turned another page.
A folded note had been tucked into the binding. Malik drew it out and unfolded it. His face changed before I could read the words.
“What is it?” I asked.
He passed it to Dana.
She read silently. Then she looked at me.
The note was brief. A reference to “the Hale girl,” followed by a line about keeping her parents quiet. Wade’s initials were beneath it.
For a second, the storage unit seemed to shrink around us. I could hear the light buzzing overhead. I could hear my own breath, too loud in the close room.
“He knew,” I said.
Malik nodded. “He knew Dustin was using her to scare you and Marcy. He wanted you both scared enough to keep out of it.”
My hands curled once. Then I opened them.
Dana folded the note along its old crease. “This is important. It connects Wade to the threat. But the ledger doesn’t prove every bout was fixed or every payment was for what the notes suggest. We’ll need to corroborate it.”
“I know,” Malik said. “That’s why I brought you here.”
He rubbed his thumb against a dark mark on the ledger’s cover.
“I didn’t start out copying anything,” he said. “Wade had me carry messages. Sometimes envelopes. He told me it was just business—fighters getting paid, people arranging matches. If I asked questions, he reminded me what he knew about my family.”
Dana held his gaze. “Did you know what the messages meant?”
“Not at first. Then I did.” His voice roughened. “I kept telling myself I was too deep in to stop.”
He looked down at the note.
“Then I saw what Dustin did to her. And Wade was still using her to make sure nobody spoke.”
His confession didn’t clear him. I could see that he knew it. The way his shoulders folded inward made it clear he wasn’t asking us to pretend he’d done nothing.
“Why make a copy?” I asked.
“Because if I went to Wade with a story, he’d deny it. If I took the ledger, he’d know exactly who had it.” Malik shut the book gently. “I thought a copy might be the one thing he couldn’t take back.”
Dana placed the ledger and note into a protective sleeve she had brought. Her movements were careful, but her attention stayed on Malik.
“You’ll have to answer questions about the messages you carried,” she said. “I can’t promise what that means for you.”
“I’m not asking for a promise.”
The cell phone in my pocket began to ring.
Marcy’s name lit the screen.
I answered. “What happened?”
Her voice was low and thin. “Robert, someone’s been waiting outside her room.”
I straightened. “Who?”
“I don’t know. They haven’t come in. They’re still there.”
Across the storage unit, Dana had gone still. Malik stared at the ledger sealed between us.
I wanted to move—anywhere, straight toward the hospital, straight toward the person standing outside my daughter’s door.
May you like
Instead, I looked at Dana.
“Tell me what you need,” I said.
