Chapter 2

I went to Lucy’s apartment first.

That wasn’t impulse. It was the simplest way to start.

When something happens to a twenty-two-year-old girl in the middle of the night, the first person to realize something’s wrong usually isn’t the police, and it isn’t the diner owner either. It’s the neighbors—next door, upstairs, downstairs.

Especially in an old building like that, where the walls are thin. Drop something at midnight and the whole place hears it.

More importantly, my face is good for asking questions.

Sixty-five. White hair. Speak a little slower. Smile, and the wrinkles gather at the corners of my eyes.

If I want to, people will always see me as harmless first. A lot of doors won’t open for cops, and they won’t open for some young stranger either, but they’ll open a crack for a man like me.

Lucy lived on the second floor. I parked downstairs and didn’t go up right away. I stood there for a moment and looked up at her window.

The curtains were drawn. No movement.

Once I was upstairs, I knocked on the door next to hers.

A woman in her thirties answered. She looked me up and down and didn’t open the door all the way—just a narrow gap.

I nodded and gave her a small smile. “Sorry to bother you. I’m Lucy’s uncle. She didn’t reply last night, so I went to the diner where she works and found her boss and a few others looking for her. I just wanted to ask—did you hear anything over here last night? Any noise?”

I didn’t say missing. I didn’t say something happened. The moment you use words like that, people get defensive.

Sure enough, the woman’s caution eased a little. “You’re her uncle? I’ve never seen you before.”

“I usually stay at a retirement home,” I said with a mild smile. “She visits on weekends, but most of the time we just talk on the phone. I don’t come by often. I’m a bit old-fashioned—don’t really use those chat apps. She didn’t answer my call yesterday, and I got worried.”

She glanced at me again, at my gray hair, and opened the door a little wider.

“I heard her come back last night,” she said. “Around midnight, maybe a little after. She opened her door in a hurry, like she was looking for something. I heard drawers opening, cabinets being shut and opened again. I thought she’d lost her keys or her wallet.”

“Any arguing?” I asked.

“No.” She thought for a second, then added, “If someone had been dragging her in the hallway, I would’ve heard it. This place is noisy. I can hear the couple upstairs fighting like it’s in my own room.”

That was enough.

If Lucy had been taken from her apartment, the neighbor wouldn’t have heard nothing. Lucy came back on her own, rummaged around, grabbed something, and left on her own.

I nodded and asked, “Do you know when she left again?”

“Ten minutes later, maybe less than twenty,” the woman said. “I ran out to throw away trash and saw her heading out. She was holding something—like a paper bag or an envelope. I didn’t see clearly. I said hi and asked what she was doing out so late. She said she was going to pick up her boyfriend. Maybe she’d slept over at his place and lost track of time.”

“Thanks,” I said.

She closed the door. I stood in front of Lucy’s, and one thing was clear: whatever happened to her didn’t happen inside the building. She came home, searched for something, took it, and left. No forced entry. No struggle in the hallway. No neighbor hearing a scream.

That meant at the very least, when she walked out of that door, she’d decided to go.

And with her mention of her “boyfriend,” I was almost certain her disappearance was tied to the trouble she’d told me about the night before.

I used the skills I’d retired with to pop her lock. Inside, the apartment looked the same as it must have the night before. I closed the door behind me and went straight to the desk.

There were a few bills, the diner schedule, a ballpoint pen, and a cheap notebook.

The first few pages were normal: rent, utilities, work shifts. Neat handwriting, careful math.

But farther in, the content changed.

It looked like a ledger, but real accounts have a pattern. What she’d written didn’t.

The amounts jumped around. Abbreviated place names repeated. Dates didn’t match the numbers. It looked more like she’d seen part of something somewhere, remembered pieces of it, then came home and tried to stitch it together from memory—trying to assemble something she could hand over as proof.

Lucy had been making a fake ledger.

The trash can held more shredded paper. I didn’t need to tape it all back together. I already knew enough.

She didn’t know what ledger those people were really asking for. She’d just caught a few words from her boyfriend’s scattered warnings, added random amounts and locations, and produced something fake.

I checked the bedroom next. On the nightstand sat an old landline phone. Beside it was a small sticky note with a time written on it, later crossed out and rewritten, and an address abbreviation: R.B.—something she’d jotted down in a hurry, like someone had given it to her over the phone.

In this town, there was only one place I knew that fit that kind of trouble: River Bar—the Bayfront bar near the old docks. It sold drinks in the daytime and kept a dirty crowd at night.

By then I could piece it together. Lucy’s boyfriend got himself into trouble, and the trouble followed him straight to Lucy. Lucy didn’t know anything, but they gave her a time and a place, an ultimatum: hand over the ledger, and you get your boyfriend back. Miss the deadline, and you don’t.

Lucy had no choice. She forged the ledger they wanted and went to the meeting.

Standing there by the desk, I remembered how she’d looked sitting across from me the night before. She hadn’t been looking for advice. She hadn’t been asking for rescue.

She’d been working herself up, trying to be brave.

She truly believed that if she handed over what they wanted, they would give him back.

She was too ordinary. She didn’t understand that once people like that get what they want, they don’t return the hostage. They erase anyone who knows anything.

And what she brought wasn’t even what they wanted.

Back in my car, I didn’t start the engine right away. I pulled out my phone, thought about calling the police, then stopped. Calling the cops wouldn’t solve this. It would only alert the people who were already watching her.

I took a slow breath, looked at myself in the rearview mirror, and put the phone away.

River Bar’s crowd wasn’t clean during the day, but their mouths were looser than at night—especially when it came to a friendly-looking old man.

People lie to police. They snap back at young men. But with me… they look down on me. They assume I won’t understand. They don’t see a threat.

I drove down to the old docks. I didn’t park right in front of the bar. I parked across the street, in an empty spot with a clear view of the entrance.

I sat in the car for about half a minute and thought it through. I didn’t bring a gun. Not yet. I didn’t need it.

First, I needed them to keep thinking I was harmless—easy to handle, maybe even a little ridiculous.

I got out, straightened the collar of my old jacket, and walked toward the bar at an unhurried pace.

I stopped at the door and caught the smell leaking out: alcohol and greasy fry oil. I knew that once I pushed that door open, things probably wouldn’t stay at the level of “asking questions.”

But I still reached out, pressed down the handle, and walked in.