Chapter 5 - Shadows in the Garage
Dawn broke over Queens with a pale, bruised light.
Tamson did not sleep.
She sat at the kitchen table until 5:00 AM, cross-referencing names from her father's old union logbook with missing person reports from five years ago.
There were three names.
Three other drivers who had served the Rallo family before Abel took over the primary route.
All three had resigned within a six-month period.
None of them had been heard from since.
By 7:00 AM, Tamson was dressed in her warmest jacket and heavy boots.
She told Ma she was going to the market.
Instead, she took the subway down to Brooklyn, heading toward the old commercial garage where the Rallo transport fleet was maintained.
It was located beneath the Manhattan Bridge, a sprawling brick building with faded red doors and security cameras mounted on every corner.
Tamson stayed across the street, hiding behind the pillars of the elevated train platform.
She pulled her wool cap low over her forehead.
She waited for twenty minutes until a delivery truck arrived.
As the driver hopped out to sign for crates of auto parts, the heavy metal security door rolled upward.
Tamson moved quickly.
She darted across the street, ducking beneath the rising door just before it locked back into place.
Inside, the garage smelled of hot oil, gasoline, and exhaust fumes.
Rows of black sedans and armored town cars gleamed under fluorescent strip lights.
Mechanics in grey overalls moved between the vehicles, wrenching and welding.
Tamson kept her head down, hugging the shadow of a massive hydraulic lift.
She needed to find the maintenance records from four years ago.
Specifically, she needed to find the black sedan her father had been driving on the night of the crash.
If the car still existed, it would be impounded in the back storage bays.
She crept past a row of stacked tires toward the rear of the facility.
The shadows grew deeper here.
Cobwebs hung from the exposed ceiling pipes.
And there, parked in the very last corner behind a rusted tarp, sat a vehicle that made her breath stop.
It was a 2022 black sedan.
The front passenger side was crushed inward like a tin can.
The windshield was spiderwebbed with cracks, stained with old, dark residue that looked unmistakably like dried blood.
Licence plate: matching her father's registration records.
Tamson approached the wrecked car slowly, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird.
She reached out a gloved hand and brushed the dust off the driver's side window.
The interior was untouched.
The steering wheel was bent at an unnatural angle.
On the floor mat lay a faded yellow parking stub from a diner in New Jersey dated the afternoon of the crash.
Abel had never been to New Jersey that day.
The logbook said he was in Manhattan.
Why was a New Jersey parking stub in the footwell?
Tamson pulled a small penlight from her pocket.
She clicked it on and swept the beam across the dashboard.
Something metal glinted beneath the passenger seat.
She dropped to her knees on the oily concrete.
She reached under the seat, her fingers grazing against a thick wire harness.
She pulled hard.
A small, rectangular black box slid out into the light.
It was a GPS tracking device, hardwired into the vehicle's electrical system, its casing scorched by an old electrical short.
Tamson stared at it.
Four years ago, standard cars didn't have aftermarket GPS trackers unless they were installed by surveillance teams.
Someone had been tracking her father's every move.
"Looking for souvenirs, Miss Hollis?"
A cold, heavy voice echoed off the concrete walls.
Tamson froze.
She clicked off the penlight and slowly stood up.
Standing twenty feet away, blocking the only exit from the back bay, was a thick-set man in a dark trench coat.
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It was one of Evander’s senior captains.
And he had a silver-barreled automatic pistol resting casually in his right hand.
