Page 11 of Velvet Vaughn

Then he poured himself two fingers of Woodford Reserve from the bottle on the bar cart.

Leo held up the glass of bourbon, knowing it would smooth the edges. He recalled Vic Shaw pushing a ribeye around a plate at Tony’s with a tremor in his glass and thought about how much he was about to ask of a woman four hours away. He’d need every neuron he possessed firing at full power for the next several hours.

Leo poured the bourbon down the drain.

Then he made coffee. The good stuff. Strong and black. He had drunk it like that in spring training when he was twenty-two years old and certain he was going to play until he was forty.

While it was brewing, he walked to the windows. Downtown St. Louis rose in the distance, and the skyline gathered together in a tight cluster of glass and steel. In the evening, the buildings seemed less imposing than luminous. Office towers glowed in grids of white and yellow, thousands of windows forming geometric patterns against the night sky. Some floors were dark, others lit with the stubborn brightness of people finishing late work.

From this height the city noise didn’t quite reach the windows. The movement below was visible but distant. Headlights flowed along the highways in thin rivers of red and white ribbons. Traffic moved with a slow, constant rhythm that made the entire city feel alive.

The tallest buildings stood together near the center of the view, their crowns illuminated in clean architectural lighting. A few aviation beacons blinked patiently at their summits, red lights pulsing at calm, measured intervals. The glow from the skyline reflected faintly off low clouds drifting overhead, giving the night sky a muted bronze haze.

The city appeared orderly from here. Peaceful. A skyline arranged against the horizon like a promise that inside all that light, something important was happening.

A noise drew Leo’s attention. His cell phone lit up on the counter. The notification was a text about a sale at one of his favorite stores. Then he noticed one missed call. It was a twenty-eight-second voicemail from a blocked number, at 11:42 the night before. He’d been asleep when it was left, and he’d somehow overlooked it all day.

He pressed play.

For a second, there was only the muffled sound of a television in the background, some announcer talking too quietly for Leo to make out the words. Then Vic’s voice came through, thinner than it had sounded at Tony’s, stretched tight at the edges.

“Leo. It’s Vic. I know you’re not gonna pick up a blocked number. Smart. I’m leaving this so it’s on record somewhere besides paper.”

A pause. The television droned on behind him, followed by the brief swell of what sounded like a commercial.

“I already mailed you something. You’ll have it by tomorrow, maybe the day after. Read the note first, do exactly what it says, but I need you to know the drive isn’t all of it. There’s more than what’s on there. I didn’t have time to copy the rest before I had to move, and now I don’t know if I’m gonna get the chance.”

Another pause, longer this time. A door slammed somewhere in the distance, followed by the faint rattle of a heater kicking on.

“I should’ve gone to you a while ago. I had pieces of this, and I sat on it because I told myself it wasn’t my problem, and now look. I’m sorry for that too. Add it to the list.”

A short laugh that didn’t sound humorous at all.

“If something happens before I can call you again, the rest of it’s—”

There was a small gasp, and then the message cut off abruptly to dead air. An automated voice told Leo when it had been received and offered to delete or save.

He played it twice more.

The rest of it’s . . . Short of a name, a place, or anything Leo could use, the sentence had been severed cleanly, consistent with a lost signal, lost nerve, or something worse. There wasn’t a second call to finish it. He sat with that for a while, turning it over and trying to decide which one it had been.

He got a legal pad out of the kitchen drawer where he kept takeout menus and old warranty cards, and he played the message a fourth time, writing it out by hand in his own block print while Vic’s voice filled his kitchen one more time. A lawyer’s habit. If it mattered later, and it would, he wanted a clean transcription that didn’t depend on a phone surviving the next forty-eight hours.

When he’d finished, he read it back against the recording once to check his work, then carried the legal pad to his home printer in the office off the hallway and ran a clean copy.

Leo folded the printout in thirds and carried it back to the kitchen. He considered putting it in the mailer with Vic’s note and the thumb drive but decided against it. One place for everything was how you lost everything at once.

Leo crossed to the credenza in the living room instead, the one with his contact lists, old contracts, and the playoff tickets he never threw away. He slid the printout into the second drawer from the top, behind a stack of expired coupons nobody would ever think to dig through.

Then he poured a cup of coffee, went back to the island, and read Vic’s note again. Not for content this time. For instructions.

Someone outside the industry. That described Anja. Her business was insular, private, and wholly disconnected from any sports agency in the country.

Someone who owes you nothing. Anja owed Leo nothing. The ledger between them ran the other way, and it ran heavy.

Someone you owe nothing to. This one was harder. Leo owed Anja his life in the most literal sense available to a human being. But Vic hadn’t meant moral debt. He was talking about the sort that gave a third party clout. Nobody held Leo’s gratitude over him. Outside of Anja, Chloe, Kayne, and her bosses at COBRA Securities, no one knew what she’d done for him on the sidewalk in Clayton months ago.

Someone who can’t be reached through leverage. Anja Johansen, as far as Leo had ever been able to tell, had no exploitable surface area at all. There was no husband (thank God), no children, no aging parents within Leo’s knowledge. She had a team of professional protectors as family. Her career had been built on being the person who walked into a room after the worst had happened and made it stop. If somebody had leverage on Anja, Leo couldn’t begin to guess what it was.