Chapter Thirteen
Pressure Points
Friday, June 13, 2014
By Friday morning, Brooklyn had settled into summer.
No graduation announcements.
No school traffic.
No teachers reminding anybody about deadlines.
Just people moving.
Cars rolling down streets.
Store gates coming up.
Music leaking through apartment windows.
The city didn't care that everyone was still trying to figure out what came next.
Maine woke up around nine and stayed in bed for another twenty minutes anyway.
His phone buzzed.
Rome:Court.
Maine typed back.
Maine:You buying breakfast?
Three dots appeared.
Rome:Hell no.
Maine laughed.
A second message followed.
Rome:You got money.
"Damn."
He got dressed.
At SSU, the recreation center was quieter than yesterday.
Maine and Rome still found a game.
Same team.
Same rhythm.
Rome brought the ball up while Maine drifted toward the corner.
One defender followed him.
Rome noticed.
He drove.
The defense collapsed.
Maine cut.
The pass came.
Easy finish.
Rome pointed at him.
"See?"
Maine shook his head.
"That's one."
"That's enough."
"No."
"Bro, take the compliment."
"I'll take the win."
They kept playing.
For a while, everything was simple.
Basketball.
Trash talk.
Sweat.
Water breaks.
Monique eventually showed up with her laptop and a drink, watching from the bleachers.
"You two ever gonna do anything besides play basketball?"
Rome looked toward her.
"No."
Maine nodded.
"Probably not."
Monique sighed.
"Great."
But she was smiling.
Lia wasn't smiling.
She had spent most of the morning looking at property records.
The Atlas name had bothered her.
Not because she thought Atlas was guilty.
Because it kept appearing in places her father had written about.
She pulled up another property.
Different address.
Different neighborhood.
Different year.
The same investment structure appeared again.
Lia leaned back.
"Okay."
She opened another file.
This one had nothing to do with the narcotics case she'd found yesterday.
At least not directly.
But the property had been involved in a redevelopment project.
Atlas appeared in the paperwork.
Then another address.
Atlas.
Another.
Atlas.
Lia's stomach tightened.
She grabbed the journal.
Her father's handwriting filled the margins.
Most of it was impossible to understand without context.
Names.
Dates.
Questions.
Addresses.
But then she found something she'd missed.
Near the bottom of one page, written smaller than everything else:
Don't confuse the property with the people using it.
Lia stared at the sentence.
She read it again.
That changed something.
Her father hadn't been saying the buildings were suspicious.
He'd been warning himself not to mistake infrastructure for the operation.
She looked back at the Atlas records.
"Then what are you looking for?"
She didn't expect an answer.
The journal didn't give her one.
Just another address.
And beneath it:
Same pattern.
Lia wrote it down.
Then closed the book.
For the first time, she wasn't trying to figure out what her father had discovered.
She was trying to figure out how he discovered it.
Across the city, Bishop placed a folder on the table.
Nasir didn't touch it.
"What is it?"
"Juneteenth."
Melo looked over.
"Again?"
"Again."
Bishop opened the folder.
"This time somebody asked about the exact arrival schedule for the speakers."
Nasir's expression changed.
"Who?"
"That's the problem."
She slid a page across the table.
"Information came through three different people. None of them know each other."
Melo leaned forward.
"Could be normal."
"It could."
Bishop pointed to another line.
"But somebody knew enough to ask the right questions."
Nasir finally picked up the paper.
"Where did they get this?"
"That's what I'm trying to find out."
Silence settled over the room.
Melo looked at Nasir.
"You want me to tighten security?"
"Quietly."
"Already moving."
Nasir nodded.
No panic.
No raised voice.
Just calculation.
He had spent years learning how to control the temperature of a room.
The problem was that somebody else had started learning his.
That afternoon, Nasir stopped by the community center.
The place was busy preparing for Juneteenth.
Volunteers moved tables.
People carried boxes.
Someone was testing speakers outside.
Kids ran between adults who were too busy to stop them.
Nasir helped move a stack of folding chairs.
One of the older volunteers laughed.
"Mayor can't delegate everything, huh?"
Nasir smiled.
"Apparently not."
He kept working.
That was what people knew him for.
Showing up.
Not just speaking.
Showing up.
His phone vibrated in his pocket.
He ignored it.
A second vibration followed.
Still ignored.
Then a third.
Nasir finally stepped away from the crowd.
He checked the screen.
One message.
No name.
No explanation.
Just a photograph.
Nasir opened it.
It was a picture of the community center.
Taken from across the street.
Taken recently.
His eyes narrowed.
The picture wasn't a threat.
There were no words.
It didn't need them.
Someone had been close enough to take it.
Nasir locked his phone.
He looked across the street.
Nothing obvious.
Cars.
People.
A delivery truck.
Brooklyn.
Normal.
He slipped the phone back into his pocket.
Then walked inside.
That evening, Maine came home carrying his basketball.
Nasir was sitting at the kitchen table.
"You hungry?"
"Yeah."
"You eat already?"
"Not really."
Nasir stood.
"Come on."
Maine followed him toward the kitchen.
They talked about nothing important.
Food.
Basketball.
Rome's terrible jokes.
Monique's graduation speech.
The kind of conversation Maine would forget years later because there was nothing remarkable about it.
And maybe that was what made it matter.
Nasir watched his son laugh.
His phone remained on the counter.
Face down.
For now, there was still a line between the two lives.
Nasir intended to keep it that way.
But outside, somebody had already started measuring the distance.
And Juneteenth was six days away.