Read Chapter 25: The Fallout

Doc’s breath came in wet, rattling gasps. Walter held him against the cold warehouse floor, one hand pressed to the cloth wound packing that was already soaked through, dark and glistening. The air smelled of cordite, blood, and the sour dust of abandoned crates.

“Roy,” Doc whispered. His eyes were open but unfocused, staring past Walter’s shoulder at the high, broken windows where morning light was beginning to seep through. “Roy’s got it. The document.”

“I know.” Walter’s voice was tight. “I’ve got a copy. Hidden. He doesn’t know.”

Doc’s mouth twitched—almost a smile. “You always had a trick left.” A cough shook him, and blood bubbled at the corner of his lips. “Phelps. You find him. You tell him… I’m sorry. I was a coward. I let them hang him for what I did.”

“You were a kid,” Walter said, though he didn’t know if that mattered. Doc had been twenty-two when he’d deserted, leaving Arthur Phelps to face the court-martial alone. Twenty-two and terrified, and the Army had needed a scapegoat for a missing payroll that Doc never took.

“Doesn’t matter.” Doc’s fingers clawed at Walter’s sleeve. “He was my friend. My only friend. And I let him rot.” He sucked in a breath that sounded like gravel shifting underwater. “You’ll make it right. You’re the only one who knows.”

Walter heard footsteps behind him. Jack and Sal hovered at the edge of the light, their faces pale and tight, guns still drawn but pointed at the floor. They were watching the dying man with the hollow, aged look of men who’d seen too much already that morning.

“Doc,” Walter said, leaning closer. “Doc, stay with me.”

But Doc’s eyes had already gone glassy. His grip went slack. The rattling breath stopped, and the warehouse fell into a silence that pressed against Walter’s ears like cotton.

He stayed there a long moment, holding the body, his jaw working against the anger that wanted to rise. Then he gently lowered Doc’s head to the floor and stood.

“He’s gone,” Jack said. Not a question.

Walter nodded. He looked at his hands, red to the wrists. In the war, he’d held dying men too, boys he didn’t know and one he did, and he’d told himself the blood would wash off and the rest would fade. It never did. It just stacked up, one layer at a time, until you couldn’t remember what your hands looked like clean.

“Roy shot him,” Walter said. “You saw it.”

Jack exchanged a look with Sal. The big man shifted his weight, uncomfortable, his meaty hands wrapping around the grip of his revolver. “We saw Roy say you was a thief. Saw you deny it. Then Doc started talking, and Roy put one in him.” Jack’s voice was slow, careful, like a man walking through a minefield. “Didn’t see whatever paper Roy had.”

“Because there was no paper,” Walter said. “Roy fabricated the whole story. I’ve never embezzled a cent from anyone. I was a bank examiner and then an accountant for twenty years, and I lost everything when DeVries’s banks collapsed—same as everyone else in this crew. Roy is the one who hired Doc to cook the books and make the bank look solvent. He’s been running this whole crew toward his own payday from the start.”

Sal spat on the floor. “Roy’s been paying our wages for six months. He’s the one who set up every job. You show up three weeks ago and start giving orders, and now Roy’s gone and Doc’s dead. Who am I supposed to believe?”

Walter reached into his coat. Both men tensed, hands moving toward their holsters. He held up his palm, then slowly drew out a folded sheaf of papers—carbon copies, flimsy and smudged but legible.

“This is the document,” he said. “Roy took the original. This is the copy I made before we ever went into Federal Trust. It’s DeVries’s ledger—names, accounts, the deliberate collapse of over a hundred banks, including the one I worked for and the one where Sal’s brother lost his savings.” He looked at Sal directly. “The one that put your mother in the poorhouse.”

Sal’s face went stony. “You don’t know nothing about my mother.”

“I know you sent her money every week until the bank closed. I know she lost everything. I know you told Roy you were in this to make them pay.” Walter held the papers out. “Read it. If I was a thief, would I still have this?”

Jack reached for the papers, took them, and squinted at the cramped handwriting in the weak light. Sal came closer, reading over his shoulder. For a long time, neither spoke. Walter watched them, his heart beating a slow, deliberate rhythm. He could feel Doc’s blood drying on his skin, stiff and tight.

“This lists a Senator,” Jack said finally, looking up. “And a federal judge.”

“Names reach all the way to Washington,” Walter said. “That’s why Roy wants the document. Not to blackmail DeVries for five million—though he’ll take that if he can get it. He’ll sell it to whoever pays more. DeVries, the Senator, anyone who wants the evidence buried. If he gets to St. Louis before we do, Arthur Phelps will testify to what he knows, and Roy will own him too.”

Sal shook his head. “Even if this is real—and I ain’t saying it is—we’re bank robbers. Nobody’s gonna believe us over a big shot like DeVries. Roy said that. He weren’t wrong about that part.”

“Roy was wrong about everything that mattered,” Walter said. “He was wrong that Doc would survive. He was wrong that you two would let him walk away.” He paused, measuring his next words. “And he’s wrong that I can’t prove what he did.”

Jack folded the papers and handed them back. “Roy said you was fired from your bank for skimming. Said you lost your house, your wife, your reputation. He said you’d been nursing a grudge for years and that’s why you joined up.”

“Roy said,” Walter repeated. “Roy said, and Roy shot Doc when Doc started telling the truth. You weigh that the way you need to.” He tucked the papers back into his coat. “I’m not asking you to march with me. I know what I am to you—a stranger, an accountant, a man who talks too much about ledgers and justice. But I’m asking you not to stop me.”

Jack and Sal looked at each other. There was a long, loaded silence in the warehouse, broken only by the distant sound of a milk truck rattling down the street outside.

It was Sal who spoke first. “We don’t know you.” He said it flatly, like a fact. “We don’t know if you’re a thief, and we don’t know if Roy’s a liar. But Doc’s dead, and that’s on Roy, and that ain’t the kind of thing I forgive easy.” He looked at Walter with hard eyes. “So you’ll stay with us until we figure out what to do with you.”

“That’s a mistake,” Walter said. “Every hour I’m here, Roy gets further away. He’s heading for St. Louis, and if he gets there first, he’ll own the only witness who can corroborate this document.”

“Maybe,” Jack said. “But we watched Roy put a bullet in a man who was talking about you. I ain’t figured out why he’d do that if you was in on it with him.” He holstered his gun, then gestured to a chair against the wall. “Sit down, Crane. Don’t make us tie you up.”

Walter looked from Jack to Sal and saw no give in either of them. They weren’t his enemies—not yet—but they weren’t his allies, either. They were two men caught in the slipstream of a morning that had turned murderous, and they were holding on to the only thing they had left: each other, and their suspicion of everything else.

He walked to the chair and sat. The metal frame was cold through his trousers. He could feel the carbon copy pressing against his ribs, tucked into the lining of his coat, a secret he was holding so close that only Doc had known, and Doc was dead now.

Jack pulled a length of rope from his pack and tied Walter’s wrists to the chair arms—loose enough to be uncomfortable, tight enough to mean business. Sal stood by the door, watching the street through a crack in the boards.

Walter looked down at Doc’s body. The man lay where he’d fallen, one arm outstretched, his face slack and peaceful in a way it never had been in life. He’d been a deserter, a forger, a man who cooked books for criminals and ran from his past. But in the end, he’d told the truth, and he’d died for it.

“I’m sorry, Arthur,” Walter murmured, though Phelps was a thousand miles away. “I’ll find him. I’ll make it right.”

Jack looked over. “What was that?”

“Nothing.” Walter leaned his head back against the chair. The light was stronger now, laying pale bars across the warehouse floor. Somewhere outside, the city was waking up. Somewhere out there, Roy was running, and the original document was in his pocket, and Arthur Phelps was still alive in St. Louis, not knowing that the men who had ruined him were coming.

Or that one of them had been his friend, and had bled out on a warehouse floor before he could say he was sorry.

The minutes stretched. Sal shifted by the door. Jack sat on a crate, cleaning his revolver with slow, methodical strokes. Neither looked at Walter. Neither spoke.

But they didn’t let him go, either.

Walter sat in the chair and waited, feeling the rope bite into his wrists, the flimsy carbon copy that was his only weapon pressed against his ribs. Roy had speed, resources, and a head start. Walter had a dead man’s confession, a stolen ledger, and a name: Arthur Phelps.

It wasn’t much. But it was enough to start with—if he could get out of this chair.