"There's a witness. There's a kid. She saw us."
Now Castellano looks up. "Define 'kid.'"
"Maybe ten years old. Black girl. She was hiding in the alley. Must have recorded us because the FBI took her phone."
Castellano stands, walks to a filing cabinet, pulls out a folder. Inside are surveillance photos from the scene. He finds Zara: a small girl in a purple hoodie sitting on a curb wrapped in a blanket.
"Zara Williams," he reads from a preliminary report. "Ten years old. Mother is Kesha Williams. Works three jobs, no father. Lives at 1447 South Racine, Apartment 3B." He closes the folder. "We don't go after her directly. We make the family unstable. CPS investigation. Eviction proceedings. Mother loses jobs. The system does what it does. The girl disappears into foster care. Problem solved."
Trent shifts uncomfortably. "What about the phone? The video?"
"Already handled. I have people in evidence lockup. By tomorrow, that phone will be lost during transfer." Castellano sits back down. "Gentlemen, we've come too far to let a child derail this. Preacher has bodycam footage of the Brooks shooting. If that surfaces, we go to prison for murder. So we eliminate threats. Quietly, efficiently."
Trent nods slowly. The others follow.
"What about the Angels?" Hayes asks.
"Let them look. We're ghosts." Castellano opens another file: *Brooks, Jamal.* Inside is a photo of a 16-year-old Black kid in a basketball jersey, smiling. "This is what happens when people see too much."
The room falls silent.
"I want the Williams family destabilized within 72 hours. Quietly. Just paperwork and pressure."
The four men stand and leave. Castellano stays behind looking at Zara's photo: ten years old, bright eyes, the kind of kid who probably gets straight A's, helps her mother, dreams of a better life. He feels nothing. He's learned not to.
Across town, Detective Sarah Hang sits in her car outside the FBI field office. She's 42, Asian-American, twenty years on the force. She just spent an hour trying to retrieve Zara Williams' phone from evidence. It's gone. Not misplaced—gone. And the clerk who checked it this morning now claims he never saw it.
Hang opens her notebook, writes down everything she remembers from her interview with Zara: the description of the men, the badges, the white van. She takes a photo of her notes with her personal phone, emails it to an encrypted account. Then she writes Lieutenant Owen Castellano's name, underlined three times. She doesn't have proof yet, but she's been a cop long enough to recognize a coverup.
At the Hells Angels clubhouse, Reaper sits at a scarred wooden table surrounded by his crew: thirty men, leather and denim, tattoos and scars. They're drinking beer, but nobody's laughing.
The Preacher stands: "Someone tried to kill us last night. Professional work. And that little girl saved every one of us."