Wednesday morning, what do you need from me? I he said, "I need you to sign an authorization today that lets me act as your representative in all communications with Apex. I can email it to you in the next 10 minutes." He paused. And I need Jackson to make a call.
What kind of call? The kind he's better at than I am," Reyes said simply. Ethan called Jackson before Reyes's email had finished downloading. Jackson picked up on the first ring, which meant he'd been awake already, which meant Reyes had probably already called him, which meant the two of them had already had a version of this conversation, and Jackson was waiting for Ethan to arrive at the decision they had both already reached. "Gerald Shu," Ethan said.
"I know, Jackson said." Reyes needs you to make a call. Already made it. Jackson said, "There's an attorney in Phoenix named Darla Campos. She handles exactly this kind of case and she has standing in Yavapai County.
She's already looking at what Rey has sent her." A brief pause. "She's good, Ethan. She's the kind of good that makes opposing council check their filing twice." Ethan absorbed that.
"How do you know her?" A short silence. "She handled something for the club about 8 years ago. I don't need to get into what. What matters is that she won and the reason she won was that she was smarter than everyone else in the room and she knew it and didn't waste time pretending otherwise.
Is she going to be a problem? Ethan asked representing someone connected to the hell's angles in a consumer lending pace. She's not representing the club, Jackson said. She's representing Shu and Gerald Shu and the others. His voice carried the specific flatness of a man who had navigated this particular distinction many times and was tired of explaining it.
Our involvement is logistical. We found the people. We connected the dots. We made the calls. That's it.
What happens in the courtroom is about Apex Lending and and what they did to homeowners, not about us. Ethan understood. He'd been a mechanic long enough to know that the person who diagnosed the problem wasn't always the person who fixed it. And that knowing the difference was half the job. Tell Campos I'll sign whatever she needs.
Ethan said she'll be at your place by noon. Jackson said he said it as though that this was a normal thing. A Phoenix attorney driving 3 hours to a small Arizona desert town to sit at a retired mechanic's kitchen table. Ethan started to say something about that and then decided not to. He was learning slowly that Jackson Morgan's world operated at a different velocity than the world Ethan had always inhabited and that the appropriate response was usually to get out of the way and let it move.
Darla Campampos arrived at 11:47. She drove herself a practical sedan, nothing showy, and she came to the door carrying a leather briefcase and a cup of gas station coffee that she was still drinking, which told Ethan she'd left Phoenix early and hadn't stopped. She was somewhere in her early 50s. Compact and precise with the particular quality of stillness that Ethan associated with people who spent a lot of time in courtrooms, the learned ability to occupy a space without performing anything. She looked at Ethan Carter standing in his doorway and said, "You're the man who started all of this."
"I returned a wallet," Ethan said. H she came inside, set her briefcase on the kitchen table with the efficiency of someone who'd been setting briefcases on kitchen tables her whole career, and opened it. Jackson tells me you're not interested in a private settlement. Not if it means Apex keeps operating the same way, Ethan said. She looked up at him.
Her eyes were dark and direct and assessed without pretending not to. Do you understand what that means in practical terms for you specifically? It means this takes longer, Ethan said. It means I'm probably still dealing with Apex for the next year or more. It means there's no guarantee of exactly what I recover or when.
It also means that she said that your name and your situation become part of a public record. That this house, this address, your financial details, they become part of a filing that anyone can look up. Ethan was quiet for a moment. He thought about Margaret's systematic filing. About 43 pages of documents photographed by the light of his kitchen.
About Gerald Shu, 78 years old, and three days into an active foreclosure proceeding. How many other people has Apex done this to in Arizona? He asked. Campos looked at him steadily. Reyes has identified six so far.
I think when we pull the full filing history, we find more, possibly significantly more. Then the answer to your question, Ethan said, is that I understand. She held his gaze for another 2 seconds. Then she turned back to her briefcase and began pulling out documents. All right, let's talk about what we're going to build.
They worked for 3 hours. Ethan signed things and initialed things and answered questions with the same precision he'd always brought to diagnostic work. No speculation, no inflation, just the facts in the order they'd occurred. Campos asked hard questions and didn't accept vague answers. And Ethan respected her for both things.
She reminded him in some fundamental way of the best of the old engineers. He'd worked alongside people who demanded exactness. Not because they were cold, but because they understood that exactness was the only real form of respect you could pay a complicated problem. At one point, she looked it up from the documents and said, "Jackson says your wife organized all of this." "Yes," Ethan said.
"Smart woman," Campo said and went back to the documents. "It was the right thing to say, and she said it the right way, briefly, genuinely, without pressing it into something sentimental. And Ethan found himself grateful for that in a way that surprised him. She left at 3:15 with everything she needed. At the door, she paused and looked at him.
I'm going to file for the injunction tomorrow morning. She said, "In the meantime, if Apex contacts you in any form, phone mail, in person, you do not respond. You call Reyes or you call me directly." She handed him a card. Not a business card, a plain white card with a handwritten number.
That's my cell. Use it if you need to. Thank you, Ethan said, she studied him briefly. Thank me when we're done, she said and walked to her car. That evening, Ethan sat at his kitchen table and did something he hadn't done in months.
He opened every single remaining envelope in the stack on his counter. He read every letter from Apex, every bank notice, every bill he'd been avoiding. He made a list, his own list in his own handwriting, not in Margaret's careful system, but in the working mechanic shorthand he'd always used of every outstanding amount and its status in what Campos had told him was and wasn't legally enforcable. He discovered, working through the math with the documents in Reyes's analysis side by side, that the amount Apex claimed he owed was inflated by more than 30%. He sat with that number for a long time, 30%.
Months of highway walks. Months of $22 scrap metal runs. Months of not opening envelopes because the number inside them was a false number constructed by people who bet that he would never have someone like Reyes look at it. The cold rage was back and this time it didn't pass quickly. He let it sit.