The Rich Boss’s Black Belt Son Challenged a Single Dad — Unaware He Once Commanded a Team
Chapter 9
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He drove out that evening, parked two blocks north on the far side of the tracks, and watched the building for an hour from a position that offered a clean sightline to both the main entrance and the secondary loading door on the east side.Three vehicles he could not account for were parked in a configuration that made no sense for a legitimate business. Two men were visible through the gaps in the roll-up door, moving with the particular patterned movement of people whose job is to remain present and alert rather than to accomplish any specific task. There was no evidence of actual repair work. The lights inside were wrong for a garage, too concentrated in one area toward the rear—the kind of lighting arrangement that focused on a specific point rather than illuminating a workspace.Tyler was in there. Jack was as certain of it as he was of anything.He sat in the car for a moment before getting out. His right knee ached in the particular way it had ached since a hard landing in a place he was not allowed to name seven years ago. There was a faint sound in his left ear that had been there for so long he sometimes forgot it existed until the surrounding environment went quiet enough that it became the loudest thing in the room. These were the reliable annotations of a body that had been asked to do serious work for a long time, and Jack registered them with the same neutrality he registered the temperature or the wind direction: as data, not as objection.What gave him slightly more difficulty was something that did not belong to his body at all. He took out his phone and looked at the photograph Sarah had sent that afternoon, taken at her grandmother's kitchen table: the small stuffed rabbit she'd had since she was four, propped up against a glass of juice, a caption beneath it that read, "Bunny says hi."The image was so thoroughly ordinary, so located in the specific, unremarkable texture of childhood, that looking at it in a dark car two blocks from a building where a man was being held at gunpoint produced a dissonance that Jack had to sit with for a moment.This was the version of himself he had built in the three years since leaving the service: the one who knew where the pediatric cardiologist's office was, who could name every medication in Sarah's regimen and explain why each one mattered, who had learned to make the particular scrambled eggs she liked without being asked. That version of himself and the one currently assessing entry points into a building full of armed men were not in conflict, exactly, but they were not the same person either. And Jack was honest enough with himself to know that the line between them, once crossed, was not always easy to find again afterward.He turned the phone face down on the seat and got out of the car.He went over the perimeter fence on the north side, where the shadow from the elevated track above was deepest. He moved along the building's east wall to the loading door, which was secured with a padlock that took him under a minute to address.