Chapter 6 - The Decoy Thread
The fabric of the red jacket muffled Miller’s sudden exclamation as Eric threw it over his head. We didn't wait to see him tear it off. Eric grabbed my hand with a grip that left no room for hesitation, yanking me hard toward the narrow opening at the far end of the alley.
Behind us, tires screeched against the wet asphalt. The dark sedan lunged into the lane, its engine roaring, but the narrow brick walls of the old downtown buildings trapped the vehicle's momentum, forcing it to brake hard to avoid slamming into a brick pillar.
We burst out onto a parallel side street, weaving between parked delivery trucks and pedestrians who stared at us in mild annoyance. We didn't stop until we reached my car, hidden two blocks away in a municipal lot. Eric unlocked the doors with shaking hands, shoving me into the passenger seat before diving behind the wheel and peeling out into traffic.
"Are you okay?" Eric panted, checking the rearview mirror as we merged into the steady flow of evening commuters. "Sarah, did he hurt you?"
"I'm fine," I said, my chest heaving as I tried to process the last sixty seconds. I looked over at my brother, whose knuckles were white on the steering wheel. "Eric... that bluff back there. About the second copy of the ledger. Was that real?"
Eric kept his eyes fixed on the road, navigating the turns with frantic concentration. "What do you think?"
"I think you made it up on the spot," I said, a strange mix of disbelief and pride washing over me. "Miller bought it completely. But why did you say it?"
"Because if Miller really worked with Dad, he would have known if there was a second copy," Eric said, his voice dropping as the adrenaline started to wear off, leaving a hollow exhaustion in its place. "Dad never mentioned a decoy box to me. But Miller didn't flinch because he thought it was impossible—he flinched because he realized I wasn't just following a script Dad wrote for me."
I reached into my bag and pulled out the leather ledger Lawson had given us. Opening it to the back pages, I flipped past the columns of financial data until my thumb caught on a thicker, double-layered page near the binding.
"Eric, look at this," I said, holding it up under the dashboard light.
He glanced over. "What is it?"
"It’s not paper. It’s an envelope glued into the binding." I carefully slid my fingernail under the sealed edge, tearing it open. Inside was a single, heavy card stock paper with a string of numbers and a handwritten location—not a bank vault downtown, but a small storage unit facility off Route 1. And beneath it, written in Dad’s familiar, precise accountant’s hand:
May you like
For Sarah. Because you always look where others forget to check.
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