Chapter 8 - The Cornered Rat
Trent Holloway did not drive to High Street.
A man who has spent twenty-eight years believing that consequences are things that happen exclusively to poor people does not pivot to obedience in twenty minutes. Panic, alcohol, and the humiliation of the alley had fermented inside Trent’s skull into a poisonous, blinding broth.
He sat in the idling Audi three blocks from Claraara’s apartment, his hands gripping the steering wheel so hard the leather groaned.
*Arthur had sounded terrified.*
Trent had never heard his father speak with that tone—not during the 2008 crash, not during the federal grand jury investigation into the port authority bids. Someone had gotten to Arthur. Someone had walked into the high tower on High Street and put a gun to the family checkbook.
*Clara.*
How had she done it? Who had she found?
Trent thought of the man from the alley. The charcoal suit. The cold, massive hands that had clamped around his windpipe like hydraulic machinery. That wasn't a private investigator. That wasn't a legal aid attorney.
*She went to someone dirty.*
Trent reached into the center console of the Audi. Beneath a stack of parking receipts and insurance cards lay a small, black semi-automatic pistol—a .380 Colt Mustang he had bought illegally five years ago from a contractor on the docks to feel dangerous during weekend trips into the city. He had never fired it. The magazine was full, the copper tips of the hollow-point rounds gleaming beneath the dashboard lights.
His father thought he was going to Calgary. His father thought he was going to spend the next five years running an equipment rental depot in the Alberta oil sands while Claraara Linwood walked through this city laughing at him, telling her friends how she had broken the great Trent Holloway.
“No,” Trent whispered to the windshield. “No.”
He pulled his phone from his coat pocket. He didn't dial Claraara; he knew she wouldn't answer. He dialed a contact saved under *G-Sec.*
“Garret,” Trent said when the line clicked. “You still have the secondary ping on that tracker before it went dead?”
The voice on the other end was rough, gravelly. “The device was destroyed around two o'clock, Mr. Holloway. But the last cellular tower handoff was recorded at the corner of 14th and Saint Jude. Residential zone. Old brownstones.”
“Did you get an address?”
“There’s only three houses on that block with active private fiber lines, Trent. Number 44. Belongs to a holding company called Vance Maritime.”
*Vance.*
Trent remembered the name from his father’s closed-door meetings. The mezzanine loan. The quiet man Arthur always referred to as ‘The Trustee.’
*The Trustee had Clara.*
Trent’s hand shook as he racked the slide of the Colt. The metal snapped into battery with a sharp, mechanical click.
In Trent’s mind, the picture was now complete. Claraara hadn't run away because she was unhappy. She had run away because she had sold him out. She had gone to the creditor, given him leverage, and used the family’s dirty business to purchase her own freedom while ruining him.
May you like
“You think you’re smart, Clara,” Trent muttered, his foot slamming down on the accelerator. The Audi surged forward into the slush, its tires biting into the gray ice, tearing away from the curb toward 14th Street. “You think you can just hand me over.”
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