Page 10 of South of Justice

El Escriba leaned back in his chair. The room around him was silent, but in his mind, a map ignited: networks lighting up like constellations, dead routes humming to life.

Not a full location, not yet. The signal was scrambled through three continents and bounced across defunct proxies. She was still clever.

His mouth curved up. Too clever for the dogs he kept on retainer. Sicarios were blunt instruments. She would spot them coming a mile away.

No, she didn’t use traceable phones. She had no known associates. She used air-gapped machines and one-use signals. He respected that. But it wouldn’t save her.

He tapped the keyboard. Another window bloomed across the screen: surveillance footage, years old. A looped recording of Lucía in a México City café. Her hair was longer then. She waslaughing at something just out of frame. She looked bright and unguarded. Happy, even.

He typed a new command. Far away, someone’s phone rang. Instructions followed, measured and exacting.

“Do not touch her,” he said. “Not until I say.”

The third fragment was still missing. It wasn’t a file; it was a key. He knew she would never have written it down. Which meant it lived in only one place.

Inside her.

He glanced back at the frozen surveillance frame, her smile half-captured in a blur of movement. She had never smiled at him like that.

But she had begged. And soon, it would be for her life.

EIGHT

Ryan wokewith a full body jerk. The room was dim, and for a second, he wasn’t sure what had pulled him from sleep. Then he heard it.

A vibration. Low. Mechanical.

He pushed himself up, every instinct sparking. The chair under the door was still wedged in place, the bolt still drawn.

And yet, there it was again. A buzz. Then silence. Then another buzz.

He crouched beside the bed, pulling up the thin mattress. Nothing. The next vibration made him whirl around and lock his attention onto the table. He got onto his hands and knees, and then he saw it: a cheap burner phone, black plastic, taped to the underside with electrician’s tape.

The screen pulsed once. A single notification:1 New Message.

Heart hammering, Ryan peeled it loose. He didn’t touch anything else, just tapped the message.

The screen went black for a second, then flickering into a grainy video. The same angle as before. Diane’s house and front yard. Noah with his soccer ball.

Ryan stared at the footage. There were some slight differences from the first video. Diane had disappeared, leaving her wash flapping in the breeze. Noah wasn’t jogging across the lawn, he was standing still, his back to the camera. His posture was odd, like he was sensing something wasn’t right and had frozen in fear. The camera was slowly zooming in on him. No, not zooming.Approaching.

The boy spun his head, looking right at the lens. At the person who was holding the lens. His face flickered from confused, to wary, to wide-eyed terror.

The camera tilted like it had been dropped, then the screen immediately went black.

A voice, flat and synthesized, layered over the video like bad AI.

“You’ve seen what we can do, Deputy Marshal Inglis. Now we want something from you. You will find a woman named Lucía Duarte. Confirm location. You have five days. If you do not find her, if you try to run or involve your friends, the boy dies. Further instructions to follow.”

The message began to immediately repeat itself, then cut off mid-sentence, as if the clip had been severed by a knife. Ryan stared at the screen. There was no rewind; no replay or back button. After five seconds, the phone went dead. He turned it over in his hands. No power button, either.

Disposable tech. Custom firmware. This wasn’t a bluff cobbled together by local cartel thugs. This was serious. Military-adjacent. If it was the cartel, they’d clearly upgraded.

Either way, they’d found him. They’d reached into his sanctuary—his shitty room, his locked door, the private space where he went to sleep, not thinking about anything but surviving another day. They’d breached his last wall.

And they had Noah.

Ryan stood very still. The room seemed to sway around him.