Page 73 of Ruthless Claim

I’ve read the same line of a report three times because she walked past my desk. I had a full conversation with Connor last week that I can’t entirely account for because she’d come out of the bathroom twenty minutes before in just a towel and the image was apparently still running somewhere in the background.

There’s also the bakery on 67th. She mentioned it once, maybe two weeks ago, in passing— something about her father taking her there as a kid. She moved on and I don’t think she even noticed she said it.

But I noticed.

Now I go past it on my way home most evenings like some kind of idiot, debating if I should go in there and get her something.

That’s a normal thing to do, right?

To be aware that she’s mentioned a bakery?

Yes, it is.

I’ll stop there and get her something. I’ll get her the whole entire store.

The point is—and I do have a point under all of this—I’m completely gone on my wife. I didn’t see it coming, or I saw it coming and told myself I didn’t, which amounts to the same outcome. She’s in my head all the time and she’s become what I’m walking toward at the end of every day.

But I have a job to do, and I should probably focus on that.

Connor’s had suspicions about the docks for three months. Word got back to him that product was going missing between the ship and the warehouse.

Not enough to be obvious, but just enough to be a pattern if you were paying attention, and Connor is always paying attention. The numbers pointed to someone on the inside giving cover, someone who knew the schedule well enough to know exactly which nights to skim.

It took eight weeks to get a name.

Mickey Sheehan.

Forty-three, two priors, and works the overnight manifest checks. He has been supplementing his income in ways Connor finds offensive.

Mickey doesn’t know we know.

That’s the point of tonight—get the confirmation, the names of whoever he’s been moving the product to, and make sure he understands that this particular revenue stream is finished. Connor doesn’t send three people to a warehouse in Queens at eleven at night for a conversation.

We catch him coming off his shift. He’s cutting through the south lot toward the parking structure, keys already out.

He doesn’t clock us until he’s about fifteen feet away.

I watch the exact moment it happens—the way he slows, processes the three of us standing between him and his car, and does the calculation.

His eyes go to the exit behind him.

Ryan’s already there.

Mickey looks back at me.

“Hey,” he says, with the specific brightness of a man who has decided to try charm first. “Cillian, right? Brennan’s⁠—”

He runs anyway.

They always run.

He gets about six feet before Doyle has him by the collar, then it’s not much of a contest—Mickey’s soft as shit, and Doyle is not.

A minute later, Mickey’s in a chair in the warehouse with zip ties on his wrists and the brightness completely gone from his face.

“Okay,” Mickey says, breathing hard, looking between the three of us. “Okay. I don’t—look, whatever you think⁠—”

“Save it,” I tell him boredly, rolling up my sleeves. Mickey blanches, his ruddy face turning white.