🌁 chapter six: the drop [let me be your ghost]

“All warfare is based on deception.” -Sun Tzu

“All warfare is based on deception.” -Sun Tzu

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“Good first day?” Xavier asked, easing us out of the underground garage and into the gray afternoon.

“Good is one way to put it,” I said, treading carefully. Another staff member, another unknown level of allegiance to Eze.

“Hayden messaged me. Your interviews are getting scheduled, so I’m to bring you back to the property while she makes her calls.” His eyes found mine in the rearview. “Unless there’s anywhere you’d like to stop first.”

I’d been on the payroll one day and my calendar already traveled faster than I did. In Eze’s world, news moved through the staff like current through a wire—everyone connected, everyone aware, nobody needing to be told twice. “Back to the property is fine,” I said, and let my gaze drift out the window as we passed tech offices with logos like children’s toys. Xavier turned up the jazz.

I watched the intersections slide by, scanning. Looking for something blue.

The envelope in my bag was already stamped and addressed, prepped before I ever left Arizona—postage paid, made out to Red Fox Publishing, the same fake imprint whose posters lined Matthew’s office walls. All it needed was the tape and a mailbox that didn’t belong to Ezekiel Crane.

Three blocks later, I found one.

“Stop the car,” I said.

Xavier’s eyes found mine in the rearview, concerned. “Are you okay?”

“Pull over. Now.”

I pointed at a gas station, and didn’t wait for a full stop before I was out the door, jogging past the pumps to the convenience store. Bells jingled as I pushed inside.

“Restroom key,” I barked, and the clerk handed over a key zip-tied to a wooden spoon. I nearly bolted back out.

Xavier was getting out of the car, but I waved the spoon at him and he hung back. I dipped around the corner of the building, out of his sightline—

—and straight toward the blue mailbox at the curb.

Tape into envelope. Adhesive strip peeled, seam pressed shut with my thumb. I pulled the blue door open, let the envelope drop, and swung it shut, my heart going like a speed bag. Somewhere inside that government-issue box, Eze’s voice was now lying in the dark, telling Matthew everything.

Now—time to support the lie. I stuck two fingers straight back into my throat by the ice machine. Slippery spit came up fast, along with what was left of that morning’s breakfast. It burned coming up, and I smelled the sour bite of bile as it hit the pavement with a splash.

When I slid back into the car, I let my shoulders sag and my face do the rest.

“Is everything okay?” Xavier asked, studying me.

“Motion sickness.” I gave him an apologetic smile, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand for the full effect.

Xavier nodded once and put the jazz back on. If he didn’t buy it, he was polite enough to keep his opinion to himself.

I watched the city give way to the climb into the mountains, freeway turning to switchbacks, the trees thickening around us until the light came through green. Ahead, over the ridge, the sky was stacking clouds in bruised layers.

My first act of deception was complete.

…

The storm made landfall around the same time I did.

Up in the lighthouse, rain came at the panoramic windows in sheets while I sat cross-legged on the round bed with Eze’s list spread in front of me, five names in strong, slanted fountain pen.

Conrad Doherty at the top, just like Eze had promised—start where it would hurt most. Below him, three names I didn’t recognize, dashed off in a hurry between a contract crisis and a flight to D.C.

And then the fourth entry. No title. No last name.

Kira.

Everyone else on the list got a first and last name. She got one word, the way you write down someone you’ve known so long that context would be an insult.

I pulled my laptop over and typed the name before I could talk myself out of it. It took two search results to find her: founder of a reputation-management startup, the kind of crisis management firm that made scandals evaporate for people whose names moved markets. Thirty-two. A TED talk with four million views. And photo after photo after photo—Kira in a silver dress on a museum staircase, Kira laughing on a yacht off Amalfi, Kira with her hand resting on the arm of a tall man in a midnight-blue tux.

Eze.

I closed the laptop. Opened it back up. Closed it again.

She was beautiful in the effortless way that took two hours and a team—blonde hair cut sharp at the jaw, big blue eyes that looked straight down the camera like it owed her money. In every photo with Eze they were leaning toward each other, tuned to a frequency the rest of the party couldn’t hear.

Is Kira his girlfriend?

The thought arrived uninvited, and I hated everything about it. It shouldn’t matter. It didn’t matter. Eze was a job with green eyes, and Kira was a name on a suspect list, and the flutter in my sternum was a professional interest in an interview subject, and I was a liar even in the privacy of my own skull.

Thunder rolled somewhere over the ocean. I told myself I wanted to interview her first because a person trusted enough to earn a one-name entry was a person worth studying.

That was even mostly true.

…

By dinnertime the storm had dug in for the night, rain coming sideways off the ocean, and I splashed my way to the main house with my hood up and my head down.

Angela was under the eave by the front door, smoking, watching the rain the way other people watch television. Her shift must have ended, because the apron was gone—and in its place, under an open rain jacket, was the Dior, cream silk swaying above her work boots.

She saw me clock it and lifted her chin, daring me to comment.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I said.

Angela exhaled smoke and almost smiled. “You eat yet?” She tipped her head toward the door. “Kitchen’s through the back. Tini runs it.” She took another drag. “Bring your spine.”

Inside, the modern cave of the house glowed against the storm, and I followed the thump of reggaeton and the smell of onions cooking in butter until I found the kitchen—a stainless steel paradise with a wall of Smeg appliances, copper pots hanging like church bells. A tiny woman was bopping around with a huge chef’s knife, tan and wiry with a bit of a crazed look in her eyes, chopping onions with fervor while tears rolled down her face and the beats of Bad Bunny rattled the pot lids.

She whirled around with her bloodshot onion-eyes and stared at me.

“What are you doing in my kitchen?” she demanded, the lilt of an Argentinian accent turning kitchen into kitshun. She swept her tears away with the back of a white apron stained from high-energy cooking.

I held out my hand. “I’m Lola. Eze’s new ghostwriter. I’m working on a book—”

“This is my kitchen. You stay out there.” She waved her knife at the stone arch of the doorway.

I stayed where I was. “I need a favor.”

“You need dinner. Favors are extra.”

“I need to know if anything about Eze’s food changes,” I said. “A new supplier. A new ingredient. A dish he didn’t ask for. Anyone who isn’t you touching his menu—I want to know about it.”

The knife stopped. Behind the onion tears, something sharp looked out at me. If I’d learned anything from three memoirs’ worth of monsters, it was that the fastest way through a rich man’s security was the food nobody screens. If whoever killed Eze’s father decided radio silence was over, it might start in a kitchen.

“You’re slow, escritora.” Tini turned back to her cutting board, unimpressed. “I’ve been watching his food since the day his father died. Nothing touches his plate that I don’t inspect first.” She said it the way other people mention taking out the trash—a chore, handled, not up for discussion. My opinion of her improved on the spot.

“Then I want a phone call when something changes. Anything. Even if it’s small, even if it’s nothing. And if someone else is trying to adjust anything—even to just change a meat delivery—I want to know who it is.”

“That’s different. That’s a favor.” She pointed the knife at me, not unkindly. “What’s your name again?”

“Lola. And I’m going to be here a while, and I’d like us to be friends.”

“I’m Tini,” she said. “Like the drink. This is my domain, so you play my rules.”

“Of course.”

“And if I’m going to do something for you, you’re going to do something for me, entiendes?”

“Sí. Yes. What can I do for you?”

“I live in one of the guest houses out back. The gardener—Amos—he has a parrot that keeps me up every night with its screeching.”

“Okay.”

“I want you to bring me that parrot.”

I blinked. “Why? What are you going to do with it?”

“Don’t worry,” Tini said, with a grin that did not make me worry less. “Just bring me the bird and we’re square.”

Kidnapping a parrot for a woman with knife skills and a grudge. Every job has its onboarding, I guess. “Deal,” I said, and we shook on it, her grip small and strong as a wrench.

She turned back to her cutting board, then flicked her eyes at me over her shoulder. “You eat in your room tonight. Storm food. I bring it to you.” A pot on the stove breathed out garlic and something rich and slow-cooked, and my stomach—empty since the gas station—answered out loud.

“Does anyone else come over to dinner?” I asked, aiming for casual. “Eze can’t eat alone every night.”

“Mr. Conrad, when he wants something.” Tini said Conrad the way you name a stain that won’t come out. “And Ms. Kira, when she’s in town. She likes my flan.” A pause, one eyebrow. “Everybody likes Ms. Kira.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m getting that.”

…

Kidnapping the parrot was the easy part—an errand I’ll be taking to my grave. The hard part was dinner, when Tini set a bowl of soup in front of me and called it chicken. It tasted like chicken. Mostly. I ate every spoonful. We were friends now, and friendship has a price. Somewhere out in the rain, Amos was calling a name into the dark that was never going to answer.

The call came while I was finishing said bowl of stew at the round table in my lighthouse penthouse, rain flogging the windows.

“Lola! Hi! It’s Hayden!” Her voice came through the Crane-issued phone with the wattage of a morning show, storm or no storm. “Eze asked me to get your interviews on the calendar. I was thinking we start you with Conrad—he’s around all week, and honestly once he hears it’s for the book he’ll talk your ear off—”

“I want to start with Kira.”

A pause. “Kira?”

“She’s on the list.”

“No, I know, it’s just—” Hayden regrouped, gloss reapplied. “Eze usually keeps her clear of company things. They go way back, so I assumed she’d be more of a color-commentary interview? For later?”

Way back. I turned the phrase over. “The early chapters are where the color lives,” I said, in my best craft-of-memoir voice. “I always start with the person who knew them best. You only get one first interview, and I don’t want it wasted on someone performing for the book.”

“Huh,” Hayden said, and there was something new in it—a first coat of respect. “Okay. If you say so. I’ll call her office and get back to you when it’s all scheduled.”

“Thanks, Hayden.”

“So exciting!” she chirped, and was gone.

I sat with the dial tone and the thunder, wondering what it said about me that I’d just spent professional capital to get in a room with a beautiful woman whose only crime, so far, was a photograph.

She’s a suspect, I reminded myself.

Sure she was.

…

The power went out at ten past two.

I knew because I was awake to see the clock die—sleep and I were on bad terms in the best of times, and the storm had opinions it kept shouting at my windows. One moment the lighthouse hummed with the low electric white noise you never notice until it’s gone, and the next, darkness, total, and the rotating beam above me swept its last arc and quit.

I reached for the Crane phone to text the Head of Staff. Dead. Of course—I’d spent half the night burning its battery looking up what little I could find about Kira.

Using what little the storm left of the moonlight, I felt my way down the lighthouse stairs, seventy-five steps of cold stone under bare feet, and pushed out into the rain. The main house crouched in the dark ahead—black, black, black, except for one soft gold light low against the hillside. The basement. A generator, maybe.

Like a moth to the flame, I went to it.

Inside, I traced my hands along the cool, uneven stone as I worked my way down the stairs toward the light. And then I heard it.

Thump. Thump-thump. Thump.

I knew that sound. A boxing glove meeting a heavy bag.

I came around the corner into a home gym lit by amber emergency lights—rows of equipment throwing long shadows, a boxing ring standing in the middle of it all like an altar. Eze was at the heavy bag in a tight black shirt and gray sweatpants slung low around his hips. A suit jacket lay dumped across a weight bench beside a tie coiled like a shed skin—D.C. discarded piece by piece. He was hitting the bag like it owed him something, and when he landed an especially hard punch, he winced, shaking out his hand as a puff of chalk drifted off the leather.

“You wrapped it wrong,” I said, the words out of my mouth before I’d decided to say them.

Eze looked up, and even across the gym I saw the surprise light up his eyes. “You’re here?”

“You’re my work. And the power’s out everywhere but here, so.”

I crossed the mats and gestured for his hand. He held out his glove and I pulled it off, examining the handwraps underneath. I was close enough to smell him—clean sweat and something herbal, eucalyptus maybe—still inviting even after I assumed was a day of long flights.

“Like I said. You wrapped it wrong.”

“Don’t tell me what—fuck.”

I shot him a look as he recoiled from my hands as I started to undo his binds.

“One of my past memoir clients was a professional boxer,” I said. “We’d do sessions while he trained.”

“Who was it?”

“You know I can’t kiss and tell.”