Zara swallowed. Her mouth was dry, and the wind kept pushing strands of hair across her cheeks. She looked from Reaper to the long row of motorcycles and then toward the dark alley where she had spent the last half hour hoping nobody would notice her. Behind the warehouse, a distant siren rose and faded as a patrol car passed somewhere on the elevated road.
"Four men," she whispered. "A white van. They worked underneath the bikes while you were inside. One of them had a police badge."
Reaper did not interrupt her. He looked over his shoulder at a Black American biker known as Preacher, a former civil rights lawyer whose beard had gone gray at the chin. Preacher was already stepping away from the motorcycles with his phone in his hand. Whatever anyone thought about a ten-year-old's warning, no one in the lot was willing to gamble thirty lives against the possibility that she was mistaken.
"Call emergency services," Reaper told him. "Tell them we have a child witness and possible explosives. Everybody else, back away. Now."
Zara let go of the handlebar only when Reaper gently asked her to. Diesel climbed off his bike without attempting to start it, his expression stripped of every trace of amusement. The men moved toward the street, leaving their prized machines where they stood. Zara followed, suddenly feeling all the strength drain out of her legs. Reaper stayed beside her until they reached a safe distance.
"You did the right thing," he told her.
She looked up at him and tried to believe it. She had not meant to become involved with dangerous men, police officers, or anything that would bring attention to her family. She had only been trying to finish her multiplication homework while her mother cleaned an office upstairs. Half an hour earlier, her biggest concern had been whether she would remember how to divide fractions on Monday morning.
The evening had begun in an alley behind a three-story warehouse on Chicago's South Side. A single security light shivered above a service door, blinking every few seconds and making the stained brick walls appear to move. The alley smelled of damp cardboard, fryer grease from a restaurant around the corner, and the sour metal odor of the dumpsters. The pavement was cracked, but the strip of concrete beneath the light was dry enough for Zara to spread her notebook across her knees.
Her mother, Kesha Williams, was cleaning the accounting offices on the top floor. The shift ran from eleven at night until six in the morning, one of the jobs Kesha took because her daytime wages at a laundromat did not cover rent, heat, and groceries. Weekend catering shifts helped when they were offered, but the jobs were irregular, and Kesha never knew how much money would remain after the next bill arrived. She had been raising Zara alone long enough to understand that exhaustion was not an emergency anyone else intended to solve.