Blackmailed

Chapter 1

It was dark outside. The kind of dark that doesn’t just cover the sky—it swallows it. 9:22 p.m. The city’s hum was a faint pulse behind the glass, streetlights bleeding amber halos through a light mist that had started to drift down sometime after dinner. My monitor glowed the pale blue of too many hours spent looking at other people’s problems. Server issues. Bad code. One client’s security certificate expired and nearly took their whole system with it. Another’s email chain was a war zone of blame.

I rubbed my eyes. The cursor blinked, patient and accusing. My own reflection in the screen looked older than I felt—lines cutting deep around the mouth, the gray at my temples spreading like frost. I’d earned it. Every byte, every late night.

I leaned back, stretching my back, popping the crick in my neck, and let my gaze wander around the room that had become both workplace and bunker. The office was large, maybe too large for one man, but I liked the space—it gave the illusion of order, a buffer between me and the noise of the world outside. The building was an old three-story brick walk-up in South Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood—a relic from another era. The facade carried a century of soot and lake wind, iron-framed windows listing slightly in their casements, and a narrow stairwell that groaned under every step like it had seen too many generations come and go.

The floors were old heart pine, worn smooth by decades of foot traffic, with knots and scars that caught the lamplight and gave the place a kind of weathered honesty. Each board had its own color, its own grain, and when the air turned dry in winter they creaked under my boots like old sailors complaining about the sea. The air smelled faintly of solder, paper, and machine oil—a scent I’d grown to associate with home. Against the far wall, a row of black file cabinets leaned slightly, as if conspiring in a quiet huddle about the years they’d seen. I kept the blinds half-closed most days; the late afternoon sun could hit the screens at just the wrong angle, and besides, the half-light made it easier to think.

The heavy oak door bore the only touch of vanity I’d allowed myself—frosted glass with my name painted in simple block letters: MIKE BYERS, CYBERSECURITY CONSULTANT. The paint was chipped at the edges, the glass etched with age, but I liked it that way. It reminded me of older times, of base offices and shore facilities where everything was marked in black stencil and nobody needed to explain what it meant. The door’s brass handle was worn dull from a hundred small exits, each one a story that began or ended in that room. Beyond the glass, the hallway light glowed dimly, a dull amber that filtered through like distant dawn. I’d always found that color reassuring—the same hue as the lights on the deck of a carrier when the night watch took over.

In the corner near the back wall stood a modern, full-height 42U rack server rack—a large metal frame, containing a dozen powerful servers, with blinking LEDs that pulsed a steady rhythm, a heartbeat made of code and current. Fans hummed low, like the whisper of an engine room. Cables coiled at its base, color-coded and labeled. It was state-of-the-art by corporate standards solid, tested, reliable, built like the men I used to serve with. I’d wired it myself, 4 years ago, when I first rented this place, feeding it through a dedicated UPS and a patched fiber line I ran by hand from the building’s main junction. Every hum and flicker of that rack was a language I spoke fluently, one that still answered when I called.

My desk dominated the center of the room—a massive executive piece of dark mahogany that had lived more lives than I could count. It was battered and pitted, the surface carved with faint scratches, initials from sailors long gone. I’d rescued it years ago from a Navy salvage auction down in Norfolk, where it had sat forgotten in a warehouse full of rusted filing cabinets and surplus bunks. The auction clerk told me it once belonged to a captain’s quarters on an old destroyer tender decommissioned sometime in the eighties. Maybe that was true, maybe not, but when I ran my fingers over the gouges and rings left by decades of coffee mugs, I liked to think of the men who’d leaned over it writing orders or letters home. The drawers still smelled faintly of salt and oil when the weather turned humid.

I’d spent twelve years in uniform before the private sector caught me. I left as a Chief Petty Officer—E-7, Hospital Corpsman — 3 years of that with 3^rd Marine Division, what they called a “Devil Doc”.  And I had also spent 20 months, aboard an old “gator freighter”, repurposed as a flag ship for the Admiral… the USS La Salle (AGF 3).  Spent 20 months going around in circles in the Persian Gulf.  And sometimes, in the quiet hours, I still heard the ship’s hum in my bones. The cadence of machinery and metal, the drone of engines underfoot, the endless rhythm of a sea that gave and took in equal measure. That life had branded itself into my habits: tools laid out in order, cables coiled tight, reports filed before midnight. Discipline forged in long watches and short tempers. I missed the noise sometimes—the kind of chaos that came with purpose. I sometimes, still had dreams about being aboard that ship.  Civilian life had its own order, but it lacked that edge, that understanding that mistakes at sea carried weight you could drown under.

Against the far wall stood an old steel locker, a leftover from the same auction. I kept spare gear inside—hard drives, patch cords, a tool kit, a few keepsakes from those years. On the top shelf sat a faded Navy ball cap, its brim curled and salt-stained, the embroidered anchors barely legible. I hadn’t worn it in years, but I couldn’t bring myself to throw it out. It belonged to another version of me, one who still believed the world had clean lines and clear missions.

I glanced toward the small closet in the rear corner—more a makeshift storage alcove than a proper room. Inside were spools of cable, a portable UPS, and a battered field laptop I’d kept since my last contract with the Defense Department. The closet door never closed right; it always hung open an inch, like it wanted to remind me that some things can’t be completely shut away. The fluorescent light overhead buzzed faintly, flickering every so often like a ship’s bulkhead light at sea.

The whole space was utilitarian, functional—yet it carried a strange warmth. Every object had a story: the chipped mug from Bahrain that still held my pens, the framed photo of my old crew from the USS LA Salle leaning against a stack of hard drives, the folded flag in a shadow box that I never explained to anyone. The office wasn’t just where I worked; it was where I remembered who I was before the noise of business and bills and compromise dulled the edges. It was where the Chief still stood watch.

I took a long breath, the air heavy with dust and electricity. The hum of the rack, the faint ticking of the wall clock, and the muted rumble of trains two blocks away merged into a rhythm I knew by heart. The world outside could roar all it wanted. In here, I could think. In here, I could fight back.

I shut the lid on the laptop, leaned way back again, closing my eyes, exhaled, and leaned forward stretching the muscles in my lower back.. My office was quiet except for the low whine of a power supply.. I picked up the phone, thumbed through my contacts, and pressed Sandy.

“Hey,” she answered, voice soft, familiar, the sound of home.

“Hey yourself. I’m just finishing up,” I said. “Gonna swing by Joey’s for a coffee. Need to clear my head a bit.”

There was a pause. “Don’t stay too late, alright? You’ve been burning both ends lately.”

“I know,” I said. “Just coffee, I promise. You know Joey’s. I’ll be home soon.”

“Alright,” she said. “Be careful.”

“Always.” I hung up before the guilt could settle in.

I turned off the lights. The room sank into shadow. My reflection in the glass vanished, replaced by the black outside and the faint shimmer of the streetlights below. I locked the door, stepped into the hallway, and took a breath of recycled air that smelled faintly of carpet glue and old coffee.

Outside, the air was warm, sticky. Early summer clinging to the city. My shoulders relaxed as soon as I hit the sidewalk. Old habit—situational awareness. I scanned the lot, corners, shadows. Old training dies slow. Everything looked fine. Normal. Whatever that means anymore.

My van waited under a flickering light. A beat-up silver Honda Odyssey that had been more faithful than most people I’d known. The left fender had a dent the size of a basketball, the driver’s seat had a tear patched with duct tape, and the dashboard lights flickered like a Christmas tree when it rained. But she started every time. I climbed in, the seat groaning beneath me, and turned the key. The engine rumbled awake.

Eight blocks later, still in old Bridgeport, I pulled up outside Joey’s Tavern. Was in the lower level, of another old 3 story brick walkup, probably build in the 20s.  But it still had character. The tavern took up the entire first floor.  The neon sign buzzed weakly: JOEY’S – SINCE 1984. The “J” had been half-dead for years. Inside, the windows glowed with a familiar amber light, the kind that made the world outside look colder than it was.

I had been raised in South Chicago, not far from this area.  6^th generation Irish Protestant.  Story in my family was that we descended from three Irish brothers who came to the new world, on the run from the British Crown.  Don’t know how true that is, but it always made for fun stories.

I stepped out and stretched, feeling the crack in my lower back that came free with age and hard living. Inside, the tavern was half-empty. The jukebox in the corner mumbled a low blues riff, something with slide guitar and smoke.

“Evening, Mike!” Joey called from behind the bar, wiping a glass with a rag that had probably seen its share of decades.

“Hey, Joey.” I slid onto a stool halfway down the bar. “Coffee, black.”

He smirked. “Living dangerously again, huh?”

“You know me,” I said. “Always on the edge.”

He poured the coffee, set it down in front of me. The mug was chipped, handle slightly loose, but it was Joey’s—everything in here had character.

“Busy night?” he asked.

“Too busy. Clients, bugs, the usual parade of panic.”

Joey nodded. “People think computers make life easier. They forget they’re built by people. People make messes.”

I smiled into my coffee. “Ain’t that the truth.”

He leaned on the bar, elbows wide, looking every bit the South Chicago Irish Catholic patriarch. Thick hands, white hair combed back like Sinatra, blue eyes that had seen more bar fights than Sunday masses.

“You still going to those meetings?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Four years sober last month.”

He nodded approvingly. “Good man. Takes guts to keep showing up.”

“Beats the alternative,” I said.

“Always does.”

We sat in a comfortable silence. The coffee was hot and bitter. A small TV behind the bar played a muted Cubs game, bottom of the ninth, nobody really caring about the score. Two guys at the far end of the bar were arguing over politics in low, slurred voices. A woman laughed somewhere near the back booth, high and nervous.

“Quiet night,” I said.

“Yeah,” Joey said, glancing around. “Summer nights bring the calm before the storm. Wait till payday.”

We shared a small grin.

I checked the clock on the wall—almost ten. Time to head home. I slid a few bills under the cup and started to rise when the door opened. The bell above it gave a half-hearted jingle.

She stepped in like a hesitation.

Tall, maybe mid-thirties, blonde hair tied back but messy, like she’d done it on the run. Her clothes looked too thin for the night—light jacket, jeans that had seen better days, a small purse clutched tight under one arm. She glanced around the room like she wasn’t sure she belonged here.

Joey raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything.

She hesitated, then walked over to the stool beside mine and sat down. Close. Too close for coincidence.

“Hi,” she said softly, eyes flicking to mine, then to the bar, then back again. “Sorry to bother you.”

Her voice was low, careful. The kind of voice that had been quiet for too long.

“Not a bother,” I said. “You okay?”

She looked around again. Her hands trembled slightly as she fidgeted with the zipper on her purse. “I… I just need a ride. Across town. My car broke down. I can’t— I mean, there’s no cabs around here, and my phone’s dead.”

Something in her eyes didn’t match her story. They were too alert. Not pleading—calculating. But fear lived under the surface. I’d seen it before.

I turned toward Joey. He gave the slightest shrug. His look said: Up to you, Mike.

I studied her for a moment. There was a bruise under her left eye, half-covered with makeup. Faint, but there. Her nails were clean, though, not chipped. Purse too nice for her clothes. Something about her didn’t add up, but then again, people rarely do.

“Where across town?” I asked.

“East side,” she said quickly. “Off Wabash. Near Thirty-Third.”

“That’s a ways,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “I’ll pay you. I just… I don’t want to be here anymore.”

The last words cracked a little. Fear, this time real.

Joey was watching us quietly, polishing the same glass for the fifth time.

“You sure about this, Mike?” he said, voice low.

I met his eyes. “Yeah. Why?”

He shrugged again. “World’s strange these days. Be careful.”

“I’m always careful,” I said, though I wasn’t sure I believed it.

“Alright,” I said to her. “Let me hit the restroom first. I’ll be right back.”

She nodded quickly, grateful, maybe too grateful.

As I walked toward the restroom, I caught Joey’s eye again. He gave a half-smile that wasn’t really a smile at all. More like a warning wrapped in friendship.

In the restroom, I splashed water on my face, looked in the mirror. The fluorescent light hummed overhead, sickly and pale. My reflection stared back—tired, lined, older than I wanted to admit.

“What the hell are you doing?” I muttered to myself.

But I already knew.

When I stepped back out, the bar was quieter. The blonde was standing near the door, arms folded, eyes on the floor. She looked up as soon as I appeared. Relief flickered across her face, thin and fleeting.  I drained the last of my coffee, set the cup down.. 

“Ready?” I asked.

She nodded.

We stepped out into the night. The air had cooled, but the humidity clung to us like a second skin. The street was empty, except for the lonely hum of the traffic light at the corner switching from green to yellow to red, with no one around to obey it.

Joey’s neon sign buzzed above us, the dead “J” sputtering to life for half a second before dying again.

We crossed the sidewalk to the van. I unlocked it with a chirp that sounded too loud in the quiet street.

“Nice van,” she said, trying for small talk, but her voice carried that nervous edge again.

“Old but reliable,” I said. “Like me.”

She smiled faintly, then slid into the passenger seat. I took the driver’s side, the vinyl cool against my back.

As the engine rumbled to life, she glanced at me, then quickly looked away.

“Thanks,” she said. “I mean it.”

“Don’t mention it,” I said.

She gave me an address. East side. I typed it into my head, started driving. The city rolled past in streaks of sodium yellow and darkness. The wipers squeaked once across a windshield that didn’t need cleaning.

For a few blocks, neither of us said a word. The air between us was thick with unspoken things.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her look down at her hands. They were clasped tight in her lap, knuckles white. She kept glancing out the window like she expected to see something—or someone—following.

I wanted to ask. But I didn’t.

The van hummed through the empty streets, headlights cutting narrow tunnels through the night. Somewhere behind us, the last chords of a blues song echoed from Joey’s, fading slow into silence.

 

Chapter 2

I woke with a start, a gut-deep jerk like something had yanked me up from the bottom of a black river. “What the fu—?” The word shredded out of me, raw and useless in the dim. My heart was pounding and the room was wrong. Too quiet, too stale, too unfamiliar. My tongue felt thick. A sour film coated my teeth. I sat up fast and the floor slid sideways with me. Head like a hammer. The kind of skull-splitting throb I hadn’t earned the old-fashioned way in years.

I kept breathing until the ceiling stopped tilting. The air smelled of damp carpet, cheap disinfectant, stale smoke cut with someone’s bad cologne from a lifetime ago. The kind of smell that gets into your clothes and tells a story: hours rented by the quarter, names not traded for faces. A battered hotel room without the dignity of a brand. Just a rectangle with a bed in it and a door that had seen too many shoulders.

I looked down and realized I was half naked—undershirt twisted, boxers, socks on one foot, the other bare. A smear of something dark on my thigh that wasn’t blood. Lipstick? Dirt? I couldn’t tell. Panic hopped the fence and galloped. I stood too quickly and had to grab the crooked dresser to steady myself.

“Where the hell am I?” I asked the dresser. It had no answers.

The bed was a king in dimensions only—a sagging continent of sunken springs and cigarette burns, stiff comforter the color of sadness. The headboard was a panel of faux wood screwed into the wall, etched with graffiti initials and a crown someone carved with a key. The bedside lamp had a shade stained a tired yellow, and the light coming through it was low and jaundiced. A single art print hung crooked: a sailboat at sunset that couldn’t outrun itself.

I turned in a slow circle. The carpet under my feet was a matted brown that had started life as something lighter. The curtains were heavy and closed, edges frayed, swallowing whatever city was trying to get in. A rattling HVAC unit below the window wheezed air that couldn’t decide on a temperature. A table listed to one side, laminated top peeling at the corners like it wanted out. On it sat a black plastic ice bucket with a cracked lid and two paper-wrapped cups that had lost the will to be sanitary.

“Where the hell did she go?” I said to nobody, and then louder, like volume could rewind time. “Where the hell am I?”

The night was a fog. I remembered the quiet blonde at Joey’s. Nervous eyes. The tremor in her hands. The address she gave me. The rest room. Walking out with that small, sharp twist in my gut that says don’t do this and doing it anyway. Opening the van door. Her thank you, soft as lint. Headlights cutting a tunnel through the dark.

And then nothing. Total blackout. Someone had reached into my memory and pinched it off like a candle flame.

My head throbbed behind my eyes, a low drumbeat I knew too well, except there wasn’t any vodka sweat in it, no chemical regret on my tongue. I hadn’t had a drink. Four years clean and counting. This wasn’t the old guilt. This was something poured into me without a please.

I forced myself to move. Inventory, Mike. One step at a time. Like rebooting a dead server: power off, power on, permissions check, scan for damage.

My clothes were scattered in a trail that didn’t belong to me. Shoes by the door—laces untied. Slacks crumpled near the foot of the bed. Belt threaded through one loop like I’d been interrupted mid-sentence. Shirt on the chair’s arm, two buttons missing that I didn’t remember losing. My jacket was draped over the back of the chair with surprising neatness, which scared me more than the mess.

I crouched, winced at the pounding in my skull, and began gathering my clothes. I patted pockets: wallet, present and accounted for. Cash in the billfold, the same tired twenties I always carried. Credit cards, driver’s license. Wedding ring—on my finger. Phone? Under the pillow, dead as a stone. I found my socks—one on my foot, one stuck to the bed skirt like a dead moth. Keys? On the nightstand beside the remote with half its buttons missing and a laminated card that said Welcome to the Maple Motor Inn in a typeface that hadn’t been welcome in thirty years. Maple—there wasn’t a tree on this block, I’d bet my life. The phone on the nightstand had a coiled cord and a red Message light that blinked without conviction.

Okay. Wallet untouched. Ring on. Keys present. That wasn’t how robberies went. If she’d rolled me, she’d done it for practice, not profit. Which made it worse.

I checked my body like it was a piece of hardware I hadn’t configured. Forearms, a faint bloom of discoloration near the inside of my elbow, like a thumbprint. I pressed it: tender. No puncture that I could see, but I’d never been a phlebotomist. Mouth dry. Stomach unsettled but not actively mutinying. No obvious… other signs. I felt for a lump on the back of my head—nothing. Not a blunt-force special, then. Something slipped into my system with the elegance of a scalpel.

“Obviously she slipped me something,” I said to the wall. “But what? And for what?”

The room had the vibe of a trap that had already sprung. But if they wanted ransom, a camera, a confession—anything—they’d have left me a script. There was no note on the table, no phone number to call if I wanted the bleeding to stop. Only the faint metallic clack of pipes in the wall and a TV remote sticky with other people’s nights.

I dressed slow, going one garment at a time so I didn’t lose the thread. Socks. Slacks. The belt threaded and pulled tight—familiar anchoring. Shirt—slow, gentle with the missing buttons. Jacket last, to feel more like a person and less like an idea of one.

In the bathroom the light was brutal and honest. A loud square fluorescent over a mirror that had the dignity of a crack running like a river from top corner to middle. The sink was shallow, the faucet dripped with a patience that would outlive us all. The shower curtain was plastic and mildewed, the tile grout stained the color of old teeth. There was a plastic placard on the vanity that said Please help us conserve water as if water was the only thing this place was losing.

I leaned toward the mirror. The man looking back at me had bags under his eyes big enough to pack a weekend in, pupils a touch wider than they should be, skin a shade paler. I pulled down my lower eyelid and saw nothing helpful. I checked the inside of the elbow again—yeah, there, a faint pinpoint I wouldn’t have noticed if I wasn’t looking for it. Or maybe it was imagination wearing a lab coat. I sniffed my own breath—chemical bitter, like a pill that had lost its name.

I flushed the tap, let cold water run until it pretended to be clean, then rinsed my mouth, splashed my face, pressed my fingers into my temples. The cold didn’t dent the headache. It just made it more acquainted with the front of my skull.

No trace of her: no hair in the sink, no scent in the air except old soap, no impression in the bed that wasn’t mine. Ghost girl. The nervous blonde had been a delivery system. I didn’t know what. I didn’t know why. But I knew enough to make a choice.

Okay, Mike. One step at a time. Best course of action wasn’t to sit here waiting for the other shoe to drop. Best course wasn’t to call Joey or—worse—Sandy and try to explain this acid bath with half my memory shot and my mouth full of the wrong words. Best course was evidence. I’d spent my life telling clients to document, to log, to preserve. The forensic gospel. If a system got compromised, you don’t boot it up and start clicking—you pull the drive, you image it cold, you don’t contaminate the evidence.

In this case the system was me.

A hospital. An ER. A tox screen. Blood draw, urine, the whole uncomfortable truth. If something had been slipped into me—GHB, benzos, scopolamine, something out of a chemistry set with a street name—it would be on the record if I didn’t wait too long. Time windows. Blood today, gone tomorrow. Urine might keep the receipt a little longer. And if this was going to be a story later, I wanted it written by a lab tech, not my bad memory.

I scooped my keys, checked the room one last time to make sure I wasn’t leaving a piece of myself behind, and opened the door. It stuck the way old doors do—moisture in the frame—and then let go with a sigh. The hallway outside was a strip of carpet that had given up its color, lit by two ceiling fixtures, one of which flickered like it was coding in Morse. The air tasted like cigarettes smoked ten minutes ago and ten years ago. Somewhere a TV argued with itself through a too-thin door. Footsteps down the far end, quick and then gone. The Maple Motor Inn was exactly where you woke up when strangers wrote your schedule.

The parking lot was a concrete rectangle pocked with oil stains, puddles reflecting the fluorescents in jittery shoals. My van sat under a light pole, stoic and unjudging. I breathed easier when the door unlocked and the engine turned over. If they’d wanted to strand me, they’d have taken the keys I now clutched like a rosary.

“What the hell happened?” I asked the windshield as I backed out. It didn’t answer. Good. I didn’t trust it.

Chicago at the edge of dawn is a hard-faced friend who doesn’t ask questions. The sky was a grainy charcoal—no sun yet—streetlights still clinging to authority. I had to squint against the light migraine glow that wrapped each lamp in a halo. The city was mostly asleep, but the crews were out—garbage trucks rumbling, a couple of bundled men loading crates at a back door, a woman in scrubs waiting under an awning with her coffee and her thousand-yard stare. I kept to the main roads. My hands felt a hair slow on the wheel, like I was piloting through honey. I rolled down the window, let the air slap me awake.

The Illinois Medical District was the only destination that made sense. Hospitals in a pack: Rush, UIC, Jesse Brown VA, and the big animal, John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital of Cook County. County. The ER that saw the city’s worst and then some. If you were bleeding, broke, undocumented, unlucky, or all four, County would keep you alive long enough to get a bill you’d never pay. It also had a lab that knew the difference between a party and a crime.

I nosed the van onto Ogden, cut down to Damen, the skyline a jag of black teeth against a sky going from blue-black to iron gray. My head throbbed with each stoplight like a red knuckle rapping bone. I kept breathing, kept driving. One step at a time.

Stroger’s ER entrance on Polk was a low-slung mouth with glass teeth, the sliding doors whispering promises and compromises. The parking lot was already half full with cars that looked like mine: dented, stubborn, paid in full. A security SUV idled by the curb, the guard inside drinking coffee and scanning the horizon like trouble had called to say it was running late.

I killed the engine, sat for a second with my hands on the wheel, and then got out. The world tilted again—just once, a slow drift—and then found its center. I walked in under the fluorescent wash.

Inside, the ER had the kind of light that flattens everything into paperwork. The air was a cocktail of disinfectant, tired breath, and steamed cafeteria food trying to be eggs at an hour eggs shouldn’t be asked to perform. A TV in the corner of the waiting room tried to sell a morning show smile to people who weren’t buying. The chairs were bolted together in rows, plastic molded to the shape of waiting. A kid coughed in a way that made his mother flinch. A man in work boots held a bandage to his thumb like a bandage could be a prayer. A woman in a blanket stared at the floor with the focus of a surgeon. And behind it all, the orchestra: triage monitors beeping in different keys, a gurney wheel with a flat spot ticking like a metronome, a printer somewhere spitting forms like a magician with a cheap trick.

The triage desk had bulletproof glass and a round hole for voices to crawl through. Behind it sat a woman with hair in a tight bun and glasses that said she had already seen your excuse and filed it under unoriginal. Her name badge read R. McGRAW, RN. She had a pen in her hand that looked like it could weigh your soul.

I stepped up, tried to find the right words in a mouth that felt like it had been rented out. “Morning,” I said. “I need to be seen. I think… I think I was drugged.”

Her eyes flicked up, then down, then up. Quick triage. “Name?”

“Michael—uh—Michael Byers.” My voice sounded like it belonged to a guy who hadn’t slept and then got run over by something soft and large.

“Date of birth, Mr. Byers?”

I gave it to her.

She clicked keys in a rhythm. “What makes you think you were drugged?”

“Blackout,” I said. “No alcohol. No… nothing. I remember giving someone a ride. Then I woke up in a motel room I’ve never seen before. Headache. Mouth like a crime scene. Possible…” I lifted my forearm through the slot. “I don’t know if that’s a puncture.”

She leaned in, peered, and made a sound that wasn’t agreement or disagreement. “Any pain besides the headache? Nausea? Vomiting? Dizziness?”

“Headache’s bad. Little dizzy. Nausea’s hovering but not committed.”

“Any chest pain, shortness of breath?”

“No.”

“Any history of seizures?”

“No.”

“Are you safe right now?” Her eyes stayed on mine for that one.

“Yes,” I said, and hoped it was true.

“You drive yourself?”

“Yeah.”

She didn’t like that, but she didn’t scold me. She typed. “Any known allergies to medication?”

I gave her the list, short and boring.

“Any substances?” She didn’t say the word drugs like it was moral, just medical.

“No,” I said, and added, “Four years sober.”

She nodded once. “Do you want to involve the police?”

I tasted the question. I thought about it. “Not yet,” I said. “I want a tox screen. Blood and urine. If we can do chain of custody, I’d prefer it.”

That made her eyes narrow in approval. “Alright,” she said. “Have a seat. Triage nurse will call you.”

I sat. The chairs were designed to outlast hope. I kept my back against the plastic and my eyes on the floor, focusing on the pattern in the tiles the way you do when you want to stay inside your skin. Across from me, a man with a face like a map of hard miles watched me with a neutral gaze that said he’d seen worse and expected worse again.

It didn’t take long. A door buzzed and a nurse in navy scrubs called, “Michael Byers?” I stood, the room doing a slow pirouette before deciding to stay put. I followed her through the door into the back where the light got brighter and the linoleum got shinier and the smells sharpened into ammonia and saline and copper pennies that might have been real.

She took me into a triage bay—curtained, a recliner chair with a paper sheet over it, a monitor on a stand with wires hanging like an octopus. “I’m Kendra,” she said, snapping on gloves. “We’ll get some vitals and then a provider will see you. You said possible ingestion?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Someone slipped me something. Or injected. I don’t know.”

She wrapped a cuff around my arm. It squeezed with the same authority as a problem you can’t ignore. “You look like you’ve had a rough night,” she said, not unkindly.

“Yeah,” I said. “That makes two of us.”

She smiled a small, professional smile and checked the monitor. “BP’s a little elevated. Pulse ninety-eight. You’re not the worst I’ve seen by a long shot. Headache on a scale of one to ten?”

“Seven,” I said. “But a loud seven.”

“Any sensitivity to light?”

“Little.”

She touched the inside of my elbow with practiced fingers, found the spot I had found. “Could be a puncture,” she said. “Could be nothing. Either way, we’ll draw. You want chain of custody, I’ll notate it and we’ll store a sample sealed. If you change your mind about the police, the option’s open.”

“Thank you,” I said, meaning it more than I knew how to say.

She left and came back with a cart. The phlebotomy tray rattled a little—vacutainers, butterfly needles, tourniquet, gauze. The sight of the needle would have once made me think of bad choices. Now it looked like someone offering facts.

“Left or right?” she asked.

“Right.”

She tied the tourniquet and my veins rose like they wanted to be helpful. She palpated, nodded, cleaned a circle with alcohol that bit cold. “Little stick,” she said, and she was right. The needle slid in and a small red river filled the tube. She switched tubes, labels with my name and the exact time—time mattered now; drugs are ghosts on a schedule. She filled a bag with my urine when I could manage it—first void is best, she said, and I filed it away like a man who collects puzzles. She sealed, initialed, noted the chain. The clinical choreography of trust.

A resident rolled in a computer on wheels, a young guy with tired eyes and a tie he’d chosen on a day he still believed in ties. “Mr. Byers? I’m Dr. Purohit. Tell me what happened.”

I told him, the short version, the facts like thumbtacks on a corkboard. The bar. The blonde. The address. The van. The blackout. The motel. Waking up half naked, nothing missing. The headache chewing at me like a rat, the mouth taste, the small puncture maybe.

He nodded, thinking. “Any muscle weakness? Visual changes? Memory gaps beyond the blackout?”

“Just the blackout,” I said. “I remember driving. Then I was waking up. I didn’t drink. I haven’t in years.”

He gave me a look that carried the weight of a dozen similar confessions. “I believe you,” he said simply. “There are substances that cause anterograde amnesia—new memories don’t form. GHB metabolizes quickly—blood six to eight hours, urine up to twelve, sometimes twenty-four. Some benzodiazepines can do similar things—flunitrazepam, although it’s rare here; more often it’s alprazolam or clonazepam, both can cause sedation and amnesia. Scopolamine—hyoscine—can produce confusion and vulnerability, but again, detection is tricky. Ketamine produces dissociation, can be detected in urine for a day or two. Z-drugs like zolpidem can also do it. We’ll run a comprehensive tox screen, but keep in mind the sensitivity varies and the detection windows are narrow. That’s why the timestamps matter.”

“I figured,” I said. “IT guy. Logs and times.”

He smiled in the way doctors smile when you make their job slightly easier. “We’ll also do basic labs, check electrolytes, liver, kidney, make sure nothing else is going on. Do you want us to call law enforcement now, or wait for results?”

“Wait,” I said. “But seal a sample.”

“Already done,” Kendra said from the corner, labeling like a scribe.

“Good,” he said. “We’ll also get you an IV for fluids—might help the headache—ondansetron for nausea if you need. Pain control—acetaminophen first. If you get worse—confusion, vomiting, chest pain—hit the call button, alright?”

“Alright.”

He stood. “I’m sorry this happened,” he said, like an apology not from him but from the fact that the world had people in it. “We’ll check on you soon.”

Kendra slid an IV into my left forearm with the care of someone threading a needle in a moving car. Saline dripped into me cold and clean. The first sip of honesty I’d had all night. She taped it down with a neat cross and handed me a small cup with two caplets. “Tylenol,” she said. “Sip of water?”

The water tasted like the hospital: metallic, chilled, neutral. The headache didn’t vanish, but it stepped back a little, like it was willing to negotiate.

A tech came and wheeled me from triage into a curtained ER bay. The curtain’s pattern tried to be cheerful and failed. A nurse I hadn’t met adjusted the monitor and tucked the blanket over my legs with a brisk efficiency that made me feel both six years old and eighty. A security officer drifted past the open gap, scanning the room the way men scan a horizon when they know it sometimes fights back.

I lay there under the fluorescent noon of a morning that didn’t want to show its face yet. The beeps around me became a kind of music: arrhythmias with a beat. A voice across the aisle argued in Spanish, tired and angry; a baby down the hall found a crying register that could break glass and hearts both. Somewhere a printer chunked out discharge instructions like a player piano.

I took slow breaths and let the saline work. The fog in my head thinned enough to let shapes through: the curve of the blonde’s jaw, the way her hands had trembled, the cheap framed sailboat in the motel, Joey’s look as I told him I’d be careful. I couldn’t afford the luxury of blame. Not now. Facts first. Feelings later.

I checked my phone with cautious hope. Kendra had plugged it into a hospital charger with a kindness that felt bigger than it looked. The screen blinked awake: 5:42 a.m. Missed call from Sandy at 12:17 a.m. A text: You okay? Call me when you can. I stared at it until the words blurred. I typed: At hospital. Getting checked. Will call soon. It was true enough to stand up in court.

The curtain shifted and a different nurse leaned in—a big man with a lion’s mane of hair pulled back under a cap adorned with cartoon lungs. “Need anything, boss?” he asked.

“Just time,” I said.

“Can’t stock that here,” he said, not unkindly. “But we’ll keep you watered.”

I nodded. He disappeared. The drip kept its small, cold promises.

The clock on the wall didn’t have hands, just a digital hunger for minutes. I watched it churn them like candy into teeth. I didn’t know what would come back from the lab. I didn’t know what would come back from the night. I didn’t know what had been taken and what had been planted.

I lay still, listening to the city’s pulse rerouted through plastic and steel, and waited for whatever truth the blood would print.  I dozed.

 

Chapter 3

My eyes opened slowly.  The IV whispered into me with the patience of rain. Clear cold pushing through tubing into a vein that had seen better nights, a metronome drip marking time I hadn’t agreed to. I lay there under hospital light that erased shadows and faces in equal measure, listening to machines conduct a cracked symphony—beeps, shoe squeaks, a printer chewing out one more line of truth. My head still throbbed, but the sharp edge had been filed down to something duller and meaner. I could live with dull. Dull keeps secrets.

I rolled my head and saw my phone was still cabled to a generic charger on the tray. The screen showed 10:07 a.m. and a wallpaper Sandy picked last summer—Lake Michigan the color of steel with sunlight pretending to be gold. The sight hit me like a fist and then I remembered, clean and ugly: Damn, Sandy. I told her I would call.

I grabbed the phone. The sudden movement tugged at the IV tape; the pain was small, a human-sized annoyance, which felt like a gift. I thumbed her name. The ring barely started its climb when she answered.

“Mike?” Her voice came fast, breathless, too alive. “What happened? Where the hell are you? You have not done this to me in four years—”

I let it roll over me for a beat. She deserved the runway. I could hear the notes under the words: fear wearing its angry coat. I kept my voice low, because volume wasn’t a tool I wanted to use.

“I’m okay,” I said. “I’m at the hospital.”

“Which hospital? Are you hurt? Did you drink?” The words tripped over each other and bled.

“Stroger. County.” I shut my eyes, made my voice soft. “No booze, San. I swear on everything. I think someone slipped me something. I woke up… not home. I’m getting checked. Tox screen.”

Silence. Not empty—calculated. I could hear her hand go to her mouth even though I couldn’t see it. “You promised me,” she said, softer now, almost to herself. “Four years. You promised me no more disappearing, no more—”

“I know,” I said. “And I kept it. I am keeping it. I went to Joey’s, had coffee, and a woman asked for a ride. That’s all. I went to the restroom, we left, I drove a few blocks, and then… nothing. Woke up in a dump. Wallet still on me. Wedding ring still on me. Just a head like a drum and time missing.” I forced a breath steady. “I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner. I should have.  I said I would when I texted you back. But I fell asleep. Head was throbbing.”

She was quiet long enough I could hear the background of our house in my head—fridge hum, the kitchen clock that ticked slightly off tempo, the old floor that creaked when the air conditioning kicked. I hated that I could picture her at the counter in my faded Marine sweatshirt, eyes bright with worry, standing very still the way she does when she’s trying not to shatter.

“Okay,” she said finally. “Okay. I believe you.” A beat. “Do the tests. And then come home.”

“I will.” It felt like a vow I could make clean. “I’m going to swing by Joey’s after, though.”

“Mike—”

“He’s got cameras. I want to see if she slipped something into my cup.” I rubbed my eyes with my free hand. “It was innocent, San. Just a ride. That’s all it was. I need proof. For me. For you.”

She breathed out slow. “You sound… sober.” The way she said the word held both hope and a knife.

“I am,” I said. “I wouldn’t survive the other thing again.

Another silence, this one looser around the edges. “Call me before you leave the hospital. And… if you feel off, get a ride. Don’t be a mule about it.”

“I’ll call,” I said. “Promise.”

“I love you,” she said, like a benediction and a checkpoint.

“I love you,” I said. “Be back soon.”

We disconnected. The line went quiet and the ER poured back in. I set the phone down like it might bite and leaned my head against the paper pillow. A small piece inside me unclenched, not joy exactly, but the possibility of it later.

The curtain moved with a whisper. Kendra—the triage nurse with the steady hands—slid inside, her eyes quick on me, then the monitor, then the IV bag. “You alright?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Spoke to my wife.”

“Good,” she said. “We like wives. They keep us honest.”

“She does that,” I said. “Any word from the lab?”

“Doc’s coming,” she said. “They pushed your samples to the front because of the window.” Her gloved fingers pinched the tubing, checking flow. “Headache any better?”

“A shade,” I said. “Seven down to a six and a half.”

“We’ll take it,” she said. “Dr. Purohit’s on his way.”

He arrived a minute later, hair more disheveled, tie looser, the night having put one more mile on his young face. He rolled the computer on wheels in like a dance partner and parked it at the end of the bed. “Mr. Byers,” he said. “We’ve got preliminary results.”

I felt everything in me rise to meet the words. “Hit me.”

He clicked, reading the screen the way I read logs at three a.m.—seeing the story inside the noise. “First, your basic labs: electrolytes within normal limits. Renal and hepatic panels fine. Blood glucose 98. CBC normal. Serum ethanol negative. Acetaminophen and salicylate levels negative.”

“Okay.”

“Urine immunoassay screening: negative for cocaine metabolites, negative for amphetamines, negative for opiates on the standard panel. Positive for benzodiazepines.” He lifted his eyes. “And positive for sedative-hypnotics—specifically, zolpidem.”

The name landed with a clean, clinical thud. “Ambien,” I said.

“Ambien,” he agreed. “We also ran a point-of-care diphenhydramine screen, given your symptoms. That came back positive as well.”

“Benadryl,” I said, because simple words make simple pictures.

“Right. A first-generation antihistamine. Sedating. In combination with a Z-drug like zolpidem, you can see pronounced central nervous system depression—drowsiness, impaired coordination, and importantly, anterograde amnesia. Ambien is well-known for episodes where people perform complex behaviors and have no memory of it—sleep driving, sleep eating. Add diphenhydramine and you magnify that effect. Both are bitter, but coffee—especially strong coffee—masks bitterness, and hot liquid dissolves crushed tablets easily. If crushed fine enough, the texture would disappear in the brew.”

He gave me a second to catch up. My brain tied the words to the night like string on pins. “The benzo hit—was that real or a false positive?”

“Immunoassays are broad,” he said, not defensive—informational. “They cast a wide net. Zolpidem doesn’t usually cross-react on a benzodiazepine screen, but some metabolites can cross with certain assays. Given the strong zolpidem positive and the diphenhydramine positive, the benzo signal may be a nonspecific reaction. That said, we drew confirmatory samples for LC-MS/MS—liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry—on both serum and urine. Those will distinguish specific agents and quantify levels. We won’t have those for a day or two.”

“So it could be just the Ambien and Benadryl,” I said.

“Correct,” he said. “Though clinically, your presentation fits zolpidem plus diphenhydramine. Onset thirty to sixty minutes after ingestion—sedation, impaired motor function, anterograde amnesia. Your time course—leaving the bar, driving a few blocks, then blackout—is consistent.

“Would I drive?” The question came out quiet. I already knew the worst of it but wanted a doctor to name it so I could decide what to hate.

“Yes,” he said. “People can appear superficially functional. You might carry on a conversation, perform practiced tasks, drive. The memory simply doesn’t imprint. It’s like writing on water. It’s not a pass—people get hurt that way. But it explains the gap without implicating alcohol.”

“Levels?” I asked. “Do the labs tell you how much?”

He turned the screen so I could half-see a list of numbers that didn’t care about my feelings. “Serum zolpidem—twenty-two nanograms per milliliter. That’s within the range we see two to six hours post ingestion depending on dose and metabolism. Diphenhydramine serum—sixty nanograms per milliliter. Therapeutic to sedating range. Your urine shows zolpidem and its metabolite zopiclone-like compounds—again, consistent with ingestion several hours ago. We did not detect GHB—gamma-hydroxybutyrate—but we did not run a targeted GHB assay; it’s not on the standard panel, and it clears quickly. Given the Ambien and Benadryl, I don’t think GHB is necessary to explain this. We also did not detect ketamine.”

The numbers made a kind of brutal common sense. Bitter pills in hot coffee. A woman with careful eyes. A blackout that was tidy and mean. The IV in my arm, the sailor-knot headache, the way the world slid.

“Could someone slip both into a cup and it not taste like a pharmacy?” I asked, because the devil lives in practicalities.

“Yes,” he said. “Zolpidem tartrate tablets are quite bitter if chewed, but crushed and stirred into hot, aromatic liquid—coffee with cream and sugar—most people wouldn’t notice beyond a slightly medicinal note. Diphenhydramine is also bitter, but the combination in hot coffee is easily masked, especially if you’re distracted. The dose we’re seeing suggests one standard zolpidem tablet—five or ten milligrams—and perhaps fifty milligrams of diphenhydramine. Enough to sedate an adult and disrupt memory, not enough to suppress breathing in a healthy person. That said, driving under that influence is dangerous.”

“Yeah,” I said. The word felt small.

He watched me a moment. “Do you want law enforcement involved?”

“Not yet,” I said. “We did chain of custody?”

“We did.” He nodded to Kendra who had slipped in behind him like a shadow. “Two sealed vials—serum and urine—labeled with time, date, patient ID, and witnessed signatures. Stored in our evidence fridge. If you decide to file a report, we can release them per protocol.”

“Thank you,” I said. The gratitude landed somewhere between my chest and my throat and sat there, heavy.

“You may feel residual effects for eight to twelve hours,” he continued. “Cognitive slowing, disequilibrium, headache. Hydration helps; you’re already getting that. Caffeine helps once you’re stable. Avoid any CNS depressants—alcohol, benzodiazepines, opioids—and, frankly, avoid making big decisions. Rest. If you develop new symptoms—confusion, fainting, chest pain, difficulty breathing—return immediately.”

“Copy,” I said. Old training—repeat the order back. It steadies the room.

He soft-clicked the mouse, then looked at me, not as a case but as a person with a wife on the other end of a phone. “I’m sorry,” he said. “This is a thing that happens. It shouldn’t. But it does.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s the world.”

He stood, fingers on the back of the rolling computer. “We can discharge you once the fluids are in. I’d prefer someone drive you.”

“I’ll try,” I said. “My wife asked the same.”

He nodded, not pressing. He knew the animal he was dealing with. “We’ll get your discharge paperwork started. Kendra will pull the IV when you’re ready.”

He left. Kendra stayed, checking the drip, her face all professional competence with a crease of something like anger between her brows.

“You okay?” she asked.

“I’ve been better.” I watched the bag, now half-empty. “Thank you for moving fast.”

She shrugged a shoulder. “Windows. If folks come in a day later, we can’t find anything, and then they think they imagined it. You were smart to come. And smart to ask for chain of custody.”

“I work in IT. Logs keep people honest.” I paused. “Does this happen a lot?”

“More than we write up,” she said. “People don’t want the paperwork. Or they don’t want to remember. Or they blame themselves for being tired and trusting.” She glanced at me. “You didn’t deserve it.”

“Deserve’s a funny word,” I said. “I offered a stranger a ride.”

She gave a small noise that could have been agreement or not. “Next time, keep your cup in your hand.”

I half-smiled. “Yes, ma’am.”

She adjusted the flow and the last of the bag emptied into me. The cool sensation faded to nothing, leaving behind a steadier pulse and a headache that had taken one more cautious step back.

She clamped the line. “Ready?”

“As I’ll ever be,” I said.

She peeled the tape with the care of someone removing a bandage from a memory. The catheter slid free, a pinprick and then warm gauze and one square of tape pressed down. She wrapped a small elastic roll over it to remind me not to be stupid. “Leave this on for an hour,” she said. “Don’t lift anything heavy. Don’t pick a fight with anyone bigger than you.”

“No promises,” I said.

She smiled, and it touched her eyes this time. “Discharge is printing. I’ll be back with it.”

While she was gone I called Sandy again. She answered on the first vibration like she’d been holding it in her hand. I told her what the doctor said—the names, the numbers, the story the labs told. She was quiet, which meant the facts had been allowed to sit down and be real.

“So it wasn’t alcohol,” she said at last.

“It wasn’t alcohol,” I said. “Ambien and Benadryl. In coffee.

A long exhale. “Are you okay to drive?”

“I feel… functional,” I said. “A little slow at the edges. They want me to get a ride. I can call a car.”

“Please,” she said.

“I’ll see if Joey’s open and then decide,” I said, a compromise that sounded like stubbornness in nicer clothes. “I won’t be stupid. I promise.”

“You were a Chief,” she said. “You’ve never been stupid. Just… proud.”

“I’ll be careful,” I said. “I’ll call when I leave here. And when I leave Joey’s. And when I pull into the driveway. I’ll spam you with calls until you’re sick of me.”

“That’s not possible,” she said, and I heard the smile finally, tired and real. “Come home.”

“I will.”

Kendra returned with a clipboard and a stack of papers that would go into a drawer and be looked at at two a.m. some night when the world was quiet enough to be loud. She walked me through them: discharge diagnosis—suspected involuntary ingestion of sedative-hypnotic and antihistamine resulting in anterograde amnesia and sedation—vital signs, return precautions, the number for hospital security if I decided to involve law enforcement, the note about sealed samples and chain-of-custody availability. Her finger tapped the line where I was supposed to sign, and I signed with a hand that shook only a little.

She handed me a small bottle of water and two packets of saltines wrapped in plastic. “For the road,” she said. “And get some coffee—you pour it, you hold it.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She walked me to the doorway of the bay. The ER had shifted gears toward morning—more voices, less night-cry. The TV now offered weather lies with graphics of sunshine over a city that preferred rain. A janitor pushed a yellow bucket like a ship over waves. The guard at the door did a long, slow stretch that creaked.

Kendra put a hand on my arm, just for a second. “Take care of yourself, Mr. Byers.”

“I will,” I said, and I meant it with an intensity that surprised me.

The sliding doors over the ambulance bay whispered open and I stepped into a pale morning that hadn’t decided on a color. The air smelled like wet concrete and exhaust and coffee I could almost believe in. The sky was a thin gray sheet stretched tight over brick and glass. The city was waking up to its bad habits and good intentions.

I crossed the lot, each step testing the ground like it might lurch. The residual fog in my head was still there, a ghost that hadn’t decided to move out, but my legs remembered me. The van waited where I’d left it, stoic, dented, familiar like a dog that understands too much.

I unlocked it, opened the door, and climbed in. The seat sighed. The steering wheel felt like home and trouble both. I sat with my hands on it and watched my breath fog the windshield once, then clear.

I turned the key. The engine caught.

 

Chapter 4

I sat there a minute, letting the van warm up, the heater coughing lukewarm air through the vents. The early light outside was weak, the kind of gray that makes everything look like a memory. My breath fogged the windshield and vanished. I just sat, staring at the dashboard, hands slack on the wheel, my brain still half in a fog but functional enough to start asking questions it couldn’t answer.

Why?
 Who?
 What in the hell?

The same words looped like bad code. The kind that runs until it crashes.

I could think of no one—past or present—who’d want to hurt me. I wasn’t the kind of guy who made enemies. The job didn’t lend itself to it. IT work was about logic and quiet; ones and zeros, not grudges and guns. The last time my life had carried any real risk, it was camouflaged and sand-caked and twenty miles behind me in another lifetime. I’d been a damn corpsman, not an operator. I patched holes; I didn’t make them.

And yet here I was, running through possibilities like a system log full of errors that didn’t make sense.

The woman—I didn’t recognize her. Not from anywhere. Not a client’s face, not a meeting, not an AA room, not from church, not a memory hiding in the dark. Just a stranger who walked into Joey’s and upended my life like she’d been sent for that one purpose.

“Why me?” I said to the steering wheel. It didn’t answer.

I sighed, rubbed my temples, and leaned back until the seat creaked. The ache behind my eyes pulsed once, twice. My body was still heavy from whatever chemical hangover was rattling through it. But my head was clearing just enough for habit to take over. Information. Pattern. Data trail.

I needed to see that footage.

I shifted into gear and eased out of the hospital lot. The streets were nearly empty, morning traffic not yet born. Chicago before dawn has a quiet unlike any other city—a silence that feels like the world holding its breath before it starts shouting again.

The van rattled through the empty streets, the sound of tires on wet asphalt and the low hum of the heater the only conversation in the world. The sky lightened by slow degrees—gray, then bruised blue, then the thin gold of a sun trying to burn through exhaust.

By the time I reached Joey’s, the neon sign was dark. The place looked asleep. But Joey never really closed. He might lock the door and turn off the lights, but he was always inside, brewing coffee and counting bottles, making peace with another night gone.

I parked out front and sat for a moment, staring at the place. The air still smelled faintly of rain and last night’s smoke. I got out, my legs stiff from too many hours of adrenaline and not enough sleep. The pavement was wet, glistening under the streetlight like something freshly cleaned that would never really be clean.

Joey’s door was locked, but the small security camera above the frame was awake and blinking its red light. I knocked twice, then tilted my head up at it.

A moment later, the buzzer clicked and the door unlocked.

I pushed it open. The tavern was dark except for the glow of the lights behind the bar. The air carried the mixed scents of coffee, disinfectant, and old oak.

“Morning, Mike,” Joey’s voice called from the back. “You’re a few hours early for happy hour.”

“Not exactly the mood I’m in,” I said, stepping in and letting the door close behind me.

He came out from behind the bar, wiping his hands on a rag, his eyes crinkled but alert. “You look like hell.”

“Feel worse,” I said.

He leaned on the counter, that half-grin fading when he really looked at me. “What’s going on? You never show up this early unless something’s wrong.”

“It’s bad,” I said. “You got a minute?”

“For you, I’ve got ten,” he said. “Coffee?”

“Yeah. Black.”

He poured two mugs and set one in front of me. The smell of it made my stomach twist. I pushed it away.

He frowned. “Alright, talk.”

So I told him. The short version. The girl. The coffee. The ride. The blackout. Waking up in that motel. The hospital. The tox screen—Ambien and Benadryl, mixed like a cocktail for forgetting. His face went still about halfway through.

When I finished, he exhaled slow, like he’d been holding his breath for the whole story.

“Jesus, Mike,” he said. “That’s—Christ, that’s messed up.”

“Yeah.”

He rubbed the back of his neck. “You sure you’re okay?”

“Physically, yeah. Mentally… jury’s still out.”

“What can I do?”

I looked up at him. “You remember when I put your security system in? About three years back?”

He nodded. “Yeah. You saved me a pile of cash. Why?”

“I want to see last night’s footage. Between nine and ten-thirty. I need to see if she slipped something into my coffee while I was in the restroom.”

His eyes narrowed. “You think she did it here?”

“I don’t think,” I said. “I know.”

Joey stared for a second, then nodded. “Alright. Let’s go.”

We went through the back, down the short hallway that smelled faintly of fryer grease and old beer, to the small office behind the kitchen. It was a cave of paperwork, old ledgers, and a monitor setup I’d built for him—a four-screen grid with feeds from every corner of the bar. The hum of the DVR filled the small room, steady and constant.

He gestured to the chair. “You know the system better than I do. Knock yourself out.”

I sat down, the seat familiar, the desk cluttered with old receipts and a photo of Joey and his late wife at some long-ago picnic, both of them younger and rounder and laughing. I tapped the keyboard awake and the monitor flickered from sleep to life.

The four quadrants filled: front door, bar counter, tables, back exit. Time stamps scrolled in small white digits across the bottom. I navigated to the date—last night—and scrolled to 9:00 p.m.

The footage rolled. The bar glowed in colorless infrared light, angles skewed from the corners. Regulars in their usual spots. Joey behind the counter, chatting, polishing glasses. Then me, at the middle stool, coffee in hand, shoulders hunched like the world was sitting there with me.

“There,” I said, pointing. “That’s me. 9:18.”

Joey leaned close, squinting. “That’s about right. You were in here maybe twenty minutes.”

We watched in silence. The footage had no sound, but the movements told the story well enough. I sat there, sipping, talking. Joey laughed at something, shook his head. I got up, gesturing toward the back—the restroom.

“Here it is,” I said.

At 9:31, I pushed off the stool and walked toward the hallway. The camera caught me leaving frame. The blonde—she came into the frame 2 seconds later.

She moved like she was trying not to be seen. Glanced once at Joey—he was wiping the bar, turned away—then back at my mug. Her hand hovered for a second. Then she reached into her purse, pulled something small—maybe a napkin or tissue—and her fingers did a subtle shake above the cup. A flick, quick, practiced. She stirred once with the handle of her spoon, then let it rest.

Joey muttered under his breath. “Damn it.”

We both watched in silence. She straightened, looked around again, then pulled her phone out, pretending to scroll. I came back a minute later, none the wiser, sat down, said something to Joey that made him grin. She smiled small, nervous. Everything looked perfectly ordinary.

But it wasn’t.

“Damn,” Joey said again, softer this time. “She did it right here. Right under my nose.”

I leaned closer to the screen. “Back it up a few seconds.”

He did. I pointed. “See her fingers? How she pinches the napkin before dropping it in? That wasn’t sugar. No one carries sugar in a napkin.”

“No,” Joey said. “She knew what she was doing.”

We let the footage roll another few minutes. At 9:38, I stood, tossed a bill on the counter, said something—probably see you later—and headed out with her trailing close behind.

Joey leaned back. “I’d swear to God she looked half assed normal. Nothing about her said real trouble. She just looked scared.”

“Yeah, I know” I said. “That’s what scares me.”

He scratched at his jaw. “You want to pull a copy? I can burn it to a flash drive.”

“I’ll take it,” I said. “But I also want to see the exterior cameras. I want to know where she came from.”

He nodded and switched feeds. The screen jumped to the outside view—the front parking area, lit by the overhang lights and the dull red glow from the neon sign. Time stamp matched the same window.

At 9:28, a vehicle pulled up across the street—an old Chevy Blazer, maybe early 2000s. Two-tone gray, rust along the wheel wells, headlights dull and uneven. It idled there a full minute before the driver’s door opened. She stepped out, purse over her shoulder, paused to check her reflection in the side mirror, then crossed the street.

“Here she comes,” Joey said, leaning closer. “That’s her, no doubt.”

She disappeared into the bar. The Blazer sat another thirty seconds, brake lights glowing faintly, then turned right and pulled away, merging with the trickle of late traffic.

“Can you pause there?” I asked.

He hit the spacebar. The freeze-frame caught it mid-turn, the right rear corner catching light from the streetlamp. I squinted. The plate was Illinois—white with blue and red. The middle numbers were blurred, but I could make out part of it: 6—2—P—something.

“Can you zoom?”

“Not much. This isn’t CSI.”

He enlarged the image anyway, grainy pixels breaking into squares. The first digit was clear enough—a six. Then maybe a two or a zero. Then P. Then something that looked like a 7 or maybe an F.

“Half a plate’s better than none,” I said.

“You want me to print it?”

“Yeah.”

He clicked through a few commands, sent the frame to the printer in the corner. The machine groaned to life, spitting out a sheet that smelled like warm toner. I took it and looked at it close. The details were rough, but the color of the Blazer, the partial plate, the rust pattern—it was something.

Joey crossed his arms. “You calling the cops?”

“Not yet,” I said. “I want to know what I’m walking into first.”

“You’re not walking into anything alone,” he said.

I looked up at him. His face was all edges and years, but his eyes were sharp and loyal.

“I appreciate that,” I said. “But let’s see what the footage says before we go kicking doors.”

He snorted. “At my age, I don’t kick doors. I call people who do.”

I smiled despite myself. “Yeah, well, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

He clapped a hand on my shoulder, the weight solid and warm. “You’re sure you’re alright, Mike? She could’ve done worse. A lot worse.”

“I know,” I said. “That’s what keeps spinning in my head. She didn’t take my wallet, my keys, nothing. Just drugged me and disappeared.”

Joey frowned. “That’s not random. That’s deliberate.”

“Yeah,” I said quietly. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

The two of us sat there for a while longer, the hum of the DVR filling the silence, both of us watching the frozen image of that beat-up Blazer on the screen. The pixels pulsed faintly, like a heartbeat.

Joey broke the silence first. “You want another cup?”

I looked at him. The corner of my mouth twitched. “Not today.”

He chuckled, shaking his head. “Fair enough.”

I stood, folded the printout carefully, and slipped it into my jacket pocket. “Mind if I keep the copy of the footage?”

“Take it,” he said. “I’ll burn you a backup too.”

“Thanks, Joey.”

He nodded, watching me like a father who’s seen too much trouble come through his doors. “You find her, Mike. Find out why.”

“I will,” I said.

I left the office, the faint smell of coffee and smoke following me out. The morning outside had brightened, thin sunlight pushing through the haze. The van sat waiting, same as before, steady and scarred. I climbed in, started the engine, and sat there again for a moment, watching the vapor trail of my breath fade against the glass.

 

Chapter 5

I sat there a moment longer, the van idling, heater fan pushing tired air at my knees. The printout from Joey’s camera sat on the passenger seat, edges curled from my grip. My pulse had steadied, but the noise inside my head hadn’t. The fog was thinning, leaving behind the ache of something half-remembered and unwanted. Then it hit me—there was one more call I had to make.

I sighed. Not the hospital, not Sandy this time. This one was older, deeper.

Steve.

My sponsor. My friend. My brother in the truest sense that word can carry without blood to back it up.

I ran a hand down my face and shook my head. “You’re gonna love this one,” I muttered. “But you need to hear it.”

I picked up my phone and dialed his number from memory. I could do it in my sleep. I had, once or twice. He picked up on the third ring, same as always.

“Kon’nichiwa, ogenkidesuka!” he barked in that gravelly, cheerful voice of his. He thought it meant “Hello, how are you?” in Japanese—which it did—but mostly he liked the way it sounded rolling out of his Marine throat. He always cracked himself up with it.

I couldn’t help smiling, despite the night I’d had. “What’s up, dumbass?”

He laughed, deep and full, like a diesel engine catching. “That’s my boy. You sound rough, Mikey. You alright?”

I swallowed hard. “I didn’t drink,” I said first thing, my voice flatter than I meant it to be.

He snorted. “I know that, dumbass. You wouldn’t be calling me if you had.”

I leaned back in the seat and stared through the windshield at nothing. “No, listen, brother. This one’s bad. I need to talk.”

Something in my tone must’ve cut through the humor, because he went quiet immediately. When he spoke again, his voice was low, steady, all Marine. “Okay. Spill it.”

I took a breath, feeling the story stack up behind my teeth. “Alright,” I said. “Last night started normal. Long day at work, late night, too many clients, too many screens. I shut down the office about nine twenty. Called Sandy, told her I was stopping by Joey’s for coffee before heading home. You know Joey’s—same old hole-in-the-wall, nothing fancy, just familiar.”

“Right,” he said. “Coffee and bullshit. Standard procedure.”

“Exactly,” I said. “So I get there, everything’s quiet. Joey’s behind the bar, wiping glasses like always. A couple of regulars. I sit, order coffee, black. We shoot the breeze about nothing for twenty minutes. I’m winding down, about ready to head out, when this blonde walks in.”

He made a low sound. “Blonde. Trouble, then.”

“Yeah,” I said. “She looked nervous, like she was being followed. Mid-thirties maybe. Jeans, jacket, hair tied back. Not glamorous, not sketchy. Just… off. You know when something in your gut doesn’t line up with what your eyes are seeing?”

“Every damn deployment,” he said quietly.

“Yeah, that.” I rubbed my temples. “She sits down next to me, asks if I can give her a ride home. Says her car broke down, phone dead, no cabs around. Seems harmless enough. I glance at Joey, he shrugs—up to me. I say sure, let me hit the restroom first.”

“Uh huh.”

“I go back there, wash my hands, splash some water. Come back out, finished off the coffee, we leave together. I remember unlocking the van, her giving me an address on the east side… and that’s it.”

Steve said nothing, letting me keep the rhythm.

“I woke up this morning in a rundown motel room. Maple Motor Inn over near Damen—one of those places you rent by the hour, not the night. I was half naked, clothes everywhere, head pounding like old times. Except I hadn’t had a drop. I knew it.”

He breathed out slow. “You check yourself out?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Wallet was still on me, phone under the pillow, keys on the nightstand. Nothing missing. That’s what’s so damn strange. If she was after money, she’d have taken it. I checked my arm, thought maybe she stuck me with something, but nothing obvious. Still, I knew I’d been dosed. The headache, the blackout—it wasn’t alcohol, it wasn’t exhaustion. It was something chemical.”

He grunted. “So what’d you do?”

“Did what I’d tell any client to do—document. I went straight to Stroger Hospital. Told them everything. They ran a tox screen, full workup.”

He made a small noise of approval. “Smart.”

“They came back with something that makes sense but doesn’t make sense, you know? Zolpidem and diphenhydramine.”

He whistled. “Ambien and Benadryl. Knockout cocktail. Interesting.”

“Yeah,” I said. “First two crushed fine, bitter as hell but easy enough to hide in hot coffee. ER doc said the mix can knock out memory cold—anterograde amnesia, like you’re walking and talking but the tape’s not recording. Explains the blackout. They figure maybe one Ambien tablet, maybe a couple of Benadryl. Enough to drop me halfway to unconscious and wipe my memory clean.”

He was quiet a long moment. “Jesus, brother. That’s ugly. You got lucky you didn’t crash or choke on your tongue.”

“Yeah. That thought’s been looping in my head all morning.”

“So what then? You tell the cops?”

“Not yet,” I said. “Wanted evidence first. So after the hospital, I went to Joey’s. He was already there, prepping for the day. I told him what happened, the whole thing. He about fell over. Then I reminded him—I installed his security system three years ago.”

“Oh, ho,” Steve said, voice perking up. “There’s the IT guy I know.”

“Right,” I said. “So we head back to his office, pull up last night’s footage. I run the timestamp from nine fifteen to nine forty-five, split-screen. Sure enough, there I am at the counter, you can see everything clear as day. Me talking, Joey laughing, nothing weird. I get up, head for the restroom. And then—there she is.”

He was silent, waiting.

“She glances around, makes sure Joey’s turned, then reaches into her purse. Pulls out a small folded napkin, pinches something between her fingers—real quick motion—and flicks it into my cup. Gives it one stir with the spoon and sets it back down. Whole thing takes maybe six seconds.”

“Hell,” he muttered.

“Yeah. Then she checks her phone like nothing happened. I come back, sit down, talk like everything’s normal. A minute later, we both leave. Joey didn’t see a thing.”

I paused, my throat dry. “We ran the outside camera next. There’s a feed covering the front lot. At nine twenty-eight, a vehicle pulls up across the street—older Chevy Blazer, gray, rust around the wheel wells. She gets out, fixes her hair in the mirror, walks straight into Joey’s. The Blazer idles another thirty seconds, then pulls away. Illinois plate. I got a partial—6, maybe 2, then P, something that looks like a 7 or F.”

Steve let out a slow breath. “You’ve got her on camera slipping the stuff and you’ve got a partial plate. That’s solid.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Joey printed me the still frame. I’ve got it right here.”

He paused, then said quietly, “You call Sandy yet?”

“Yeah. From the hospital. Told her everything. She believes me.”

“Of course she does,” he said. “You’ve earned that.”

“Still doesn’t make the pit in my stomach smaller,” I said.

He chuckled, low and sympathetic. “You always were the type to autopsy your own soul.”

“Comes with the sobriety package,” I said.

We both fell quiet. The hum of the van filled the silence between us. I could hear his lighter flick through the phone, the tiny crackle as he drew on one of those unfiltered Camels he swore he’d quit twenty years ago.

Finally, he spoke. “You know, Mikey, this world’s a strange place. Some people slip pills for money, some for kicks, some for reasons they don’t even understand. But you, my friend—you walked into a bad hand and somehow still have your chips.”

“Yeah,” I said softly. “Still breathing.”

“Exactly. You did everything right. You didn’t drink, you didn’t spiral. You kept your head. That’s recovery working, brother. You got tools now.”

“Doesn’t feel like enough right now,” I said.

“It never does when the hits come. You ride ‘em anyway. And tonight, you get your butt to a meeting. You talk it out. You let the room hold the weight with you.”

“Already planning on it,” I said. “You going to the regular haunt?”

“You kidding?” he said. “Wouldn’t miss it. 7 p.m., St. Matthew’s basement. Same coffee, same folding chairs, same band of misfits keeping each other upright.”

That got a laugh out of me, small but real. “Yeah. I’ll be there. I need the air, the noise, the normal.”

He grunted approval. “Good. You need anything before then? Want me to swing by?”

I shook my head though he couldn’t see it. “No, brother. I’m good. Just needed to hear your voice. Needed to say it out loud before it started turning into something worse in my head.”

He was quiet a beat, then said softly, “You’re not alone in this, Mike. You never are. You remember that, right?”

“I do,” I said. “Always.”

There was a pause, then the sound of him exhaling smoke. “Alright then. Get yourself home, rest a bit, maybe shower off whatever chemical ghosts you got left in you. I’ll see you tonight. And Mike?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m proud of you. You handled it.”

I stared out the windshield at the pale light creeping over the rooftops. “Didn’t feel like handling it,” I said. “Felt like surviving it.”

He chuckled, the warm kind of laugh that comes from someone who’s been through enough storms to know you can’t always tell the difference. “Same damn thing, brother. Same thing.”

The call ended there, clean and quiet. The line clicked dead, leaving only the sound of the van’s idle and the wind scraping across the windshield. I set the phone down on the console and rubbed my face with both hands, letting the moment settle into the silence.

I sat a while longer, eyes unfocused, feeling the tremor finally leave my chest. The sky outside was turning the faint color of pewter, sunlight beginning to drag itself over the city like someone pulling on an old coat. I took a slow breath and reached for the ignition.

Time to move.

I started the engine and felt it catch, steady and familiar beneath my hands.

 

Chapter 6

Three days pass. Life settles back into its grooves—or something pretending to be them. I wake, shower, shave, and drive the same streets I’ve driven for years. The muscle memory of habit fills the hours between dawn and dark.

By the third morning, the world almost feels right again. Or maybe I’ve just convinced myself it does.

The office hums the way I like it—steady and quiet. Server rack in the corner breathing in blue light, routers humming their low electrical chant, monitors casting reflections on the walls. The faint smell of dust and ozone.

Thirty years I’ve been in this world—IT, data, infrastructure, security. Started in the early days when the internet still looked like a frontier. I owned a quarter of a Microsoft partner firm once, sold my share three years back. Now I run my own little outfit. Small clients, small contracts. The kind that keep my mind sharp and my soul uncluttered. I pick my projects—churches, schools, nonprofits—teaching cyber security as mission work.

A quiet life.  Until tonight.  As the Teams used to say, the only easy day was yesterday.

At 7:23 p.m. CST, my phone dings. Unknown number. Three words:

Check your email.

And one attached photo.  I open it.  It’s me.  Lying half-naked on that motel bed, head turned toward the wall, the cheap lamp bleeding light across my shoulder.  My pulse spikes. I stare at it, feeling that cold, hollow slide inside the chest that comes when something old and bad wakes up.

I thumb open the email app.  One new message. No sender name. Just a nonsense string of letters and numbers ending in a domain I don’t recognize—some dead-end Eastern European suffix.

Subject line: Hello pervert.

I click.

The body is a wall of text, written in that half-broken English that tells me I’m dealing with someone fluent in machines but not humanity.

Hello pervert, I’ve sent this message from your own Microsoft account.
 I want to inform you about a very bad situation for you. However, you can benefit from it, if you act wisely.
 I’ve recorded many pictures and videos with this blonde hooker. You look really cozy with her. I like how you let her have her way with you. You are an old pervert.
 I doubt you’d want your friends, family and co-workers to know about it. However, I can do it in a few clicks.
 Every number in your contact list will suddenly receive these videos – on WhatsApp, on Telegram, on Instagram, on Facebook, on email – everywhere. It will sweep away your life. But especially your wife, Sandy!
 Have you heard of Pegasus? This is a spyware program that installs on computers and smartphones and allows hackers to monitor the activity of device owners. It provides access to your webcam, messengers, emails, call records, etc. It works well on Android, iOS, macOS and Windows.
 I guess you already figured out where I’m getting at. So you know by now, I do have all your contacts and their info.
 If you do not want your life ruined, you will start sending me 500.00 per month, to this account.

Attached: six images. Two short videos.

I force myself to look.  It’s me. Same room. Same bed. Bare-chested, half-draped in that cheap hotel blanket. There’s motion in the edge of the frame—someone else’s arm, pale, female—but her face never shows.  Each photo framed with surgical precision. No context. Just enough to burn reputation.  They were careful. Controlled.

I close the window, sit back, and let out a long, slow breath.  So this is the play.  The girl wasn’t random. The motel wasn’t coincidence. The blackout wasn’t mercy.  They staged the entire thing.

But here’s the mistake—they picked me.  I’ve lived and breathed IT for thirty years. I’ve taught cybercrime for half that. They think they’re predators. They’re amateurs swimming with a shark.

I close the email and open the terminal on my air-gapped laptop—the one that’s never touched the outside world. Its hum feels like company.

First step: headers. Always the headers.

I pull the raw source from my inbox, scroll through the gibberish of routing strings and authentication codes.

Return path: three proxies, last hop in Latvia. Before that, one in Poland, then Romania. A chain of dirty mirrors—each one a compromised relay, each pointing at the next. But that’s where they get sloppy.  The third hop—Romania—has a time stamp mismatch: 03:23 GMT.

I follow it backward, one layer at a time. Each IP opens a small story: one belongs to a hijacked WordPress blog, another to a private mail server that was abandoned last year. The last, the one they thought was clean, routes to a U.S.-based host.

Not Bulgaria. Not Eastern Europe.  The final node sits right here, on home soil.  I sit forward, jaw tightening, eyes on the terminal.  “Got you,” I whisper.

It’s a small colocation data center in Texas, one of the cheap ones that rents rack space by the square foot. The IP resolves to a block owned by a shell company that’s changed names three times in the last year. But the server is still active—listening, waiting, alive.

Whoever’s running this routed the traffic overseas to make it look foreign, then looped it back stateside. They wanted to look like ghosts, but they left fingerprints.

I run a whois lookup—registrant data scrubbed, of course—but the nameserver references an internal MX relay in Chicago. That’s my city.

The ghost trail ends in my own backyard.  I feel the corners of my mouth pull into a slow, quiet smile.  They’re not untouchable. They’re here.

I pull a notebook toward me and start jotting down the key fragments: relay hops, timestamps, IP blocks, checksum patterns. Every detail matters. The system might be obfuscated, but I can unwind it. It’s like following the path of smoke back to the fire.

Outside, the streetlights hum, their glow leaking through the blinds in soft gold lines. The world beyond the glass looks calm, but I know better now.

I sit there, tracing the network routes on the screen, eyes darting between addresses and ports. Each one a breadcrumb.

Someone built a script—probably an off-the-shelf PHP mailer patched into a hijacked SMTP relay. They automated the extortion letter, changed the language just enough to personalize it, and triggered a send batch. But mine wasn’t random. The photos prove that. They found me before the script ever ran. This is not a generic mass sextortion scam. These people are targeting specific people. I am probably not the only one.

I copy the header file to an encrypted drive, then shut down the mail client. The laptop’s fan slows. The room grows still. They think they’ve got control. They think I’m scared.

I stare at the monitor, the reflection of my own face faint in the dark glass. I can almost see the other side—the person who hit “send,” sitting somewhere behind a screen, probably with coffee gone cold, thinking they’re invisible.  They’re not.  No one is.

My fingers drum on the desk. My brain runs the steps ahead—triangulate the relay, map the endpoint, locate the node inside the States. I don’t have the exact location yet, but I know the terrain. I can feel the direction in the numbers.  They’re close.  And that changes everything.

The air feels heavy, electric, like a storm crouched on the edge of breaking. I stand, stretch my shoulders, and look around my office one last time. Everything is in its place.  My tools. My weapons.  They wanted five hundred a month.  They’ll pay more than that before I’m done.

I close the laptop, slide the lock on my office door, and let the silence wrap around me. The hum of the servers keeps time with my heartbeat.

Somewhere in this country, someone’s about to find out what it feels like to blackmail the wrong man.  I lean back in my chair, eyes steady, pulse calm.  Now to begin the counter.  And, I decided I need to find out who else they are targeting.  See if I can help them. Interrupt this little scam. It is time to help those who cannot help themselves. I bet there are many others.  My first task, will be to try to figure out how many, who, where they are, how to reach them, and warn them.

 

 

I sat at my desk until my lower back started to protest. The chair had a complaint ready—an old, familiar creak—and the hour had a weight to it I couldn’t shrug off. The phone lit the dark when it rang; Sandy’s name blinked on the screen. The clock on the wall said 8:57. I let it ring twice and answered on the third.

“Hi, honey,” I said, trying to smooth the edges of my voice.

“Mike?” She sounded relieved and tired at once. “You okay? You’re late.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I’ll be there in twenty. I’ll explain when I get home.”

There was a small intake of breath—half relief, half the disbelief that still lives with her after everything. “Alright. Be careful.”

“I will.” My stomach made a sound like an honest confession. “I’m starving. What do we have I can heat up quick?”

“We have some leftover lasagna from last night,” she said. “I can just microwave it. It’ll be fine. There is enough for both of us, I have not eaten either.  I was too worried.”

“I am sorry I mumble, and That’ll do.” I pictured the ceramic dish in the sink, the edges already browned from yesterday, the sauce settled and forgiving. “Be home in twenty, hon.”

“Okay. Love you.”

“Love you.”

I gathered the laptop and my battered, road worn briefcase, carried for 30 years of consulting, tucking the printed frame from Joey’s into a folder. No point making the kitchen a crime scene. I glanced around the office—rack lights blinking their steady, indifferent rhythm—then locked the door and walked out into the night. The drive was short, the streets slick with the after-rain residue, lights reflecting in the puddles like tiny, indifferent stars. My mind cycled through what I’d already done: headers pulled, relays traced, the endpoint in the States circled on my mental map. The email had been clever enough to sting—personalized enough to feel real—but clumsy enough in its routing that I had a trail. That meant options. That meant leverage.

I pulled up outside the old, remodeled but modest brick two-flat townhome we own in Bridgeport and killed the engine. For a moment I just sat, letting the van cool and the silence settle. Then I climbed out and went up the short steps to the door, keys in hand.

The smell hit me when I opened the door—garlic and tomato and melted cheese, yesterday’s lasagna held in the warm hush of the microwave. Sandy was at the small table setting plates, moving with the quiet competence of someone who’d perfected this routine. She didn’t ask for a recount; she didn’t need one. She already knew the skeleton of the story from three days ago—the ride home from Joey’s, the blackout, the ER, the toxicology results, Steve being called, the security footage. Tonight she only needed the new facts from tonight: someone had escalated to extortion.  That could wait, first we eat.

I dropped my bag by the chair and kissed her quick on the mouth. “You smell good,” I said, and it wasn’t a lie. She glanced up at me, a brief softening that made the weight in my chest light for a second.

We ate quietly. The lasagna was reheated—edges a touch chewier than fresh but still generous, the sauce thick where it had settled overnight. We passed plates and forked bread into the sauce, the small rituals of married life steadying us. Sandy’s eyes kept flicking to me, the question poised but patient. I let the fork do the talking for a while, letting the steam and the sound of the plates fill the space where the explanation would go.

When I set my fork down and wiped my mouth, she looked up. “Okay,” she said. “Tell me the new thing, Mike. Don’t go back through everything. I know the old stuff.”  I reached for the laptop and opened it on the table between the plates, the screen throwing a soft blue across the napkin.

“Tonight I got a text and an email,” I said. “The text said check your email. The email was a sextortion—classic template, but personalized. They attached photos and short silent videos from the motel room. They threatened to send the files to everyone in my contact list unless we started paying five hundred dollars a month.”

Sandy’s hand went to her mouth for a second. Her face compressed—not with shock so much as the particular hurt that comes when a promise between two people is threatened by a stranger. She already understood how dangerous the optics could be. “Did they actually send the footage?” she asked.

“They did,” I said. “But I won’t show you the images. real enough to be credible—angles from the motel, my body, cropped so they never show her face—but I’m telling you, I was not awake when that was filmed. I was drugged.” I let the words sit on the table between us. There was no dramatic flourish—just the fact. Sandy nodded slowly. She’d heard that before. This time the new part landed: “They also included details about some of my accounts, and they claimed to have access to them. I seriously doubt that. It’s a scare tactic. Classic sextortion. They routed the email through a chain of overseas proxies to mask origin, but it dead-ends on a host in the U.S. I can see the trail. It’s obfuscated, but the endpoint is here.”

Sandy closed her eyes briefly and let out the half-exhale of someone counting off facts to stay steady. “So it’s not just an automated scam,” she said. “They have the pictures. They think they can make it stick.”

“They think so,” I said. “But they don’t know who they chose. They don’t know what kind of trouble they started.” I left the boast unspectacular, not because it wasn’t true but because this wasn’t the time to preen. It was time to plan. “I traced the headers. Multiple relays—Latvia, Poland, Romania—typical dirty mirrors. But the last hop routes back to a colocation in Texas. The shell company that registered the server points to a nameserver with an MX relay tied to a Chicago host. It smells like an operation trying to look international. They’re using proxies to throw investigators off, and they assumed that would be enough. It isn’t.”

Her hand squeezed mine. “Are you going to call the police?” she asked.

“I’m not ruling it out,” I said. “We can involve them formally and get a subpoena, but I don’t want to hand the adversary the timeline if there’s a short window on the files. I want to control how evidence is handled. I’m doing forensics on the headers and the send mechanism now. If I can locate the server, we’ll give the cops the coordinates with a clean chain. If this is a single script kiddy, it’ll be quick. If it’s a group, it’s more complicated.”

“Besides,” I added slowly, “I seriously doubt that I am the only victim.  I need to see if I can track down any other victims they are preying on, and if I can help.

She just nods slowly.

She asked the practical question next, the one that had already been sitting at the back of her throat. “What are you going to do about us? About the kids? About our name?”

“We’re going to control what we can,” I said. “I want you away from here for a bit. It’s not about running; it’s about minimizing risk. Your sister in St. Louis can take you in for a couple of weeks. I’ll cover everything—train tickets, whatever you need. I’ll keep you updated, and I’ll tell only the people who absolutely need to know.”

She swallowed. “You want me to leave?”

“I do,” I said. “Not forever, just until I either neutralize this or we get a clear picture that it’s safe. If they’re talking about simple extortion, it’ll be done fast. If it’s something more organized, I don’t want you here while I poke the hornet’s nest.”

She blinked, anger flashing for the first time—not at me, not exactly, but at the situation. “You can’t just—” she began.

“I know,” I said. “I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t necessary. I have people I can call on here—Steve, that old jarhead would charge hell with me if I needed him, also a couple of reliable contacts in the Chicago Police department from some of my consulting there, and  Joey. I’m not going in blind. I can set up a buffer, rotate keys, lock down accounts, get forensic images from the mail server and preserve the chain. If it looks like the wrong kind of group, I’ll bring in a pro for the heavy lifting. But you staying here puts you at risk.” I watched her process. The fight in her eyes softened into something like acceptance because she trusts the competence she remembers in me.

Finally she nodded. “Alright,” she said, voice small. “I’ll call Lisa tomorrow and get the train on Thursday.”

“Good,” I said. “I’ll make the arrangements tonight. I’ll be in touch all the time.”

She reached across the table and smoothed my sleeve—simple, domestic, mortal gestures that feel bigger than anything in the digital war we were suddenly in. We finished the dishes together with an efficiency born of habit—stacking plates, rinsing pans, sliding the lasagna dish into the fridge for when she came back. The kitchen smelled like basil and lemon soap and the last small comforts of the day.

Later, in the bedroom, the city light through the blinds painted the ceiling in tight bands. Sandy’s breathing settled beside me. She fell asleep quickly—not a hard sleep, but a trusting one. I lay awake with the list in my head: lock down the accounts, rotate passwords and keys, isolate any devices that may have synced with the motel Wi-Fi, queue subpoenas if I needed them, run a thread on the relay chain and cross-reference the hosting block with local ISP logs and payment trails. I thought of Joey and the frame printout in my folder. I thought of the partial plate on the Blazer. I thought of Steve waiting at St. Matthew’s later that week. Plans stacked and clicked into place like gears.

The apartment hummed around us—refrigerator cycles, distant traffic. I could hear her breathing deepen, slow and even. My back ached less now, dulled by fatigue and a certain, gritty focus. Outside, the city kept working its long, indifferent machinery. Inside, the list of tasks became a steady metronome, grounding me. I settled into the rhythm and let my eyes close, arranging the next moves like pieces on a board.

Sandy’s breathing stayed even and quiet as she slept. My mind did not. It moved through contingencies, contact names, a schedule for the next forty-eight hours, a plan to make sure no one else got dragged into this without knowing the truth. I rested my hand lightly on her shoulder until she stirred and murmured, then lay still, alert and ready for the next step.

 

 

Chapter 7

Thursday morning, 7:15 am
Chicago Union Station
Lincoln Service

Thursday morning came with the kind of cold that makes breath visible and fingers ache in a hurry. I roused Sandy early, handed her a travel mug while she double-checked the little list Lisa had texted—sweaters, chargers, paperback—and we loaded her small rolling case into the back of the van. It felt strange and right to be the one driving her to the station; no cab, no fuss. The van has its faults, but it’s mine and reliable and I like knowing where everything I care about is sitting.

We left before dawn. The city was a slow exhale: streetlights bleeding into wet pavement, a few yawning stores pulling their shutters up, the rumble of an early commuter bus. Conversation between us was economical, the way it is when two people have rehearsed goodbyes and don’t want to trip over the same lines twice. I kept the tone light—small talk about Lisa’s plans, the botanical garden, the museum exhibit Sandy’d been looking forward to—because the easier things in life are ballast when you’re trying to keep your head on straight.

Chicago Union Station rose up as we turned into the circular drive, granite and glass and that familiar sense of gravity old transit places have. The van’s engine clicked as I killed it, and we moved across the plaza together. The Great Hall breathed above us: the barrel vault catching the pale morning light, scuffed marble steps, Corinthian columns that looked like quiet sentries. There was a gentle, timeless clatter—suitcases rolling, shoes on stone, a distant announcement that felt like it belonged to every parting ever made there. People were already gathering in the concourse; commuters moving with purpose, a family hugging near the newsstand, a woman in a long coat staring up at the skylight as if memorizing the pattern. Union Station has that way of making ordinary departures feel ceremonial.

We walked to the counter because the paper ticket feels like something permanent when a world you’ve known for years starts to wobble. A human takes the card, stamps the stub, prints the little barcode that will give the conductor something firm to scan. The agent folded the ticket and handed it to Sandy with a small smile. “Lincoln Service?” she asked by way of confirmation. “Train number. Car and seat are printed right there.” The ticket was a small, tidy artifact: departure time, seat, and the list of stops tucked in a corner you could almost miss—those intermediate waypoints that, for anyone who rides, mean a rhythm of towns and faces between here and there. The Lincoln Service threads south through Illinois; nine intermediate stops before the river takes you into Missouri: Summit, Joliet, Dwight, Pontiac, Bloomington–Normal, Lincoln, Springfield, Carlinville, and Alton. Each one a small pulse map on the way to Gateway Station in St. Louis.

We wandered the concourse a little, not wanting the goodbye to happen too soon. Tourists craned necks at the vault. The coffee kiosk served orders with the weary politeness of soldiers in a slow war. In the background, a station announcement rolled—somewhere to the east, a conductor’s voice calling a track assignment, the way the public voice in a station is always both helpful and indifferent.

On the platform, the air smelled of oil and cold metal and the faint comfort of diesel. People clustered in pockets—students with coffee, a man with a guitar, a woman checking the screen for the arrival time. When the Lincoln Service eased into the platform it did so with the deliberate dignity of a machine that has spent decades doing the same thing and doing it well: stainless steel glinting where the pale sun hit, the doors breathing out steam as they cycled, brakes hissing. Sandy pulled her scarf tighter and tucked the ticket away.

We stood close, shoulders touching, and spoke in the tiny grammar of people who have said goodbyes before and mean them. I told her again that I expected to have this cleaned up soon—that it would probably be over in a few days if this was amateur work and skillfully shorter if it was anything more. She smiled—small but real. “Lisa has plans,” she said. “She’s already made a list. I’ll be busy. I promise I’ll call when I get there.” The ordinary litany of weekend pleasures was a comfort I wanted for her to sink into.

The conductor’s call sliced through the small talk: “All aboard for the Lincoln Service to St. Louis.” We stepped forward. For a moment the platform felt like a stage, the final bar of any scene where the characters had to separate for a while. I leaned in, gave her a short, precise kiss—the kind that carries a promise back and hope forward. “Text me when you land,” I said.

“I will,” she said. She picked up her bag, turned, and climbed into the car. I watched until the windows motored past, until the train picked up that slow, inevitable speed and began to thread down the line, the city unspooling behind it. The arch of St. Louis peeked at the horizon along the route in my mind’s eye like a destination in a dream.

When the last car rounded the curve and the train had become a long line—and then just a faint ribbon in the distance—I straightened, shoulders stiff with a tightening that’s part habit, part caution. I turned back to the van and climbed in. The drive back to the office gave me time to think and plan in a way the morning bustle doesn’t allow. The city slid by in a kind of low-focus reel: storefronts, a breakfast joint with a steady line, a bike courier cutting a corner with the practiced arrogance of youth. My mind, meanwhile, wasn’t on the scenery; it was on building the next stage of a trap.

I had some pieces already. The rack in my office hummed quietly—a collection of hosts and storage arrays I kept for redundancy and lab work. I had a few server hosts, virtual and physical, segmented from the production gear. Those would be the foundation. But what I needed next was a dedicated, air-gapped environment—an isolated, hidden network that would act as the hub of a controlled sting: a place where I could lure, observe, and gather without contaminating my normal infrastructure. The word “honeypot” floated in my head, but that was too clinical; I wanted something robust and unquestionable—evidence-grade.

I thought through the components at a high level. A discreet new host, physically separate from my main rack; storage that could be forensically imaged; a management console that didn’t touch the internet except through controlled, logged gateways; a way to ingest any suspicious traffic and preserve metadata immutably. I drew, mentally, an architecture that favored isolation and auditability: segmented VLANs, removable media kept under chain-of-custody procedures, hardware that could be seized cleanly if we needed to hand it to investigators. I wasn’t thinking in the language of seminars—this was practical, surgical. I also knew I needed redundancy: if the adversary tried to burn the node, I wanted a cold copy elsewhere, air-gapped and immutable.

Beyond the servers, there was the question of how to connect the trap to the targets. I needed ways to capture the signals that led back to them, to collect logs and communications metadata without stepping over legal lines. That meant acquiring passive monitoring gear and commercial, lawful services that provide lawful intercept and trace assistance—forensics appliances, passive radio receivers and software-defined radios used purely for monitoring and correlation, not for active interception. I made a mental note: keep everything provincial and provable; if we brought in law enforcement, the chain of custody had to be flawless. The last thing I wanted was to give the opposition an opening by behaving like a vigilante. If this was something a judge might see, it needed to be spotless.

I ran through a shopping list in my head, practical and non-prescriptive: an additional server or two with removable drives, an isolated switch and rack cage that could be bolted into the office, a hardware appliance for immutable logging and write-once storage, external drives for cold images, and a physical lockbox for evidence. For signal correlation and locating, commercial geolocation services and passive monitoring tools—nothing exotic, nothing that required me to build a surveillance device in my garage. If something needed active tracing, that was a job for the department or a vetted contractor with legal authority; I’d coordinate, not improvise.

There was other gear too—robust UPS systems, replacement network cards, spare racks of SFPs and fiber patch panels, a decent KVM console so I could access the air-gapped machines without crossing networks, and a small dedicated laptop that would never touch my production environment. I also penciled in a budget for a professional forensic engagement if the logs warranted it; some of these things aren’t worth doing on your own once the stakes rise. Evidence needs to be unimpeachable.

Practical logistics came next. I’d need help hauling hardware and creating the physical separation that I couldn’t easily do on my own. That was where Steve came in. He’s strong, steady, and trustworthy—the kind of dependable man who can move a rack without questioning why. I pictured him in my head: early morning coffee, gravel voice, the easy laugh that breaks tension. I’d call him later and ask for a hand loading gear into the server corner of my large open office. He didn’t owe me, but we both knew he’d be the first one in the door if the night needed it.  I smiled to myself, and shook my head, damn jarhead.

The van hummed along the expressway, and the city blurred into neighborhoods I could navigate by memory: the bowls of low houses, the church towers, the strip malls that keep a city anchored. By the time I pulled into the small lot behind my office, a clear plan had formed in enough detail to write down. The hard parts—legal coordination, forensic imaging, the sequence of operations—were mental check boxes to be addressed in the right order. Nothing reckless; everything documented.

I parked, killed the engine, and sat for a heartbeat listening to the van’s cooling sigh. I turned to the passenger seat where Sandy’s ticket receipt lay folded like a small talisman and then took the folder with Joey’s printouts out from under my arm. The afternoon would be long, and the next steps precise: order the hardware, get the additional host racked in a secured enclosure, create the air gap, prepare write-once storage, and schedule calls with the few people I trusted—Steve for muscle, one or two vetted forensics contacts if it turned hairy, and the detective from the police who owed me one from a favor I’d done years ago. I would document every move, email timestamped copies of every image to an encrypted account for redundancy, and keep Sandy’s trip and privacy front and center.

I made a mental note to call Steve later in the day—simple: “Need a hand moving some servers. Bring gloves.” Short, practical, no drama. Steve’s brawn and steady presence would be useful getting the physical pieces into place. And I would call the forensic contact I trusted to be on standby if the logs showed a live node we could serve a warrant on.

Then I locked the van and headed in, the morning’s rhythm settling into the surety of work that had always been my refuge.

I shuffled to the office door with the printouts tucked into my hand. The building smelled faintly of coffee and old carpet. In my office, it smelled of old pine wood.  Inside, the rack lights blinked their green pulse, the monitors waiting like patient instruments. I took a long breath and let the list settle into present actions. The trap would be clean, lawful, and ready to catch whatever stepped into it.