NTB STORY Ideas

Chicago taught me two lessons before I learned long division: don’t look hungry, and don’t look scared. The Marines added a third—never lie to yourself about what you’re willing to do.

By 1956 I’m out, pensioned, limping on a knee that clicks in bad weather. I’ve got a small office over a barber shop, a battered desk, a file cabinet that smells like dust and old cigarette paper, and a phone that rings only when someone’s desperate enough to pay for truth.

The client is Patrick Donnelly, South Side construction—Irish, respectable, the kind of man who pays for church windows and expects God to notice. He’s being squeezed. Not with broken legs or tire irons. With paperwork. Permits delayed. Inspections multiplied. Union grievances that appear like clockwork. And a “consulting” fee—cash, regular, quiet—delivered through a front company with a clean letterhead and dirty hands.

He wants me to find the extortionist and make it stop.

Extortion has a rhythm. It repeats. It leaves patterns the same way drunks leave footprints. I follow the money through bank records, invoices, and the kind of conversations men have when they think they’re speaking off the record. Every thread pulls me into the same places: a ward boss’s office, a union hall, and—most of all—St. Brigid’s parish, where Donnelly’s family built their reputation and buried their sins.

Then I find a name I didn’t expect to see again.

Michael Ruiz.

Twenty years back, he was a teenage altar boy from the neighborhood. Smart kid. Steady kid. One day he doesn’t come home. The parish says he ran away. The police shrug. The file goes cold. His mother never stops waiting.

I’ve seen plenty of missing persons cases. Most of them don’t stay missing because they ran.

The extortion isn’t random. It’s aimed like a rifle shot. Someone is using the Donnellys’ present to force the past out of hiding.
And that’s when my own past crawls out from under the floorboards.

I was a Marine MP. Twenty years. Ten of those at Camp Lejeune, Provost Marshal’s Office. Major crimes. Real work. Work that made a man older than his years. I learned how to follow evidence without mercy—and I learned how commands can “manage” evidence when the truth is inconvenient.

Back then, a young Marine died in a supposed accident. A clean file. A tidy conclusion. I signed off on it.

In 1956, I find out the accident never was one.
And the men who needed it buried… are the same kind of men who can twist a city around their finger.

Now I’m not just investigating extortion. I’m digging up a long-buried crime—one that ties together parish respectability, political machinery, union muscle, and a dead Marine whose name I should have protected.
Somebody wants justice. Somebody wants vengeance. Somebody wants the truth—but only if it’s the kind that doesn’t hurt the right people.

And I’m standing in the middle with dirty hands, trying to decide whether doing good is worth the cost of being exposed as part of the rot.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ghost Warrior - Chapter 1

Chapter 1 2005 Forward Operating Base Cobra Afghanistan – 0100 Hours Local Time The air inside the briefing room was stale, thick with the scent of sweat, coffee, and gun oil. The walls were bare save for a large satellite map pinned to a plywood board, covered in red markers, tactical notes, and satellite imagery.  Seated around the long table were six men—Echo Team, DEVGRU, Tier 1 operators who had spent years in the shadows, hunting the worst of the worst. At the head of the table, Commander Greg Harlan, their operational commander, call sign “Hardman”, stood with his arms crossed. Hard, weathered, no bullshit. A lifer in the SEAL teams, Harlan had run ops from Mogadishu to Fallujah and carried himself with the kind of quiet authority that didn’t need volume to be felt. To his left, Case Officer Nick Rossi, the CIA liaison for the mission, a civilian in a tactical button-down, sleeves rolled to his forearms. Rossi was agency through and through—sharp, cold-eyed, and built for di...
Read more

Jaws: The Minnowing

The creek at Pebble Hollow was five inches deep on a bravely rainy day and seven inches deep on a braggy sunny one, but to the kids of the neighborhood it might as well have been the Atlantic. It had secrets: crawdad castles under rocks, dragonfly pilots on patrol, a tire from 1987 that everyone pretended was a shipwreck. And now, as the summer baked the grass to crunchy confetti, the creek had something else. Minnows. Not a couple. Not a dozen. A school—no, an academy, a university—of spear-nosed micro-torpeados with the collective moral compass of a sandwich-stealing seagull. They glinted like jittery coins and moved with the precision of a marching band directed by caffeine. And they were hungry. It began on a Tuesday, the kind of day when the sun felt like a dog’s tongue, warm and slobbery. Benny “Bubbles” Alvarez dangled his toes from a flat rock while sipping a juice pouch with all the seriousness of a CEO reading quarterly earnings. The water made that glassy babble sound—the cr...
Read more

Desert Son

  Desert Son The stale hum of recycled air filled the command tent, lit by the soft, flickering glow of an overhead fluorescent bulb. Sergeant Billy "Hawk" Henderson sat stiffly on a metal folding chair, his rifle slung across his back, as the unit’s commanding officer, Major Cole, outlined the operation. His spotter, Corporal Marcus "Dusty" Owens, leaned back in his chair, absently scratching behind the ears of Koda, the sleek black Belgian Malinois lying at his feet. “This is as black as it gets, gentlemen,” Major Cole said, pointing to the map projected on the canvas wall. “Your HVT is an arms dealer code-named Ibrahim . He’s responsible for supplying IED materials to insurgents. Intel suggests he’s holed up in an encampment here.” Cole jabbed a finger at a cluster of coordinates nestled in the highlands. “Your job is simple: find him, confirm his identity, and neutralize the threat. Exfil point will be at grid seven-four-nine at 0300, three days post-engagement....
Read more