The Warlord Returns novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: Zero Six Zero Nine

Jack's apartment was on the ninth floor of a downtown building with a doorman who never looked up.

It had a bed, a table, and nothing on the walls.

"I rented it a month ago," he said, locking three bolts. "Nobody lives here but me."

"It looks like nobody does."

He almost smiled.

I sat on a kitchen stool with an ice pack on the back of my head and watched him lay Carrie's phone on the table.

The screen was black.

He pressed the button.

A lock screen glowed up, Carrie and me in the photo, squinting into the sun at Fort McHenry.

I looked away.

"Four digits," he said.

"I tried everything. Her birthday, mine, her mother's, the day she got the job. Nothing."

"Ten tries and it wipes."

"I know. I stopped at six."

Jack looked at the screen for a long moment.

Then he typed, slowly.

Zero. Six. Zero. Nine.

The phone buzzed once and opened.

"My birthday," he said. His voice had gone rough. "She used to say nobody would ever guess a brother's."

I put my hand over my mouth.

For fourteen months that little purple phone had sat in the dust behind my radiator.

And the answer had been her brother's birthday the whole time.

He scrolled.

The camera roll held forty photos.

Pages and pages of a ledger, handwritten in blue ink, with columns of dates and numbers and initials.

"Harbor Fund," Jack read from a header. "Disbursements. These payments go to companies I've never heard of."

"Carrie was an auditor there."

"She found something."

"She said they were stealing. Nine million, she said. Veterans' housing money."

The words came faster than I meant them to.

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