Chapter 5 - The Rogers Park Warning
The Honda Civic hit every single red light on Lake Shore Drive, its rusted muffler rattling a furious tattoo against the damp asphalt as Daniel pushed the accelerator down past seventy.
In the passenger seat, Elena didn't panic. She didn't scream, and she didn't reach for the handle above the door. Instead, she had her tablet open in her lap, her fingers moving across the glass screen with cold, algorithmic speed.
“That second text,” Elena said, her voice completely level despite the fact that they were currently weaving between a semitruck and a CTA bus at sixty miles an hour. “The metadata on the image file. It wasn't sent from a burner phone.”
“Who cares who sent it?” Daniel’s knuckles were white against the steering wheel, his jaw locked so tight his teeth ached. “They were at my building. They were touching Lily’s bike.”
“I care,” Elena said, her eyes fixed on the screen. “Because Vince Miller isn't smart enough to spoof an IP address through a proxy server in Cicero. Someone else is backing him up. Someone with access to corporate security logs who knows where you live.”
Daniel didn't answer. He threw the car into a hard right turn onto Foster Avenue, the tires squealing against the wet pavement as the dark, brick-and-stone apartment buildings of Rogers Park rushed past in a blur of yellow streetlights and flickering neon tavern signs.
Three minutes later, the Civic skidded to a halt at the curb in front of their brick six-flat.
Daniel killed the engine, burst out of the door before it had even stopped rocking, and vaulted up the concrete steps to the front porch.
The red bicycle was there.
Chained to the iron porch railing was a heavy, industrial-grade drop-forged steel padlock—the exact same brand of lock used on the primary electrical vaults in the sub-basement of the Hartwell Tower.
Tied to the handlebars with a strip of yellow caution tape was a white envelope.
Daniel ripped the tape off, tore the envelope open with his bare hands, and pulled out a single sheet of heavy corporate letterhead.
Printed in bold, black Helvetica were four words:
**DROP THE AUDIT OR ELSE.**
Elena walked up the steps behind him, her heels clicking softly against the old wooden boards. She didn't touch the envelope; she just looked down at the heavy steel lock, her eyes narrowing into cold, black slits.
“Not Vince,” she said quietly. “Vince is in a holding cell at the 1st District precinct. This is someone else.”
“Who?” Daniel’s voice was a low, dangerous rumble that sounded less like a mechanic and more like an engine about to throw a rod.
“The board,” Elena said.
Daniel turned to look at her, the yellow porch light casting hard shadows across his face. “The board? Pendelton?”
“Not Pendelton,” Elena said, shaking her head. “Pendelton is old guard, but he respects the numbers. But we have three minority stakeholders who represent a private equity firm out of New York—Apex Capital. They’ve been trying to force a hostile buyout of Hartwell Systems for six months.”
She pointed a slender finger at the heavy industrial lock chained to Lily’s bicycle.
“Apex owns a majority stake in Titan Vertical,” Elena continued. “If Titan gets shut out of our building contracts, Apex loses millions in municipal kickbacks. And if my administration fails, the board triggers a no-confidence vote, removes me as CEO, and installs a puppet who will sell the company to Apex for pennies on the dollar.”
Daniel looked down at the letter in his hand, then at the bicycle, and finally through the front window of the apartment building where he could see Mrs. Gable’s shadow moving across the hallway upstairs, rocking Lily back to sleep.
A cold, methodical calm settled over him—the kind of calm an elevator mechanic feels when he’s standing in a dark shaft three hundred feet in the air and realizes the main cable has started to fray.
“They think this is about a stock price,” Daniel said softly.
“To them, it is,” Elena replied.
“Yeah.” Daniel folded the letter twice, slid it into his back pocket alongside his father’s grease-stained manual, and turned to face her. “Well, they’re about to find out what happens when you bring corporate politics into a guy’s front yard.”
Elena looked up at him, her dark eyes holding his for a long, steady moment. In the dim, flickering light of the porch lamp, the CEO of Hartwell Systems didn't look like a woman who lived in a glass tower on the fifty-fifth floor. She looked like someone who was ready to go to war.
“What’s your plan, Mr. Mercer?” she asked.
Daniel reached down, gripped the heavy industrial padlock with his bare hands, and gave it a sharp, diagnostic twist.
“First,” Daniel said, his lips curling into a grim, hard line, “we’re going to fix the locks on this porch. Second, we’re going to find out which one of those New York equity guys signed off on the purchase order for this lock.”
And third?” Elena asked, raising an eyebrow.
May you like
“Tomorrow morning at eight o’clock,” Daniel said, his voice dropping an octave, “I’m walking into the boardroom with my toolbox, and I’m going to show your board members what a real hostile takeover looks like.”
***
