# THOMPSON-HAYES: BLOOD MONEY
## Chapter Twenty-Nine — Gerald Reed is Served
Jake called from a parking garage on a Thursday morning.
She recognized the echo before he spoke — the hollow, concrete quality she had learned to associate with him making calls he did not want overheard. He was whispering again. Not because he needed to. Because some rooms lived in you long after you left them.
"It's happening," he said. "Right now."
She was in her classroom. Period two had just ended. The desks were still in the circle and the whiteboard still had the morning's sentence on it — *What does it feel like to finally say the thing you've been carrying?* — and she was standing at the window with twenty minutes before period four when her phone buzzed.
She went into the hallway.
"Tell me," she
