REDLINE

Chapter 3

Avery spent twenty minutes on her phone that night, reverse lookup sites, area code search, the particular internet rabbit holes she’d learned to navigate from her old editor at Lakeview Prep who had the philosophy that every piece of information left a trail if you were patient enough to follow it. The number was unregistered and had no trace. She thought it might be prepaid. The kind of phone you bought with cash at a gas station and called to never be traced.

Which meant whoever sent the message wasn’t random. They’d thought about it. They’d chosen to warn her and chosen, simultaneously, to be unfindable.

She wrote in her notebook, Warning = “someone knows I’m asking. Too early for that. I’ve spoken to exactly two people about the Circuit. Priya. Calloway.”She stared at it. Then she wrote,” Or someone who was watching one of them.”

She didn’t sleep well again. The dryers had stopped at nine but the silence they left behind felt loud in a different way, filled with the nighttime sounds of a town she didn’t know yet, a dog somewhere, a car on Route 9, the particular creak of the building settling. She lay on top of her covers and stared at the Florida-shaped water stain and thought about Zane Calloway telling her to look at the surface before she dug, the dark low car in the open bay of Ray’s Auto that was built for something other than road trips.

By morning she had decided three things. First, she wasn’t going to mention the text to Priya yet. Secondly, she was going to the garage. Thirdly, she was going to talk to Marcus Calloway.

She barely had a thread not to talk more about a story but a thread was where stories started, and this one had just tugged.

Marcus Calloway was easy to find.

He was outside the south building at lunch, sitting on the concrete steps with three other sophomores, talking with the loose animated confidence of someone who moved through social space without friction. He was younger than Zane by two years but you could see the family resemblance, same dark hair, same line of jaw except where Zane’s face was closed and measured, Marcus wore his expressions openly, like a hand of cards laid face-up on the table. He was laughing at something when Avery walked up, and the laugh was genuine and unguarded.

“Marcus Calloway,” she said.

He looked up. Grinned. “The journalist. Priya said you’d probably find me.”

“Priya says a lot of things apparently.”

“She’s efficient.” He shifted to make space on the step, which she hadn’t asked for but took anyway. His friends drifted, not rudely, just the natural dispersion of people who understood that a conversation had begun that didn’t include them. Avery noticed he didn’t have to signal it. They just read him. “What do you want to know?”

She liked that. No performance of not knowing why she was there. “Your brother told me to drop the story I haven’t written yet.”

Marcus’s grin settled into something more considered. “Sounds like Zane.”

“Is he usually right?”

“About things being dangerous? Yeah, usually.” He pulled at a thread on the knee of his jeans. “About whether that means you should stop? That’s more of a personal call.”

“What would you do?”

He looked at her sideways. “I’m sixteen. I do stupid things for interesting reasons. Probably not the right sample size.” But there was something under the lightness a flicker of something that wasn’t quite humor and wasn’t quite worry. There and gone. “What do you actually know so far?”

“Illegal racing operation on the salt flats northwest of town. Multiple vehicles. Late nights. Someone runs it, which means someone profits from it, which means there’s an infrastructure I can’t see yet.”

Marcus was quiet for a moment. Around them, the lunch crowd moved and talked and the Louisiana sun pressed down flat and warm on the concrete. He had a habit, she noticed, of going still when he was thinking, the opposite of how he moved when he was comfortable. Like thought required a different physical mode.

“The Circuit’s been running for about three years,” he said, finally. “At least that’s when people started talking about it. Entry fees for drivers. Side betting. Hierarchy, you move up the ranks, you race for higher stakes.” He paused. “It’s not random. It’s organized. Someone built the structure and someone maintains it.”

“Who?”

“Nobody says a name out loud.” He looked at her directly. “That’s the part that should be interesting to you as a journalist. Not the racing itself. The fact that something that’s been operating for three years in a town of eight thousand people, everyone knows it exists, nobody names who runs it.” He let that sit. “That’s not ignorance. That’s management.”

Avery wrote nothing down. She had a voice recorder in her pocket, turned off, because she hadn’t asked permission and she wasn’t the kind of journalist who didn’t ask permission. She was committing it to memory instead, which she was good at. “Does Zane race in it?”

The stillness again. Longer this time.

“I’m not going to answer that,” Marcus said.“That’s his thing to say or not say.”

“Fair.” She meant it. “Has anyone been hurt?”

Something crossed his face that wasn’t the flicker from before, this was slower, heavier. It moved through his expression and left a residue. “Last spring,” he said. “Driver named Teo Boudreaux. Went off the flat on a wet night, hit a drainage berm at the edge. He walked away but his car didn’t, and he had a concussion bad enough that he couldn’t finish junior year.” He looked down at the thread on his knee. “He doesn’t talk about it. His family doesn’t talk about it. Which, again, that’s the part you should be looking at.”

“Because people don’t go quiet after accidents. They go quiet after they’ve been asked to.”

Marcus looked at her for a moment with an expression she couldn’t entirely read something between respect and the particular caution of someone who’d said slightly more than they’d planned to. “You’re fast,” he said.

“I’ve been told.” She stood, tucking her notebook under her arm. “One more question. The text I got last night. Unregistered number, warning me off the salt flats.” She watched his face. “You know who sent it?”

He met her eyes. Steady without blinking. “No.”

She believed seventy percent of it, which in her experience was about as honest as people got when they were protecting someone they loved.

“Thanks, Marcus.”

“Hey, Chen.” He said it as she was turning away. She looked back. His expression had gone serious in a way that sat differently on his young face heavier than sixteen should look. “Teo Boudreaux wasn’t the first person to get hurt near the Circuit. He was just the first one who was actually in it.”

She stood very still. “What does that mean?”

But he’d already looked away, back toward the parking lot, his jaw set, the grin gone.

Ray’s Auto Garage at four-thirty in the afternoon was busier than she’d expected.

One bay had a sedan up on the lift, an older woman waiting in a plastic chair by the door, reading a magazine, clearly a regular. The other bay had the dark car, which in afternoon light Avery could see was definitely black, a modified Dodge Challenger with the rear quarter panels removed and something new being fitted in their place. Body modifications. Weight reduction or aerodynamics, she wasn’t sure which, but purposeful either way.

Zane was under the hood of the sedan on the lift. He heard her come in, she saw his shoulders register it because he kind of shrugged it when their eyes met, there was a slight shift and he didn’t look down immediately. He took his time with whatever he was doing, then leaned back and looked at her with that same calibrated neutral.

“Persistent,” he said.

“Professionally.” She stopped at the edge of the bay, respecting the space. She’d grown up reading that mechanics had a relationship with their workspace that was essentially territorial and she’d always found that if you respected someone’s territory they were more likely to talk to you inside it. “Nice Challenger.”

Something shifted in his expression. Almost imperceptible. “It’s a project.”

“Whose project?”

“Mine.”

She looked at it for a moment. The engine bay was visible from where she stood heavily modified, components she couldn’t name but could recognize as non-standard. This wasn’t a weekend hobby. This was a serious, expensive, ongoing build. “You do all the work yourself?”

“Uncle Ray taught me. Started when I was eleven.” He came down from the step platform by the sedan and wiped his hands on a rag. He was less guarded here than at school, she noticed. revising it. “You came to ask about the text.”

“Among other things.”

“I didn’t send it.”

“I know.” She held his gaze. “But you know who did.”

A long pause. From somewhere in the back of the garage a radio played old country, something with a steel guitar, low enough to be atmospheric rather than intrusive. The older woman turned a page of her magazine. The afternoon light came in golden and flat through the bay doors.

“There are people around the Circuit who don’t like attention,” Zane said, finally. “Even potential attention. Someone heard you were asking questions. The text is a first warning.”

“First warning implies subsequent warnings.”

“It does.”

“Are they escalating warnings or am I just supposed to wonder about the stakes and scare myself?”

For the first time, something in his face broke open, it was not quite a smile, but , reluctant and brief like light through a closing door. “You’re not easy to scare.”

“I’m plenty scared,” Avery said.

“Being scared and stopping are different things.” She looked at the Challenger again, then back at him. “Marcus told me Teo Boudreaux wasn’t the first person hurt near the Circuit. That someone was hurt who wasn’t actually in it. You know what he meant by that.”

The almost-smile was gone.

Whatever had briefly opened closed again, completely, and what was left was something older than eighteen should look, the same weight she’d seen cross Marcus’s face at lunch, the same heaviness.

“I need you to go,” he said quietly. “I’m serious, Chen. This is not because I’m protecting the Circuit but because there are people in this town who built something they can’t afford to have looked at, and they are not the kind of people who stop at texts.” He looked at her steadily, and in his eyes was something she hadn’t seen there before not caution, not calculation. Something rawer. “My brother is sixteen years old. He talks to people. He doesn’t always know what lines he’s crossing until he’s crossed them.”