ICE AND ALIBI

chapter 5

Chapter 5: The Chase

The bag felt heavier than it should have, slung across my back on the walk to the lot behind Finnegan's Auto, three streets over from anywhere I wanted to be standing at eleven at night.

Triple the regular load. My cousin's words, not a request.

The lot was dark except for one flickering streetlight at the far end, and a black sedan parked under it with its engine running, headlights off. I'd done drops before — small ones, quiet ones — but never one this size, and never alone like this, with nobody watching my back but myself.

A man stepped out of the sedan before I'd even crossed half the lot. Heavyset, leather jacket, a face I didn't recognize and didn't want to.

"You're the kid," he said. Not a question.

"I'm the one with the bag." I kept my voice flat, the way I'd been taught, like nerves were a luxury I couldn't afford to show.

"Where's the rest of it?"

I stopped walking. "This is the full order."

"Full order was supposed to be double what you're carrying after last week's mess. We heard about the cafeteria. We heard about the flush." He laughed, short and humorless. "Your family's good people, but good people who can't keep product in a bag aren't people we like doing business with."

"This is what I was given," I said. "If you've got a problem with the count, take it up with—"

"I'm taking it up with you. You're standing here." He took a step closer, and two more men I hadn't even noticed stepped out from behind the sedan, slow, unhurried, the kind of unhurried that meant they weren't worried about anything I might do about it.

My pulse picked up, but I kept my hands loose at my sides, kept my face the way I'd learned to keep it — flat, bored, like none of this mattered, even when every part of me was doing math on how fast I could run if I had to.

"The count's right," I said again. "You want more, that's a conversation for tomorrow, not tonight."

"Funny," the first man said, closing the last few feet between us. "I don't remember asking what conversation you thought we were having."

He reached for the bag strap on my shoulder, and I pulled back on instinct, the same instinct that had cost me a nose-bleeding kid and thirty thousand dollars already this week — and for half a second I thought, stupidly, *not again, not the same mistake twice* — and then the whole night exploded into red and blue light all at once.

Sirens, close, way too close, cutting through the dark like something physical.

"Cops!" one of the men by the sedan barked, and everyone scattered at once — the first man grabbing for the bag, missing, swearing, diving for the gym instead of fighting for it anymore. Tires screamed against asphalt. Doors slammed. The sedan peeled out of the lot so fast it fishtailed before straightening, taillights disappearing around the corner in seconds.

I didn't move fast enough.

I froze for one stupid heartbeat too long, bag still gripped tight in both hands, and by the time my legs remembered how to work, the flashing lights were already swinging into the mouth of the lot, headlights washing across the cracked pavement, across the dumpsters, across me standing right out in the open with everything I shouldn't have been holding.

I bolted for the fence line at the back of the lot, lungs already burning, bag slamming hard against my spine with every stride. A chain-link fence loomed up fast, taller than I remembered scoping it earlier, and I didn't have time to think about that either — just jumped, fingers catching wire, hauling myself up as a voice behind me barked something I didn't catch over my own heartbeat.

I dropped hard on the other side, ankle twisting wrong under me, and kept running anyway because stopping wasn't a choice that existed right now.

A narrow alley opened up between two buildings, black with shadow, and I cut into it without slowing down, chest heaving, the bag's weight dragging at my shoulder like it wanted me caught.

Footsteps. Behind me. Closer than I wanted them to be.

"Stop! Police!"

I didn't stop. I couldn't stop. Stopping meant the bag, meant questions, meant my cousin's voice in my head saying *you don't get to decide what handled means* on a loop I couldn't shut off even now.

The alley narrowed ahead, boxed in by a dead-end fence I hadn't scouted, hadn't planned for, hadn't had time to plan for any of this—

I skidded to a stop, chest heaving, staring up at chain-link too high to climb fast enough, a flashlight beam already swinging into the alley behind me, footsteps slowing now, confident now, the way footsteps get when they know they've got you cornered.

"Hands where I can see them," the voice said, closer, steady, already certain how this ended.

I stood there in the dark with thirty thousand dollars of someone else's mistake still strapped to my back, no cousin to fix this one, no fixer waiting to make it disappear before anyone had to ask a single question.

And for the first time since I'd walked into that cafeteria and changed everything, I had absolutely no idea what came next.