Chapter 2 — The Man on the Motorcycle
1589 Words
I did not go home straight after work that day.
I know that sounds strange given everything I just told you. A man is dead. My boss. The same man who handed me an audit that had a four million dollar secret buried inside it. You would think the smart thing to do was go straight home, lock the door, and call someone.
But call who exactly?
The police? And tell them what? That I found a suspicious transfer in a financial report and my boss fell down his stairs? That a man on a motorcycle followed me home? None of that sounded like a crime when I said it out loud. It sounded like a woman who was tired and grieving and letting her imagination run away with her.
So instead I drove to a small diner three blocks from my office called Patty's. I had been going there since I first moved to the city. The booths were cracked and the coffee was too strong and the woman who ran the place, a short round woman named Bev, always brought you a slice of pie you did not order because she said everyone needed pie whether they knew it or not.
I needed pie that evening.
I sat in my usual booth at the back, the one by the window, and I ordered coffee and let Bev bring me a slice of apple pie without arguing about it. Then I took the folded page out of my bag and spread it flat on the table in front of me.
I looked at it for a long time.
The account number stared back at me. Twelve digits. A routing code I did not recognize. A transfer date from six weeks ago. And a name.
Dusk Holdings.
That was all. No address. No contact details. Nothing that would tell you what Dusk Holdings was or who owned it. Just a name sitting at the end of a money trail like a door with no handle.
I took a photo of the page on my phone. Then I folded it back up and put it away.
I told myself I was being careful. The truth is I did not know what I was doing. I was just a woman sitting in a diner eating pie she did not order, trying to figure out how scared she was supposed to be.
The answer, it turned out, was very.
I noticed him when I was on my second cup of coffee.
He was parked outside. Right there on the street directly in front of Patty's big front window. Same black motorcycle. Same leather jacket. He was not trying to hide. He was not pretending to be somewhere else. He was just parked there with his arms folded and his eyes on the window.
On me.
My stomach dropped.
I looked away quickly and stared at my coffee cup and tried to think clearly. He had followed me here. Which meant he had been outside my office waiting. Which meant he had been there all day. Watching.
I looked up again slowly.
He had not moved.
Up close, with the diner light reaching him a little better than the rainy street had the night before, I could see more of him now. He was tall even sitting on the bike, broad through the shoulders in a way that had nothing to do with the jacket. His hair was dark and a little long, not messy but not neat either, like he cut it himself and did not think too hard about it. His jaw was strong and there was a scar along the left side of it, thin and pale, the kind that was old enough to have settled into the skin properly.
He looked like trouble.
Not the loud obvious kind of trouble that announces itself. The quiet kind. The kind that is already three steps ahead of you before you realize you are even in a race.
I pulled out my phone and I called my best friend Trisha.
She picked up on the second ring the way she always did because Trisha treated a ringing phone like a personal challenge she refused to lose.
"I need you to listen to me," I said, keeping my voice low.
"Sol, I just got home, I have one shoe off and a glass of wine in my hand, whatever this is better be good."
"There is a man outside watching me."
Silence. Then, "What kind of watching?"
"The kind that started last night and has apparently continued through to this evening."
"Solène." Her voice changed. Trisha could go from light to serious faster than anyone I knew. "Where are you?"
"Patty's."
"Do not move. I am coming."
"No, do not come, I do not want you near this."
"Near what? Sol, what is happening?"
I looked out the window again. He was still there. And then something happened that made my heart do a very uncomfortable thing inside my chest. He looked directly at me. Not in the general direction of the window. Directly at me. Like he knew exactly where I was sitting and had known the whole time.
And then he did something I was not expecting.
He nodded.
Just once. Slow and deliberate. Like he was answering a question I had not asked out loud.
"Trisha," I said quietly, "I will call you back."
I hung up before she could argue.
I sat there for a moment and breathed. In and out. Steady. I was good at being steady when I needed to be. It was one of the few things I genuinely trusted about myself.
Then I picked up my bag, left two twenties on the table which was probably too much but I was not in the right headspace for arithmetic, and I walked to the front door of the diner.
Bev called after me. "You barely touched that pie, sweetheart."
"Save it for me," I said without turning around.
I pushed open the door and stepped out onto the sidewalk.
The cold air hit me. The street was quiet. A few cars passing. A couple walking a dog half a block down. And him. Six or seven meters away, still on the bike, watching me come out like he had been expecting exactly this.
I was not sure what I was planning to do. Walk up to him maybe. Ask him directly what he wanted. I am a woman who deals in facts and numbers and the only way to get facts is to ask questions.
But I did not get the chance.
He spoke first.
His voice was low. Not loud at all. But it carried across that stretch of sidewalk in a way that felt deliberate, like he had calculated exactly how much sound was needed to reach me and not a bit more.
"You should not have taken a photo of that document."
I stopped walking.
Every single thing in my body went very still.
He knew about the document. He knew I had photographed it. Which meant he either had access to my phone somehow or he had been watching me inside the diner long enough to see what I was doing at my table.
Neither option was comforting.
"Who are you?" I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt. I was grateful for that.
He did not answer that. He just looked at me for a moment with those dark eyes that gave away absolutely nothing. Then he said, "Delete the photo."
"I will not," I said.
Something shifted in his expression. It was not quite surprise. More like a small adjustment. Like he had expected one thing and gotten another and was quietly recalibrating.
"Go home, Solène," he said.
The sound of my name in his mouth did something strange to me. Not because it was warm. It was not warm at all. It was flat and careful and precise, like he was reading it off a list. But it meant he knew who I was. He knew my name. This man I had never spoken to before tonight knew exactly who I was.
"How do you know my name?" I said.
He did not answer that either.
He started the motorcycle. The engine came to life with a sound like controlled thunder and he pulled out onto the road without looking back at me.
I stood on that sidewalk in the cold and watched his tail light disappear around the corner.
My phone buzzed. Trisha calling back.
I stared at it for a second.
Then I looked down at my bag where the folded page was sitting in the inside pocket. Then I looked at the corner where his tail light had just vanished.
He knew my name. He knew about the document. He knew I had photographed it.
And he had not hurt me.
Not yet.
I answered Trisha's call. "I am fine," I told her before she could start. "I am going home."
"Solène Voss if you do not tell me what is going on right now I will drive to Patty's myself and sit in that parking lot all night."
"I promise I will tell you everything tomorrow."
A pause. "You better."
I walked to my car alone. I drove home alone. I checked my mirror the whole way and did not see a black motorcycle anywhere behind me.
I was almost disappointed.
That scared me more than anything else that had happened all evening.
- Writer
