“Ron was a good guy.” I remember him from several years back. He did a lot of the computer work for my father and brother.
“I always liked him.” Antony looks nostalgically into the distance.
“He got himself killed in a car wreck, didn’t he?” I try to picture Ron’s face in my head and compare it to the kid I saw hunched over a computer.
“That’s just the kind of guy he is. Well, was.”
“How do ya mean?”
“No mess for us to clean up.” Antony smirks.
“Very considerate.” I shake my head and roll my eyes.
“I thought so.” He continues to grin. He finishes his smoke and updates me on the rest of the business in Cincinnati while simultaneously flipping through some hook-up app, mostly swiping right. Clearly, Antony isn’t too picky.
I sigh heavily.
“Antony, I need a favor.”
“Anything you want, boss. What can I do ya for?”
“Do you remember that girl from the club the other night? The one with the bad taste in internet dates?”
“Sure. We grabbed a pic of her ID when you had me take care of that guy for ya. Well, Threes did most of it, but you know what I mean. Cherice Bay.”
“That’s her. I need to check her out.”
“I should be able to get that done today.”
“I was hoping we could do it now.”
“Right now?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” Antony eyes me for a moment, and then I follow him up the stairs and inside.
Antony closes the door with a bang, but no one hears the noise or looks up. Several dozen people hover over the workstations lined up against the walls. The center of the room is filled with boxes on pallets, all marked with Chinese characters above the English words indicating computer parts.
The boxes aren’t filled with computer parts, of course. They’re filled with stolen and wiped phones, which are much more profitable.
I follow Antony past the workers, briefly glancing at their meticulously created forgeries of passports, birth certificates, social security cards, and driver’s licenses. On the other side of the warehouse is another door, and Antony walks casually through it to the far side of the building.
I close the door behind me and give my eyes a moment to adjust to the dim lighting. This part of the warehouse is empty and looks like it hasn’t fulfilled its role as a place to store stuff for years. The steady drip, drip, drip of a leaking pipe echoes through the concrete structure.
Antony leans over a folding table and switches on the computer that sits there. We wait for the PC to boot up, and then Antony starts his searching.
“All right,” Antony says. “Nothing too spectacular here, but I did find her. Driver’s license looks legit. Cherice Marie Bay hails from Accident, Maryland.”
“Accident? Really?”
“Yeah, that’s the name of the place. I noticed the town when I was looking at the surveillance footage and honestly thought it was bogus, but I checked it out, and it’s legit. Looks like she’s lived there all her life with an aunt named Virginia Marie Bay. Never applied for a passport. If you want a copy of her birth certificate, I’ll have to file for it in Maryland. I don’t think we have any contacts that can get us one, so we’d have to wait on that. Worked in the town library while she was in high school. Never went to college, maybe because her aunt got sick the summer after her high school graduation. She passed away last fall.”
“That all fits with what she’s told me.”
“Virginia Bay owned an antique shop in Accident, which has been passed down to Cherice but hasn’t been reopened since Virginia died. Cherice moved to Cascade Falls in an apartment on East Fourth Street about three weeks ago.”
“Which apartment building?”