Chapter 10: Pete

The gas station attendant was the one who broke first. Not broke — that implied the script had cracked. What Pete Okafor did was more subtle: he handed Dana her coffee and said, under his breath, without looking at her, 'The diner closes at nine. The booth by the window doesn't have cameras.' She was at the diner at eight-fifty. Pete arrived at nine-oh-three, after the owner had locked up and left through the back. He sat across from her in the window booth and looked at the table for a long time before speaking. 'I sent the invitation,' he said. 'Why?' 'Because it's been three years and nothing has happened and I'm tired of nothing happening.' He looked up. 'Mira was my friend. She didn't leave voluntarily. She left because we made her leave, and we made her leave because the alternative was worse for her. And that decision has been eating at me every day since.' Dana set her recorder on the table. Pete looked at it. 'Not yet,' he said. 'First you need to understand what we're protecting before you decide what to do with it.' She put the recorder away. 'Tell me,' she said. Pete told her about the mine. Not the old silver mine that appeared in the county records — a different operation entirely, recent, operating under a holding company nobody in Calloway had been able to trace. Mira had traced it. Mira had figured out what was being extracted, who was extracting it, and what it meant that the operation existed three miles outside a town of three hundred people. 'She sent the documentation somewhere safe,' Pete said. 'And then she left. Because staying meant they'd come for the documentation through her.' 'Who's they?' He looked out the window at the dark main street. 'That's what we couldn't figure out,' he said. 'That's why I invited you.'