The call came Sunday night, late enough that Enzo almost didn’t pick up.
“It’s me.” Gia’s voice, flat.
“You alone?”
He sat up.
“Yeah.”
“Someone came by the yard Friday.
Asked questions about the books.
Federal questions.”
Enzo’s kitchen went very quiet around him.
“You talk to him?”
“No.
He talked to Paulie the day dispatcher.
Asked about invoices, routes, weight tickets.
Left a card.” She paused.
“Paulie told me because there’s a column that doesn’t add right and he doesn’t know how to explain it if they come back.”
“What kind of doesn’t-add-right?”
“The kind where a route got billed twice in one week and the weights don’t match the fuel logs.
It’s small.
It’s also exactly what an agent builds a case on.”
Enzo stood, paced to the window.
“You call your boss?”
“He’d fix it by making me disappear.
I’d rather fix it by making the problem boring.” Her voice went quieter.
“You’re the only person I know who can read a column that fast.”
Tommy’s warning was still sitting there from the week before.
So was Reyes, somewhere, dating another entry in a file that had his name in it now too.
The smart play was easy to name and hard to do: tell her no, hang up, let the yard fix its own column.
“When do you need it clean?”
“Tomorrow.
They come back, ask again, and Paulie’s got an answer that sounds true because it is true, just…
tidier.”
“Where?”
“Yard office.
After close.
Ten o’clock.”
Enzo looked at the card Reyes’s partner had left at the pork store two weeks ago, still wedged in the frame of his bathroom mirror where he’d filed it to forget.
“I’ll be there.”
She hung up without thanks.
READ she broke her own rule (never ask a favor).
HOOK: federal proximity to her is federal proximity to you.
BOOK PRICE protecting her costs HEAT you can’t afford and buys RETURN: zero.
The math says walk.
He went anyway.
He drove with the window cracked, November air thin enough to taste the river two miles east, and told himself this was just numbers a favor between people who understood columns and voids.
The carting yard at night smelled like diesel and wet asphalt, the office a single lit window in a chain-link grid.
Gia opened the door before he knocked.
She looked tired.
No makeup, hair pulled back, dressed like she’d left somewhere in a hurry and was glad to be gone.
The desk behind her was clean except for two ledgers, a stack of fuel logs, and a yellow legal pad covered in her small, precise handwriting. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
“Thanks for coming.”
Enzo stepped inside, shut the door.
“Show me.”
She turned the ledger toward him, tapped a column.
“Route 14, November third and November ninth.
Same billing code, different tonnage, and the fuel log says the truck only ran once that week.”
He scanned the entries and saw it immediately a transposition, not fraud.
A dispatcher had copied the wrong date from a manifest, billing a route that was still a week out.
Sloppy, but the kind of sloppy that fixed itself once you found the seam.
“You got the actual manifests?”
She pulled a folder from the filing cabinet, handed it over.
He flipped through, matched the dates, found the real route buried two pages later under a different code.
“This one,” he said, tapping the page.
“The truck ran the ninth under a different number because the original route got canceled.
Somebody re-billed it and forgot to void the third.”
Gia leaned over his shoulder, close enough he caught her shampoo plain, unscented, the absence of perfume its own kind of statement.
She studied the page, then nodded.
“So it’s not double-billing.
It’s a clerical error and a void that never got filed.”
“Right.
You file the void, note the correction, and the column adds clean.
An agent asks, Paulie says ‘Yeah, we caught that in November, here’s the amended log.’ Boring.”
She took the folder, made a note on the legal pad.
“You just saved me from a subpoena or a pink slip.
Possibly both.”
“The Feds come back, don’t be helpful.
Give them exactly what they ask for, nothing extra.
They’re fishing.”
“I know how it works.” She looked at him, and the hardness in her jaw softened a degree.
“My father got fished to death.
They never charged him.
Just kept asking until he had a heart attack in a room like this one, trying to make a column add.”
Enzo said nothing.
Every answer he could think of bent toward a promise he had no right to make.
Gia set the folder down, leaned against the desk.
“Why’d you come?”
“You asked.”
“That’s not a reason.
You don’t owe me anything.
We’re not even friends.”
He held her eyes across the desk.
“You’re the only person who looks at me and sees a man before a price tag.”
Her gaze held.
“That’s because I can’t afford you.”
“Good.
Means you’re not buying.”
The office went quiet.
Outside, a truck hissed air brakes in the lot.
Gia folded her arms, not defensive contained.
“Spending yourself on me and getting nothing back.
Either you’re stupid or you’re something I stopped believing existed in this world.”
Three feet of office between them, close enough to matter.
Enzo didn’t close it.
“Which one scares you more?”
“The second one.
Because if you’re just stupid, I can walk away clean.”
She stayed.
So did he.
The fluorescent tube above the desk buzzed at a frequency that got inside his teeth, and for a span of seconds the only other sound was the lot gate swinging in a wind neither of them had noticed until now.
COUNT HEAT paid: moderate (presence at a federal-adjacent site, linkage to a witness).
RESPECT earned: none.
RETURN: none.
The trade is you for her.
The Bookkeeper cannot price what this buys.
Adjust the file.
Gia’s gaze dropped to the ledger, back to him.
“You should go.
This was already stupid before it got complicated.”
“Yeah.”
His feet stayed planted.
She exhaled half breath, half laugh.
“You’re going to be the thing that breaks my rule about not getting involved with this life, aren’t you?”
“Your rule’s smarter than both of us.”
“I know.” She straightened, handed him the folder.
“Take this.
Make sure the void gets filed with the county, not just the yard.
It has to match if they cross-reference.”
Enzo took it.
Their fingers missed each other by an inch that felt deliberate.
“I’ll handle it.”
“I know you will.
That’s the problem.”
He left before the space got any smaller.
Outside, the diesel smell was sharper, the cold waking him up from whatever he’d just walked into and not back out of.
He sat in the car, folder on the passenger seat, and let the engine run a minute before he put it in gear.
He’d just tied himself to a witness the Feds were circling.
Burned risk he could not spare to scrub a column clean for someone who’d told him, plainly, that getting close was a mistake.
The Envelope had priced it as pure loss and he’d paid anyway, and somewhere in a federal file his name was about to sit next to Gia Barzetti’s for the first time and stay there.
HEAT LEDGER updated.
You linked yourself to a federally interesting bookkeeper.
You handed an agent a relationship to exploit.
The case now includes her.
RETURN: she didn’t walk away.
Neither did you.
The Bookkeeper does not understand the trade.
The file remains open.
He started the car, pulled out of the lot, and drove home knowing two things for certain.
The smart move had been to say no.
And the next time she called, he’d say yes again.