The rain came down in heavy, slanted sheets, turning the parking lot into a mirror of gray.

Detective Marcus Hale slammed his car door shut and pulled his collar high against the wind. He hadn’t told anyone where he was going. He wasn’t even sure why he’d agreed to come.

Victor’s call had come an hour earlier — urgent, nervous, the kind of tone Hale hadn’t heard from him since their dockyard days.

“Marcus, I can’t say much over the phone,” Victor had said. “But it’s about Blue Harbor. You were right — the fire wasn’t an accident. And I’ve got proof. Meet me at Unit 47B. Tonight.”

Proof.

The word had stuck in Hale’s head ever since.

He stopped at the row marked Forty-seven. The lights were dim here — half of them out, buzzing faintly like dying insects. He scanned the units until he reached 47B. The door was down, the padlock intact.

He knocked once. “Victor?”

Nothing.

He waited, then tried again, louder. “It’s Hale. You said you had something for me.”

Still nothing but the sound of rain hammering the steel roof.

Unease tightened in his chest. Victor wasn’t the kind to bail on a meeting. Hale bent down and saw something odd — faint scratches near the edge of the lock, fresh and clean against the rust.

He stepped back, hand instinctively drifting toward the gun under his coat. “Victor,” he said again, slower this time. “If you’re in there, open up.”

Still silence.

Then — a soft clink. Metal shifting inside.

The hair on his neck rose.

Hale reached for his flashlight, scanning the ground. A few dark drops trailed from the side of the unit toward the drain. Not rainwater. Thicker.

Blood.

He tried the door. It wouldn’t move. The lock was jammed shut. Hale hesitated — years of instinct screaming to call it in — but something deeper held him there. A sense of obligation. Of unfinished business.

He stepped back, took a breath, and forced the lock open with his crowbar. The metal gave way with a screech.

When he lifted the door, the stench hit him first — iron and oil and something burnt. The light from his flashlight caught on the edge of a crate… then a boot.

“Jesus, Victor.”

He crouched beside the body, reaching for a pulse he already knew wasn’t there. Victor’s hand was still curled around something — a scrap of paper, soaked through. Hale pried it loose.

The ink was blurred, but he could make out part of a word:

“Hale.”

He stared at it, rain dripping from his hair, his chest heavy with something between anger and guilt.

Then his radio crackled, startling him.

“Unit 12, report. You near Mariner Depot? We’ve got an alarm tripping in 47B.”

He froze. His throat was dry.

He looked once more at Victor, then at the open box lying behind the crate — empty.

Hale closed his eyes, shoved the scrap of paper into his pocket, and whispered,

“I’m sorry, old friend.”

When he stepped out into the rain, headlights flared in the distance — a security truck turning into the lot.

He didn’t look back.