A Second Chance

Part 62 - Investigation

The second location on my list was a waterfront plaza on the east side of the city.

I spent about an hour there, talked to a few regulars, and got nothing useful. The plaza was busy enough for a Wednesday morning, lots of people cutting through on their way to work, a few older residents doing their usual routines. Nobody had noticed anything strange, or if they had, they weren't sharing it with a detective they'd never heard of.

I crossed it off and moved on.

The third spot was a transit hub near the city center, the kind of place where a lot of different types of people passed through at all hours. I figured if anything unusual was moving through the city, a busy transit point was a reasonable place to pick up on it. I walked the area for ninety minutes, kept my eyes open, started a few conversations, and came away with absolutely nothing. One man told me his neighbor's dog had been barking more than usual lately, which I wrote down to be polite.

The fourth location was a covered market that ran along two city blocks near the financial district.

It was the kind of place I would have genuinely enjoyed on a different trip, vendors selling everything from produce to handmade goods, the whole thing bustling and loud and full of color. I moved through it slowly and asked around where it felt natural to do so. A couple of vendors were happy to chat, mostly about how business had been slower the past few months, nothing that connected to anything I was looking for.

By the time I got to the fifth location, a public recreation center on the north side, I was starting to feel the grind of it.

This was the part nobody talked about when it came to investigative work. It wasn't dramatic, it wasn't fast, and most of the time it was just a long string of dead ends that you had to get through before anything real showed up. I knew that going in, but knowing it and living it were two different things. I grabbed a coffee from a cart outside the recreation center, found a bench nearby, and decided to sit for a while instead of rushing to the next name on my list.

The bench faced a small open-air café across the narrow street, the kind of place with a few tables out front and a chalkboard menu by the door. It was quiet enough that I could hear most of what was going on around me without trying.

I was about halfway through my coffee when two men sat down at the table closest to the street, just a few meters from where I was sitting. They were dressed casually, nothing that stood out, and they ordered without looking at the menu, which meant they'd been here before.

I didn't look at them directly. All I did was just eavesdrop.

Most of it was ordinary, a conversation about scheduling, something about a delivery being pushed back. But then one of them said something that made me slow down internally without letting it show on my face.

"The new drop point's still the same. Tell them to use the south entrance, not the loading dock. The dock's been getting too much foot traffic since that building opened up next door."

The other one nodded like it was routine. "Timeline's still the same, yeah?"

"Far as I know. Just make sure nothing comes through the main district. Remember, there shouldn't be any noise."

They moved on to something else after that, and I finished my coffee at the same pace I'd been drinking it.

I stood up, tossed the cup, and walked back to the SUV without looking back at the table. Once I was inside with the door closed, I pulled out my phone and typed out everything I'd just heard word for word while it was still fresh.

Yeah, praise my very long and efficient memory. 

A drop point and a south entrance. Someone wanting things kept quiet in the main district.