“Mr. Hernandez—oh, excuse me, you go by your mother’s name, don’t you? Mr. Louis,” the man chuckled darkly. “Your father tried very hard to protect you. He played his part perfectly. But unfortunately, you tried to be a good son by paying the hospital directly instead of giving the old man the cash we explicitly demanded.”
“I have money!” I yelled, tears of panic streaming down my face as I dashed out of the room toward my car. “I make over a hundred thousand a year! I can get you twenty thousand dollars right now! Just tell me where to bring it!”
The man on the line let out a low, mocking laugh that sent a shiver straight to my core.
“Twenty thousand dollars? Oh, Louis. That was the price for your father’s silence. That was just the interest on a debt that has been compounding for thirty years. Now that we’ve had to come all the way down here to collect it ourselves, the price has gone up significantly.”
I threw myself into the driver’s seat, started the car, and tore out of the gravel driveway, the tires screaming against the pavement. “What do you want?!”
“I want you to look out your front windshield, Louis,” the voice said quietly.
I slammed on the brakes.
Blocking the narrow dirt road leading away from the riverbank was a massive, black luxury SUV with tinted windows. The headlights flashed once.
The phone call didn’t disconnect, but the voice now echoed from both the speaker in my hand and a figure stepping out of the passenger side of the SUV. The man was dressed in a pristine gray suit that looked completely out of place in the slums of Savannah. He held a phone to his ear, smiling directly at me through my windshield.
“The debt your mother’s family owes us isn’t measured in dollars, Louis,” the man said into the phone, his smile widening into a terrifying grin. “It’s measured in blood. And since your father ran out of his a long time ago… we’ve come to collect yours. Step out of the car. If you try to reverse, the man standing in your wife’s hospital room gets the signal to end it.”
My hand froze on the gear shift. Through the tinted glass of the SUV’s rear window, I could see the silhouette of a second man raising a suppressed firearm, pointed directly at my chest.
I was trapped. And the clock had just run out.
