Gus was already on his feet.

“We call the police.

Now.

Not later — now.” And that decision, more than anything else that night, is the reason this story does not end in a warehouse.

We reached the state investigator who had quietly reopened Porter’s crash on Gus’s earlier tips, and everything moved at once.

The school footage had already given them the plates of Dax’s shell-company vehicles; the moment I described the text, they pulled the traffic cameras and had a location inside of twenty minutes.

A patrol unit found the car on the coast road before it ever reached the docks.