Chapter 19: The Lead
"Sorry to interrupt."
Sarah's voice came from directly behind them.
Simon stepped back from Meg and turned. Sarah and Casey were crossing the sidewalk toward them with the unhurried efficiency of people who had already decided how this conversation was going to go.
"Meg," Simon said quietly. "Get in the car."
Meg looked at the two approaching figures, read the situation in about one second, and nodded. She got in without argument, which Simon appreciated more than he could currently express.
He waited until the door closed, then turned to face them.
"Tonight doesn't get discussed," Sarah said. No preamble, no warmup. "With anyone. Not your girlfriend, not your neighbors, not someone you trust. No one."
"How complicated does it get if I don't cooperate?" Simon asked.
Casey answered that one. "Best case — we hold you in a secure location until we determine you're not a threat. That could be weeks." He paused. "Worst case, you have an accident. Something mundane. Nobody investigates mundane accidents."
Simon looked at him.
Casey looked back with the specific blankness of a man who was not making a rhetorical point.
"Understood," Simon said. He kept his voice neutral and his hands visible, because these were people who responded well to clarity and poorly to ambiguity. "For what it's worth — I genuinely don't know what Chuck's actual situation is. I saw my coworker getting chased, I followed, and then a lot of things happened very fast. I'm not a factor in whatever you're running."
"That's what we're going to determine," Sarah said. "In the meantime — don't leave the area. No unusual travel, no out-of-state trips, nothing that reads like you're trying to put distance between yourself and tonight."
"I work at the Buy More and I go to high school," Simon said. "My radius is about four miles."
"Keep it that way." She held his eye for a moment — assessing, filing. "We'll be in touch."
Casey clapped him once on the shoulder — not hard, but with the specific weight of a very large man who wanted you to know he could make it harder. "Good talk."
They left the way they'd arrived — without ceremony, already onto the next thing.
Simon watched them go, then got back in the car.
"What did they want?" Meg asked.
"To make sure I understood the value of not talking about tonight."
She was quiet for a moment. "Are we okay?"
"We're fine." He started the engine. "It's fine."
He said it with enough steadiness that she let it go, which was either trust or exhaustion and he wasn't sure which. Either way, he was grateful for it.
He dropped her home, waited until the front door closed, and drove back to his own house.
He didn't sleep for a while.
He lay on his bed in the dark and ran through the evening with the methodical patience of someone doing a post-mortem on a decision.
The honest assessment: he'd overreached. He'd seen Chuck in trouble and moved without calculating the full perimeter of what he was stepping into. Chuck's situation wasn't just a coworker in a tight spot — it was a national security operation, with two trained federal agents running point, and Simon had inserted himself into the middle of it with a handgun and a fake LAPD announcement.
Sarah and Casey hadn't neutralized him tonight because he'd been useful and non-threatening and the situation hadn't allowed time for the alternative. That window would not stay open indefinitely. Within a few days, they'd have run him fully — background, associations, the street racing, Doc, all of it — and then they'd be back with a much more specific set of questions.
The variable he needed to control was what they found when they looked.
On the Doc side: he'd participated in one job, collected payment, and was currently being coerced into a second. He had no prior criminal record. He was a high school student with a part-time job and a legitimate carry license. The money was in a storage closet and hadn't moved.
On the Chuck side: they'd already seen him. The story — I followed because he's my coworker and I thought he was in danger — was true, which made it easy to maintain under questioning.
The main risk wasn't what they found. It was what they decided to do about what they found.
Which meant the answer was the same as it had always been: become valuable enough that removing him cost more than managing him.
He filed it under ongoing problems and eventually fell asleep.
His alarm went off at six thirty.
He was dressed and outside by seven — dark jeans, boots, a denim jacket, sunglasses instead of his usual frames. He'd texted Dom the night before.
Dom had responded with two words: We're there.
The street in front of his house looked like a car show had materialized overnight.
Dom's Charger at the front. Letty's car behind it. Jesse, Vince, Leon, half a dozen others from the extended crew, and another dozen from the broader racing community who had apparently been called in as a show of force on relatively short notice. Engines running, windows down, occupying the full width of the street from one end to the other.
Simon walked out to meet them.
"You didn't have to bring this many," he said to Dom.
"Family shows up," Dom said simply.
Simon nodded. "Appreciate it."
He got in the Supra, pulled to the front of the formation, and led them toward Neptune High.
The convoy arrived during the ten minutes before first bell — peak traffic in the parking lot, maximum audience. Simon pulled through the main entrance slow enough that every student within line of sight had time to register what they were looking at.
Modified cars in formation. Recognizable faces behind the wheels. The specific social weight of a group of people who operated by their own rules showing up in a place that had been making one person's life difficult.
The message required no translation.
Simon parked, got out, and took off his sunglasses.
The parking lot had gone notably quiet.
He held the sunglasses in one hand, looked at the students who had stopped to watch, and turned back to give Dom a single nod. Dom nodded back. The convoy pulled out, engines settling back to a rumble as they cleared the lot.
Simon walked into school.
Meg was near the lockers. He found her before she found him, which was unusual — she was always the one who spotted him first.
"Last night," he said. "Anyone bother you?"
"Couple of emails. Nothing new." She looked up at him. "No calls, though. That's different."
"It'll get quieter."
She studied his face. "What did you do?"
"Made sure the people who needed to understand something, understood it."
"The cars outside."
"The cars outside."
Meg exhaled slowly. "Simon — that's Dom's crew. That's — people are going to talk about that for weeks."
"Good," Simon said. "That's the point."
She shook her head. But she was also slightly smiling, which he took as a net positive.
"You're going to get a reputation," she said.
"I already have one," he said. "Might as well make it useful."
Lunch.
Veronica found their table and sat down without asking, which was her standard operating procedure and which Simon had long since stopped finding either rude or presumptuous.
"The parking lot thing this morning," she said, arranging her food. "Brave. Also not smart."
"I've heard that today," Simon said.
"High-profile moves leave marks. From here on, any time anything happens in this school, administration is going to check you first. You've put yourself at the top of a very inconvenient list."
"He knows," Meg said.
"I'm saying it anyway, because someone should." Veronica looked at Simon directly. "The people who had actual power here — your dad's-a-cop leverage, your family-name leverage — they got to operate quietly because nobody was specifically watching them. You just made yourself visible."
"Noted," Simon said. "On the other hand, you've been visible at this school for two years and you're still functional."
Veronica blinked. Then: "I didn't choose to be visible."
"Neither did Meg." Simon shrugged. "At least this way it's our choice."
A pause.
"That's actually a reasonable point," Veronica said, in the tone of someone who found reasonable points mildly annoying when they came from unexpected directions. "Doesn't make you less of a target going forward, but—"
"It's a reasonable point," Simon agreed. "I'll take it."
"Also," Veronica added, "having Dom Toretto roll through campus on your behalf does tend to make people reconsider their priorities. I'll give you that."
"How's your investigation going?" Meg asked.
Veronica opened the worn notebook she carried everywhere. "Two angles. The site that sold the fake results, and whoever had access to the school's student database passwords." She tapped the notebook. "The site's a dead end for our purposes — it's a shell, probably offshore, no one's tracing it from here. The real question is who accessed Meg's file specifically."
"The password person," Simon said.
"Yes. I've been running through everyone who has admin access to the student database. Teachers, office staff, a few student council members who were granted limited credentials for the scheduling system." She glanced at her notes. "On the surface, everyone checks out."
"Surface is the wrong level to check," Simon said.
"I know that." She looked at him. "And the people who look cleanest on the surface are usually the ones worth looking at below it. I'm aware." She closed the notebook. "I'll have something concrete soon. The trail is there — it always is. Someone made a move and left a fingerprint. I just need to find which fingerprint belongs to which hand."
"Veronica." Meg leaned forward. "Thank you. Really."
Veronica's expression softened in the specific way it did when she let it — briefly, genuinely, before she reassembled the composure she wore as standard kit. "You didn't do anything to deserve what happened to you," she said. "That's reason enough."
She picked up her fork.
"Also," she added, in the drier register, "Simon paid me two hundred dollars, which doesn't hurt."
Simon raised his cup. "Professional to the end."
"Always," Veronica said, and went back to her food.
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