Page 182 of The Lonely Road

He’s recalculating.

He thought he understood the board and had just registered that a piece moved when he wasn’t watching.

Followed, half a second later, by fear.

He’s smart enough to be afraid. That’s something.

“Mr. Brooks,” he greets.

“Mr. Tannenbaum.” I smile without any warmth. I’ve been told it’s threatening. “May I come in?”

He steps back.

The room is cream and gray, the kind of furniture that photographs well, a desk with his laptop open and three phones, and the detritus of a man who has been managing a crisis from a hotel room for the better part of a week.

The mountain view is as advertised.

I sit in the chair by the window without being invited.

He remains standing, which is a mistake—standing in a bathrobe in your own hotel room when the man across from you is fully dressed and completely settled is not a power position. He doesn’t sit because sitting feels like ceding something but standing in a bathrobe feels like exactly what it is.

I let him work this out.

“I don’t know what you think you’re doing here.”

“Yes, you do,” I reply pleasantly.

He glances at his phone. Calculating whether to call someone.

“You’re welcome to call legal counsel.” I set my arms on the rests. “I’d suggest you hear what I have to say first. It’ll make the conversation with your lawyer shorter.”

He puts the phone down.

I open my jacket and take out the folder—I didn’t bring the whole package, just enough.

Three pages.

The financial transfers that connect Jessup personally to the authorization of Trafton’s operations in Wildflower Canyon. The paper trail between his name and the instruction that put a man on Clara Whitman’s property while her children were there. And, lastly, the documentation showing how, through several shell companies, High Mesa is connected to Jessup’s son-in-law’s development company.

He studies it.

“Jessup is done,” I continue. “You know that. The political infrastructure that made this project viable is gone. The resort permit dies in committee without it, and the investors you’ve been fielding all week already know it.” I lean forward slightly. “What they don’t know yet—what you have approximately twenty-four hours to get ahead of—is whether your name appears in a federal filing connecting him personally to the intimidation of a ranching family in Wildflower Canyon County, Colorado.” I hold his gaze. “A single mother. Two children. One of them is four years old.”

I am bluffing. I have nothing connecting Tannenbaum to Jessup’s crimes—but I’ve been bluffing for years, I’m good at it.

“What do you want?”

“High Mesa withdraws the Whitman challenge.” I don’t think I’ll get it, but I have to try. “I don’t want a recess or even a continuance. I want a full withdrawal, filed by eight a.m. tomorrow.” I stand. I pick up the folder. “You do that, this stays where it is. You don’t, and the FBI has it before noon. I think you know about Kazimir Chase by now.”

He’s a smart man—I saw it in the courtroom, I see it now, in the bathrobe with the mountain behind him.

“It’s out of my hands,” he says evenly. “There are others who want this project moving.”

This is what I was afraid of. That his influence is limited, and those who have the power are hidden—like Jessup—and I don’t have enough time to find them.

“But, if the judge rules against us…which is a distinct possibility, I will convince my investors to back out of this.”

I rise. “Thank you, Mr. Tannenbaum.”