The Disbursement

Ellis Bingham has been sitting outside the Hargrove house for forty minutes, engine off, watching a light move through the upstairs rooms. He's done this before. He knows the property. He knows what it's worth, what it was worth, what his cut should have been before the Covenant of the Ascending Hand filed their paperwork and the estate attorney stopped returning calls.

He has a folder on the passenger seat. Twelve years of documentation. He's ready.

What he isn't ready for is the name he finds in the records when he finally gets a paralegal to pull the original disbursement filing — a name that appears twice, in two different columns, doing two different kinds of damage. One column is the Covenant's. The other one is his.

The town around him is already mostly gone. The anchor stores closed in sequence, then the smaller ones, then the restaurants. What's left is a regional hospitality company that Ellis owns, a strip of storefronts he manages, and a legal claim he's been sharpening for over a decade. The claim was supposed to fix everything. The claim was supposed to be clean.

It isn't clean.

The Covenant stole from him. That part is still true. But the money they stole passed through his hands first, and the hands before his weren't clean either, and the further back he pulls the thread, the more the whole thing unravels into something he can't put in front of a judge without putting himself there too.

He could walk away. The town would absorb it. The Covenant would get the property and eventually the property would become something unrecognizable and that would be the end of it.

He could. He's been sitting in this car long enough to know he won't.