I went back to Leon's territory the next morning without asking Mercer's permission and without bringing anyone from our side, because I'd decided overnight that if Leon's men had taken Daniel out of spite for a missed meeting, I would rather face that alone than drag more armed men into the same gravel lot where it happened.
Leon's yard sat behind a chain-link fence strung with faded orange tape, stacks of pallets leaning at angles that told you nobody there cared much for appearances. Two of the same men from the dock saw me coming and had me pinned against the side of a flatbed before I'd said six words, one forearm hard across my collarbone, the other man patting down my jacket like I might have come armed to ask a question.
"I'm not here for trouble," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I expected given the position I was in. "I want to know if your people have my nephew."
That was when the strap holding a stack of loaded drums let go on a flatbed twenty feet away, the whole load starting to shift and roll toward a kid stacking boxes who hadn't seen it coming, and both the men holding me let go at once and ran for it, and I ran too, throwing my shoulder against the nearest drum hard enough to feel something tear loose in the joint, slowing the roll just long enough for the kid to scramble clear before the whole stack went down in a crash of metal that left my ears ringing.
Leon came out of the office at the sound, and when he saw me on the ground with my arm cradled against my chest and his own man's flatbed load scattered across the gravel, something in his face shifted from suspicion toward something closer to a grudging accounting of debts. "You didn't have to do that," he said, crouching down near me.
"Wasn't thinking about owing anybody anything," I said, which was true enough in the moment, though I knew already it would change how he talked to me for the rest of that visit.
He walked me to the shed where the meeting was supposed to have happened three nights before, an aluminum-sided building at the back of the lot that smelled of motor oil and mildew, empty now except for a folding table and two chairs still set across from each other the way they'd been left waiting for men who never sat down in them. On the floor near the table leg was a canvas packing strap, the kind used to bind crates, stenciled faintly along one edge with a warehouse code I recognized because I'd loaded trucks under that same code a hundred times at Mercer's cold-store building.
I picked it up slow, turning it over once, and said nothing about what it meant, because I didn't fully know yet myself, only that it had no business being on the floor of a shed that belonged to Leon and not to Mercer. I folded it twice and put it inside my jacket instead of showing it to Leon, telling myself I needed to understand it before I handed anyone a reason to act on it, though some part of me already understood I was choosing which side of this I was willing to investigate and which side I wasn't ready to.
Leon watched me do it and didn't ask what I'd found, maybe out of some rough courtesy for the shoulder I'd ruined on his man's falling drums, and we walked back out toward the gate together in a kind of uneasy truce neither of us had agreed to out loud. At the fence he stopped me with a hand on my good arm. "Your boy's not the only one missing," he said. "Ruth Bell, keeps books for the cold-store operation. She didn't come in two days before your nephew went off the map. Nobody's seen her either."