The Shove
Chapter 01 - The Shove
The rain hadn't let up in an hour, and Grant Ashworth's jet had been sitting on the tarmac for three of them.
Kayla heard him before she saw him. Boots on wet concrete, fast and hard, the kind of walk that wanted an audience.
"Three hours delayed?!"
His voice bounced off the hangar's steel walls.
"Do you have any idea what my time is worth?!"
Kayla didn't look up from the clipboard. She'd learned a long time ago that looking up too fast only fed men like this.
*Finish the line. Then deal with him.*
She initialed the last box, tapped her pen twice against the board out of habit, and turned.
That was her mistake.
Grant's hand caught her shoulder and shoved, hard, before she'd even registered his face was that close. She stumbled back into a luggage cart, and the clipboard flew from her hands.
Papers scattered across the wet tarmac, already curling at the edges from the rain.
"Three hours!" he shouted again, jabbing a finger at her. "I have a nine a.m. in Geneva!"
Kayla caught herself on the cart's handle. Her jaw was tight. Her hands were shaking, but not from fear.
She said nothing.
She crouched and started gathering the papers, one at a time, smoothing the wet edges against her thigh. Thunder rolled somewhere out past the runway lights.
"Are you deaf?" Grant said. "I asked you a question."
Still nothing.
A voice came from the shadow near the jet's stairway, unhurried, low enough that Grant had to stop shouting to hear it.
"Sir."
Grant turned.
A man in a dark overcoat stepped into the floodlight, silver hair damp at the edges, hands loose at his sides like he had all the time in the world.
"You just put your hands on our new majority partner in this hangar operation."
The words landed and just sat there.
Grant's mouth opened. Closed.
"Wait," he said. "What?"
Marcus didn't repeat himself. He never did.
Kayla straightened, the recovered clipboard held against her chest, rain running down the back of her neck. She looked at Grant the way she looked at a cracked turbine blade, like something that had already failed and just hadn't noticed yet.
"Marcus," Grant said, and his voice had lost its edge, gone thin and careful. "This is, she's ground crew. She checks in luggage."
"She's been ground crew for six years," Marcus said. "She's also been buying Denny Okafor's shares for the last eleven months. Closed escrow Tuesday."
Grant looked at Kayla like he was seeing her for the first time. Which, in a way, he was.
*This is the moment,* Kayla thought. *This is the one where his whole face changes.*
It did.
The red drained out of it slow, like a tide pulling back, and what was left underneath was pale and much older looking than it had been thirty seconds ago.
"That's not possible," Grant said. "Denny wouldn't sell to, "
He stopped himself. Didn't finish it. Didn't have to.
Kayla flipped the clipboard open, checked that the pages were still in order, and pulled one specific sheet toward the top. Rain had smeared some of the ink, but not enough to hide what it was.
"You want to know why your jet's been sitting here three hours?" she said.
Her voice was even. Quiet, even.
"It's not the weather."
Grant's jaw worked. "Then what."
"This." She held the clipboard up, angled toward the floodlight so he could see the header, if not the details. "Your jet's last inspection sign-off. The one from four months ago."
"What about it."
"It's forged."
The hangar went very still. Even the rain seemed to back off, or maybe that was just her heartbeat filling up the space where the sound used to be.
"We just grounded you," Kayla said.
Grant stood there, soaked, silver hair plastered flat, staring at a woman he'd shoved into a luggage cart four minutes ago.
He didn't say anything else.
There wasn't anything else to say. Not yet.
Behind him, past the stairway, a second maintenance panel sat open on the jet's fuselage, its access light still burning yellow in the dark.
Kayla hadn't opened that panel tonight.
Someone else had. Earlier. Before Grant ever arrived. And whoever it was hadn't logged it.
She hadn't told Marcus that part yet.
She tucked the pen back into her vest pocket, next to a badge with her name on it, and looked at the open panel one second longer than she meant to.
*One forged signature is a mistake.*
*A whole drawer of them is a pattern.*
She'd found the drawer three weeks ago.
She just hadn't told anyone how deep it went.
Marcus was already reaching for his phone, thumb hovering over a number he clearly didn't want to call tonight.
"Get him inside," he said to Kayla. "Get him coffee. I need ten minutes."
Grant didn't move at first. Rain dripped off his chin.
"Ten minutes for what," he said.
"To decide how much of tonight I'm required to report by law," Marcus said, "and how much of it I choose to."
He walked toward the office without waiting for an answer.
Kayla picked up the last loose page, folded the clipboard shut, and looked at Grant.
May you like
"Coffee's this way," she said. "Sir."
She let the word sit there a beat too long before she turned and walked.
