Marcus calls on a Tuesday evening, which is unusual. Marcus is a weekend caller by habit.
"I've got something you're going to want to hear," he says, when Gideon picks up.
"I'm listening."
"The councilman. District seven. Bernard Kelley."
Gideon knows the name. Everyone in Philadelphia knows the name. Bernard Kelley is fifty-six, three terms in city council, unremarkable public record, the kind of politician who persists by making himself impossible to care about strongly enough to vote out.
"What about him?"
Marcus is quiet for a moment. This is how he prepares you — not with preamble, but with a beat of silence that tells you what's coming isn't small.
"Sealed record going back fifteen years. Pre-council. He was running a protection operation out of a construction company — city contract work, residential demolition in neighborhoods the city wanted cleared. People who didn't want to sell their homes got visits. Three of those visits resulted in hospitalizations. One of those hospitalizations resulted in a man spending four months learning to walk again."
Gideon says nothing.
"The record got sealed as part of an agreement with the DA at the time. The DA retired eight months later to a consulting firm that had several city contracts. Kelley won his first council seat six months after that."
Gideon stands at the window of his apartment. The street below is ordinary in the evening light — a woman walking a dog, a kid on a bicycle, the particular Philadelphia quiet that is not really quiet but sounds like it compared to the things inside his head.
"Can you get me the sealed file?"
"I can get you what I have, which is the original medical reports from the hospitalizations and one sworn statement that was excluded from the record on a technicality." Another pause. "Gideon."
"Yeah."
"He has a security detail. Not constant, but regular. City-assigned."
"I know."
"Be careful."
"I'm always careful."
"I know you think that," Marcus says.
Gideon hears the dogs in the background. He thinks about what careful actually means — not just the operational version, but the other version, the one that has to do with what you allow yourself to become.
He pushes the thought away.
"Send me what you have," he says. "I'll start building the file."