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Cal Brink survived nine years as a process server and private investigator in Washington, DC. He’s spent the last eight years as a real estate agent in Kansas City. Both required reading rooms for a living. Body language. Hesitation. The gap between what a seller says and what a seller means. He’s built a career out of the carnage of the Great Recession-helping investors pick through the bones for houses nobody wanted, in neighborhoods nobody trusted, and from sellers who were a little too eager to close.
On August 13, 2010, Cal makes a mistake: he gets careless. He signs on his first investment, a distressed property in Kansas City’s Columbus Park neighborhood, for $29,000-no interest, no haggling and a moved-up closing date. He signs where the title agent points, initials where she taps, and doesn’t bother reading any of the paperwork.
No car chases. No shootouts. Just a slow unraveling of evidence he wasn’t supposed to find tied to a dead man from 1988.
Not letting it rest, Cal drives 1,080 miles into his past to confront a man who sits in a powerful chair just blocks from the White House. A man who holds evidence that could send Cal to federal prison-under the watchful eye of the FBI. The city he loved has turned its back on him.
Notice of Assignment is the first novella in The Cal Brink Files series where real estate is the crime: a procedural with building dread that snaps into noir.
From Chapter 4
The silver box whispered a protest with a grinding metal sound. The smell of gun oil hit my nostrils, calling back to an era I had put behind me. Three items revealed themselves for the first time in what I figured was a long, long time.
A handgun. A picture. A white envelope.
I recognized the handgun immediately as a Colt Detective Special. I poked around the kitchen, finding an old, dusty towel inside a cabinet. I snapped the towel tight and the dust particles sparkled in the rays of light like fireflies by a creek.
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A Chris Writes, LLC Publication
Not legal advice / not professional guidance / do not imitate tactics
Fictionalized/composite/altered details + no identification intended
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