The Blackmail Review

Chapter 6 — The Call

Jess had never made the call herself.

That was the rule. The whole point of FiveStar Shield — the LLC, the letterhead, the polished website with its stock photo of a smiling consultant shaking hands with a restaurateur — was distance. Jess found the targets. Danny built the flood. The “consultants” she hired from a rotating pool of freelance closers made the calls, read from a script, and never knew what came after the “no.” The machine worked best when none of its parts touched each other.

But Rosa Benedetti was different. Rosa hadn’t been scared. Rosa hadn’t paid. And three weeks into the heaviest flood Jess had ever authorized, the bakery’s rating was crawling back up like a weed through concrete — real five-star reviews from real regulars, stacking up faster than Danny’s bots could drown them.

“She’s stubborn,” Danny had said that morning, hunched over his monitors, the blue light carving hollows under his eyes. “The organic reviews keep outpacing us. We’d have to triple the bot output, and honestly, Jess, the pattern would look —”

“I know how it would look,” Jess had snapped. She hadn’t slept well. The reporter — that nosy local journalist who’d started asking questions about review patterns across three different restaurant review sites — was living rent-free in her head.

That morning she’d checked the bakery’s rating from her office, the way she checked all of them — a quick, proprietary glance, like a general surveying a battlefield. 4.6 stars. It had been 3.1 at the bottom of the flood. The loyal customers were winning. Every real five-star review that landed felt like a small personal insult, a hand pushing back against hers.

She’d sat there, coffee going cold, staring at the screen, and felt something she hadn’t felt in years: the sense that a situation was no longer under her control. FiveStar Shield didn’t lose. That was the entire pitch. Pay, and the storm stops. Don’t pay, and the storm doesn’t stop until you do. But Rosa Benedetti wasn’t paying, the storm wasn’t stopping her, and now strangers were writing articles about it.

So at 2:40 on a Tuesday afternoon, Jess Lane picked up a burner phone, dialed Benedetti’s Bakery’s number from a corner booth at a coffee shop three miles from her office, and decided to break her own rule.

This was personal now. Rosa had looked her in the eye — through the screen, through the photographs in the news article — and said no to her like she was nothing. Jess had built an empire on the simple fact that nobody said no to her.

The phone rang twice. Then a voice answered.

Not Rosa. A man. Older. Calm in a way that made her sit up straighter before she knew why.

“Benedetti’s,” he said.

Jess let half a beat pass, the way her closers did, settling into the role. “Good afternoon. I’m calling from FiveStar Shield. We’ve been monitoring your restaurant’s online reputation, and I have to be honest with you — the situation is getting worse every day. If you’re not working with a professional service —”

“Ms. Lane.”

She stopped breathing.

It wasn’t a question. He said her name the way someone says something they’ve been holding in their mouth for a long time, carefully, exactly. Not “Jess.” Ms. Lane. Her real name. The name on the LLC filings. The name nobody in this business ever said out loud.

“I — I’m sorry, who is —”

“We know what you’re doing.”

The words were not loud. They were not angry. That was the worst part. He spoke with the flat, unhurried calm of a man reading a weather report, and every syllable landed like a door closing.

Jess’s hand tightened around the burner phone until the plastic creaked. “I don’t know what you’re —”

“Three hundred reviews in one night. All from accounts that have never reviewed anything else. All posted between two and five in the morning. You stopped for a week when the reporter started asking questions, then you started again yesterday.” A pause. “We know.”

Her mouth went dry. Every number he named was right. Every number was private. The flood schedule was something only she and Danny knew — Danny had staggered the posting windows himself, personally, on encrypted drives in a basement apartment with blackout curtains.

“Who is this?” she whispered.

“Stop,” the man said. Simply. Gently. Like advice from a friend.

The line went dead.

Jess stared at the phone. Before she could think, her thumb hit redial — a stupid, instinctive move, the move of someone who’d just been hung up on and couldn’t stand it. The line rang once, then a recorded voice told her the number was no longer in service. A dead end. Of course it was. Whoever he was, he’d been ready for her.

She sat in the coffee shop booth, the burner phone pressed to her ear, listening to nothing. The espresso machine hissed. Somewhere behind her, someone laughed. She could not remember how to make her hand let go of the phone.

It wasn’t the threats that scared her. Threats she could handle — she dealt in threats; they were her currency. It was the calm. He hadn’t been bluffing. He hadn’t been guessing. He hadn’t even been particularly interested in her fear. He’d sounded like a man who had already finished a long piece of work and was now, as a courtesy, telling her it was done.

Slowly, she set the phone on the table. Her hand was shaking. She stared at it until the screen went dark.

How? How did anyone know the schedule? How did anyone know her name?

She thought about Rosa — sixty-one, flour on her apron, saying my family built this with clean hands. She thought about the granddaughter crying in the news photo. And now this voice, this stranger’s calm older voice, sitting in the middle of Rosa’s bakery like he belonged there, holding her entire operation in his palm like it was nothing.

Jess grabbed the phone, stood so fast her knee hit the table, and walked out of the coffee shop without her coffee. On the sidewalk, the Chicago wind cut through her coat. She pulled up her own phone and called Danny.

“He knows,” she said. “Somebody knows my name, Danny. Somebody knows everything.”

There was a long silence on the other end.

“Danny?”

“Jess,” he said slowly, “we need to talk about something I found this morning.”