Page 57 of Sawyer
Riggs cuffs the broken-wrist goon, who is moaning through a mask. “Rourke?” he asks.
I lift the mask. The face is a stranger. A hired nothing. “Where is he?” I snarl into the man’s sweaty fear. “Where’s Rourke?”
“No names, man,” he pants. “We just—just a pickup.”
“Who hired you? Vale?” My grip tightens.
He can’t answer with the air cut off. I ease enough to let words through.
“We get cash, that’s it. GPS pings; we drive. Warehouse number comes in an hour before. That’s all. Please—my hand?—”
“Good,” I say, softly. “It hurts.”
Rae stalks over, eyes predator-sharp. “We’ll find your boss,” she says. “You’ll sing louder later.”
Sirens begin to wail in the distance—Hartley, or CHP, or both—drawn by the flash of the munition and the drone’s ping. I gather Cam, lift her, and her legs wrap around my waist like they’re remembering something we promised last night.
“Home,” she whispers.
“Home,” I echo, and my voice breaks.
I carry her into the sun.
We’ll figure the rest—the partner who played with matches, the fixer who wants fire, the father who finally told the truth. I’llhand the folder to Dean, and he’ll peel Vale like fruit. Hartley will build a case. Rourke will get his day with my hands.
But right now, in the parking lot of a storage facility that looks like a thousand others, I hold the woman I almost lost and let the fact that she’s breathing into my neck turn me human again.
“Rae,” I say, already thinking seven moves ahead even as I feel Cam’s pulse returning to calm under my thumb, “call Dean. Tell him we’ve got Cam and two live. Tell him the name Vale is coming off my lips with receipts.”
“Copy,” she says, voice fierce with satisfaction. “And Sawyer?”
“Yeah.”
“Good hunt.”
I kiss the top of Cam’s head and start walking us toward the SUV. Behind us, Riggs reads the skinny perp his rights, and the drone hums like a satisfied hornet. Ahead: answers. A storm. And after that—if we survive the truth—blue paint, a studio floor, and a life I will put my body between and anything that tries to break it.
22
Camille
Hospitals always smell like lemon-bleach and boiled linens, like somebody tried to scrub life into something that forgot how to breathe. The ceiling over my bed hums with fluorescent daylight even though it’s well past noon. A blood-pressure cuff kisses my arm every six minutes as if it can squeeze fear out of the arteries it helped flood.
I’m wearing a gown the color of regret and a warm blanket that never warms all the way. Tape rash blooms along my cheekbone where silver adhesive ripped my skin. The nurse with honey-brown braids keeps offering me ice chips. I take them because they’re the only thing that doesn’t taste like duct tape and panic.
Sawyer is a silhouette in a vinyl chair, boots planted, shoulders squared, headset in, phone face-down for once. He’s said maybe twenty words to me since we got here—most of them not about me: to the triage nurse (“mild head trauma, tape abrasion, possible sprain left wrist”), to Detective Hartley (“we’ll do the statement once scans clear”), to Dean through that deceptivelyordinary phone (“we have the file; sending the whole rotten tree”). The rest he says with hands—the ones that found me in a concrete room—and eyes that won’t stay still, bouncing from door to clock to drip line to me, back to the door.
“Your CT looks clear,” the physician says, flipping a tablet at my bedside. He’s young, probably my age, with a ring-shaped divot on his ring finger where a glove bit down during residency. “Concussion symptoms minimal. Tape burn we can treat. You’ll be sore.” His eyes lift to Sawyer. “No evidence of… anything else.”
Relief punches my diaphragm from the inside. I nod. “Can I go home?”
“We’d like to observe you for a few hours,” he says. “Detective Hartley’s waiting to take a statement if you feel up to it.”
“Later,” Sawyer answers for me, voice sanded down to control. He stands, shakes the doctor’s hand. “Thanks, Doc.”
The doctor exits. The nurse helps me peel gauze from my cheek. Tears threaten and I grip the rails hard enough to squeak the plastic because I refuse to cry over adhesive. Crying is for actual things, like the moment the van door closed and the world shrank to stink and dark and the sound of my heart learning how to be a hammer.
“You should try to rest,” the nurse murmurs, patting my shoulder. She leaves us alone with the ceiling hum.
