Page 63 of Sawyer
“Riggs—do not hit 4B without me,” I say into the line, even as I know I can’t go. The words taste like broken teeth.
“I’ll put eyes and wait for the paper,” he promises. “Rae’ll give me a door cam in five. If he moves, I shadow.”
“Good,” I say. “If he spooks, don’t escalate. I want him alive to point at Vale.”
“You also want his teeth,” Riggs says mildly.
“I’ll settle for his phone,” I lie, because we both know I want both.
The fourth light flickers. Forty-seven seconds. Somewhere down the hall, a code page barks and slams through a different set of doors; an emergency we aren’t in. For once.
Gregory appears at the far end of the corridor like a ghost who got lost. He moves with the hesitance of a man who knows he isn’t welcome and wants to be punished for it. Hartley slots into place at his shoulder before I have to stand. He’s good at his job. I don’t move, except to tighten my hand into a fist on my knee.
Gregory stops a polite distance away. His eyes are a color softer than Cam’s but I can see the gene. “Is she?—?”
“Resting,” I say.
He nods as if he deserved a different answer. He opens his mouth, shuts it again, opens it. “I’m going to turn over my phone to Detective Hartley. Everything. I’ve already called my general counsel,” he says, deflated. “And I scheduled a press conference for tomorrow to apologize to the community?—”
“Cancel it,” I cut in, low, because the thought of Cam’s pain being chewed by cameras makes bile flood my mouth. “If you stand ata podium right now, you turn a target into a spectacle. Sit with law enforcement. Sit with your shame. Leave the podium until Cam isn’t the headline.”
He flinches. “I thought transparency?—”
“Transparency is telling your daughter with your own mouth before she hears it from a man she’s paid to trust,” I say, and even I hear the acid. “You missed that window. Don’t miss this one.”
Hartley steers him away again. I exhale and realize my shoulders are somewhere around my ears. I drop them one notch at a time.
The nurse returns with a fresh bag of saline. She glances at me, at the way my hands want to punch and pray simultaneously. “She asked me to tell you something,” she says.
I straighten before I can stop myself. “Is she…?”
“She’s not ready to see you.” The nurse smiles gently when my face betrays more than I want it to. “But she said to tell you she heard you at the door.”
“What did I say?” I ask, wrong-footed.
“Nothing,” the nurse says. “That’s the point.”
I swallow. It lands like glass and I don’t care.
My phone vibrates in a staccato I’ve set aside for one thing only: incomingGOtexts from Riggs. I step to the window to read.
RIGGS: Eyes on 4B. “Bane” present—ball cap, ear nick, same build. He’s packing a duffel. Rae got warrants hot from Dean’s guy. SPPD is two out. You sure you don’t want to play?
I look at Cam’s doorway and think of what she needs, not what I want.
ME: Bring him breathing.
RIGGS: Always.
I text Rae separately: Don’t let SPPD burn the door. He’ll badge at a window if they spook him. Quiet, surgical.
She thumbs a and adds:Hatcher just sent me “Bane’s” preferred coffee—there’s a cart on the corner. I’m having the vendor call building security about a “spill” in the lobby to clear civilians. Don’t say I never give you gifts.
I almost smile. Almost.
The hall quiets in a way that isn’t silence—it’s the absence of footsteps that don’t matter. Two Orange operators I posted at either end of the corridor trade a look with me that sayswe’ve got this slice of earth.A phlebotomist slips past, humming something that sounds like an old Motown track under her breath. The fourth light doesn’t flicker on time. I notice and then it flickers anyway. Forty-eight seconds. Nothing is perfect. We move anyway.
Vanessa returns with enough coffee for a platoon and sets one beside my chair without comment. “Black, no sugar,” she says. She doesn’t ask how I like it; somehow she knows. Or she’s watched me long enough to guess. “Tell her I’m here,” she says again. Then she curls in a seat down the hall, legs folded, phone face-down, for once silent.
