Page 64 of Sawyer
At 18:12 my satphone rings with Dean’s brand of weary triumph. “Vale’s phones are in a Faraday bag and he’s discovering he’s not half as clever as he thought,” he says. “He’s at the SPPD buildingwith counsel, which means we have him in a box. Kestrel’s P.O. box is a dead end with a live wire attached: a clerk saw a guy matching ‘Bane’ pick up mail twice this month. We’re sending that across.”
“And Rourke?”
“Riggs will tell you, but early word is that he’s got a front row seat to the man discovering that his apartment door can be opened with a master key and a slapped warrant. Officers on scene say he was mid-duffel and not half as brave without a mask and a van.”
I close my eyes.
Dean huffs out a, “You did good, Sawyer.”
“Not good enough,” I say. “Not yet.”
“Then keep going,” he says, and hangs up.
I text Riggs:Status?He sends a photo I will never show Cam—a blurred still of a bruise of a man face-down on rough carpet, cuffs on, the notch in his ear proof of identity. Another text follows:Phone seized. SIMs. Two throwaways. One still warm. We’ll get him to talk.
I let my head hit the wall again, close my eyes, and for the first time since the van door slammed in my imagination and then in the world, I let my breath out all the way. The sound it makes is a rough thing. Vanessa hears it and pretends she didn’t. One of the Orange operators looks away pointedly. The nurse smiles like a small moon.
Through the door I hear a rustle and the faintestclickof a bed control. I don’t move. I put my palm flat to the wood one more time and say nothing again.
A text glows on my screen.Cam:I need time.
My fingers hover. Then I type:Take it. I’m outside.
The dots appear. Disappear. Appear again.Don’t go far,comes back.
Never,I send.
I pocket the phone, sit back down in the ugly chair, and let the antiseptic and time do what they do while we do what we do better: hunt, build, close. Because this is the part of war nobody likes to put in recruitment videos—waiting while the net tightens, while the warrants are served, while the man with the ear nick sits in a room under fluorescent hell and tells us where he hid the rest of the rot.
And when it’s done—when Vale signs the last paper that names his sin, when Rourke points to the last locker—we’ll walk out of here. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But we’ll leave, and when we do, we won’t be going back to the world we had before.
We’ll build a new one. With doors that hold. With walls that don’t need to be this thick to make us feel safe. With a table permanently stained with blue and copper and a laugh in a kitchen where the coffee doesn’t taste like waiting.
But for now: I keep watch.
Forty-seven seconds.Flicker.
I’m here.
24
Camille
Hospitals measure time in drips and beeps. Back at the house, time is paint drying—slow at the edges, fast where you need it to last. Since they discharged me, I keep catching myself staring at ordinary things like they’re evidence: a bread knife lying too close to the counter’s edge, the way a shadow slices a doorway, the exact click of a lock I’ve heard a thousand times. My brain tags everythingthreat/not threat, the way Sawyer taught me, except now the sorting happens without permission.
Sawyer gives me space. He’s here, yet not, like a star you can find even when you don’t look at it directly. He’ll linger in the hall until my breath evens, then vanish to answer a call. He walks the perimeter at dusk with Riggs, murmuring into his throat mic, and at sunrise I sometimes catch him on the veranda, coffee cooling by his boot while he scans the drive. He’s a constant background hum that makes the rest of the sounds sort themselves out.
I’m not ready to let him back into the sphere where he was before. He knows it, accepts the distance like a man holding aweight at arm’s length because the person beneath it asked him to.
So I paint.
The first canvas back is ugly on purpose—charcoal slashed with sickly green, aluminum gray smeared with the yellow of streetlights I didn’t see but felt under my skin. I paint the ridges of a cargo van floor with the ribbed side of a palette knife, the way sound thudded through my jaw. Then, in the upper corner, almost invisible, I pull a single stroke of titanium white, thin as a breath. Sawyer’s line. The first time he drew it, I thought: protection disguised as motion. Now it looks like a promise I held with my teeth.
Vanessa comes by on day two with Tupperware of arroz con pollo and a bag full of brightly colored scrunchies “for hospital-hair days you escaped but still deserve to accessorize.” She perches on my studio stool and watches me paint until the urge to fill silence makes her burst.
“He should be in here,” she declares after exactly twelve minutes, meaning Sawyer.
“He is,” I say, gesturing to the line. “In a way.”
