Chapter 14 #2
What had started as cautious surveillance was beginning to look like the connection we’d been hunting for—a direct line between a Summit Falls officer and the suspected syndicate backer.
The weight of it settled in the vehicle like a physical thing, pressing down on the night’s earlier patience and replacing it with something colder.
Reeves left his latest stop and headed south. Longer stretch this time. No turns, no stops, just the Civic moving through empty streets at a steady pace.
Then he pulled into a gas station. Parked at the edge of the lot, away from the pumps. Didn’t get out.
“He’s checking his mirrors,” Donovan said.
We drove past without slowing. I watched through the side mirror as Reeves sat motionless, his head turning slowly, scanning the lot and the road behind him.
Two blocks later, Donovan pulled over.
Thirty seconds passed. Reeves pulled out of the gas station and took two turns in quick succession, then parked on a dark residential street and killed his lights.
He’d made us. Same headlights in your rearview for two hours, even at a distance, tripped something in the trained brain.
“Decision time,” Donovan said. “Pull off and lose him or commit.”
If we pulled off, Reeves would know someone had been following him. He’d tighten his patterns, and our window would close. If we committed, we’d have to explain why two Citadel contractors were tailing an off-duty officer through Summit Falls at ten o’clock at night.
But we’d also be confronting a man we now believed was connected to the drug syndicate. A man who carried a weapon and had every reason to use it if he thought his operation was exposed.
“We commit,” I said.
Donovan pulled up behind the Civic and parked. We got out.
Reeves was already standing beside the driver’s door.
His right hand hovered near his waistband—not on the weapon in his holster, but close enough that the distance could disappear in a fraction of a second.
The nearest streetlight was half a block away, and in the wash of ambient dark, his face was all hard angles and shadow.
We stopped ten feet out. Hands visible. No sudden movements. Two men approaching an armed cop on a dark street, each side holding a piece of a calculation the other couldn’t see.
He recognized us. The hand near his waistband dropped an inch, but it didn’t leave the vicinity. The tension didn’t break, but it shifted, cycling through something I could track in the set of his shoulders: fear dissolving into confusion, confusion hardening into anger.
“You’ve been following me.” Not a question.
“Shane.” I kept my voice even. Donovan held a position slightly to my left. Not flanking. Just present.
“The hell is this?” His jaw was tight, and his feet had shifted into a wider stance—weight balanced, ready to move. A young cop’s training overriding whatever else he was feeling. “You’ve been on me all night. I spotted the same headlights an hour ago and figured I was paranoid. But here you are.”
“We noticed some unusual patterns. Wanted to make sure everything was okay.”
“Unusual patterns.” He repeated it back like I’d insulted him. “What does that even mean? You’re not my supervisor. You’re not cops.”
“We’re concerned. That’s all.”
“Concerned about what exactly?”
I glanced past him into the Civic’s back seat. Close enough now to see what I hadn’t been able to make out from two cars back. Insulated bags. The kind with handles, zippered tops. Several of them, some flat, some still holding their shape around whatever was inside.
“What are the bags, Shane?”
His hand finally came away from his waistband.
Not because the tension broke, but because what replaced the anger on his face required a different posture entirely.
A loosening around the eyes, a collapse in the set of his shoulders that looked less like guilt and more like the particular misery of a man watching his dignity walk out the door.
He looked at the bags. Looked at me. Looked at Donovan.
“It’s not what you think.”
“What do we think?”
He rubbed a hand over his face and leaned against the Civic. Crossed his arms, then uncrossed them, then shoved his hands into his jacket pockets. He couldn’t figure out what to do with his body because the shame had taken up all the available space.
“DashDrop,” he said.
Donovan straightened. “The delivery app?”
“The delivery app.” Reeves stared at the ground. “I’m a DashDrop driver. I deliver food a few nights a week.”
Every assumption we’d built over the past three hours—the suspicion, the Porter connection, the growing certainty that we’d found our dirty cop—landed in a heap at our feet.
A delivery app. The kid was delivering fucking food.
“The second phone,” I said.
“My delivery phone. Prepaid, bought it with cash so the notifications don’t pop up on my personal line at work. Last thing I need is Briggson seeing ‘Your DashDrop order is ready’ on my screen during a briefing.”
“Why did you need a second job?” Donovan asked. His voice had changed. The edge was gone.
Reeves let out a short, humorless laugh.
“Have you looked at the cost of living in this town? Ski resort corridor. My apartment is twice as much as most places in the state, and it’s the cheapest thing I could find.
I’ve been on the force eighteen months, bottom of the pay scale.
After taxes and rent and insurance and my car payment, I’ve got about enough left to eat if I don’t do anything crazy like buy gas. ”
He pulled his hands from his pockets and looked at us with the weary defiance of a man who’d made peace with his choices even if he hated them.
“I’m saving for a ring.” His voice was quieter now.
“My girlfriend’s been with me since college.
Three years. She moved here when I got the job.
She staffs the front desk at the resort, seasonal hours.
We’re making it work, but I want to propose, and I’m not doing it with a ring I can’t afford and I’m not putting it on a credit card. ”
He reached through the Civic’s open window and pulled one of the insulated bags from the back seat. Unzipped it. Inside were two sealed containers of food and a small receipt taped to the lid.
“Pad Thai and green curry. Going to an address on Birch Street.” He zipped it back up. “That’s my night. Every night I can manage it. Pick up, deliver, wait for the ping, do it again. And if I keep it up for three more months, I’ll have enough saved.”
“The houses you’ve been delivering to,” I said. “A lot of them trace back to Jonathan Porter’s rental properties.”
Reeves looked at me like I’d told him water was wet. “Porter owns half the rental housing in this town. You can’t deliver food on the south side without hitting his buildings. His tenants order dinner like everyone else.”
I had no idea if Reeves was privy to the suspicion that Porter was tied to the drug problem in town, so I didn’t say anything further.
Donovan leaned against the SUV and rubbed his jaw. I could feel the same thing in him that I felt in myself: the heavy, humbling weight of having been completely wrong about a kid whose only crime was working too hard for not enough money.
“Does the department know about the moonlighting?” I asked.
“No.” Reeves’s chin came up. “And I’d appreciate it if it stayed that way.”
I shook my head. “Shane, departments have policies about secondary employment. Most require disclosure. If someone finds out before you file the paperwork, that’s a problem you don’t need.”
“I know.” He looked away. “I’ve been meaning to. I just didn’t want to draw attention. Plus, I’m hoping not to have to do it for long.”
“Get the paperwork squared away,” Donovan said. “Sooner rather than later. Protect yourself.”
Reeves nodded. He looked exhausted, relieved, and still a little angry, all of it sitting on his face at once. He straightened off the Civic, picked up the delivery bag, and looked between us.
“We good?”
“We’re good,” I said. “And your secret’s safe with us. Be safe out there.”
A single tight nod. He got into his car and pulled away. His lights disappeared around the corner, and the street settled into the type of quiet that made you aware of your own breathing.
“Well,” Donovan said. “Best lead we’ve had, and the kid’s delivering Pad Thai.”
“We eliminated a suspect. That’s progress.”
“Is it?” He rubbed his eyes. “Because it feels a lot like standing still.”
I didn’t argue. He was right. The dirty cop was still out there, still wearing the badge, still feeding information to people who moved poison through a town full of families.
And we were two men standing on a dark street with nothing to show for the night except the knowledge that Shane Reeves loved his girlfriend enough to drive food around Summit Falls five nights a week so he could put a ring on her finger.
The Porter connection was coincidental for Reeves, but it underscored something that made the real investigation harder. Porter’s portfolio was so vast that any movement across the south side overlapped with his properties. The actual dirty cop could hide in that noise indefinitely.
We drove back across town without talking. Donovan dropped me at my house a little after two. I stood outside for a minute after he pulled away, every house around mine dark, the neighborhood silent.
Jolly was on his bed in the living room. He lifted his head when I came through the door, gave me a single tail thump that said noted, don’t care, sleeping, and dropped back down.
I locked up. Moved through the dark house on muscle memory. Set my keys on the counter. Stood at the kitchen window for no reason I could justify except that Kayla’s house was visible from there, and looking at it had become a habit I wasn’t interested in breaking.
Her windows were dark. The house was closed and quiet, and somewhere inside it, a six-year-old was asleep with a scuffed red ball on the nightstand beside him.
Hell, I didn’t even know if the kid had a nightstand, but I’d still bet a month’s salary he was keeping that ball secure to play with Jolly in the morning.
I pressed my hands flat against the counter. The stitches in my arm pulled, and I let them. The ache was grounding—a reminder that the work was real, that the stakes were real, that the people sleeping in the houses around me deserved better than a department they couldn’t fully trust.
But when I closed my eyes, it wasn’t the investigation I saw. It was Kayla’s hand closing around mine in the doorway. The way her fingers had tightened, unhesitating, like she’d already decided she wasn’t afraid of what it meant.
Be safe.
Two words. They’d ridden with me all night.
In a few hours, the sun would come up. William would be at the fence with Jolly’s ball, and Jolly would already be there waiting, his whole body aimed at the gap in the cedar.
The pinecones would fly. William’s laughter would carry over the fence, bright and wild and loud enough to hear from inside the house.
I turned off the kitchen light and went to bed.