Chapter 21
Ben
Two days later, I was back in the cold.
The weekend with Kayla had been the kind of time I didn’t have a category for.
Saturday morning, I’d walked back across the yard before William got home from Trish’s, and by that afternoon, I was at the fence gap watching Jolly and William throw pinecones while Kayla sketched on the deck and pretended she wasn’t watching me.
Sunday, she’d brought over coffee, and we’d sat on my front step in the early light, shoulders touching, saying almost nothing, and it had been enough.
Now it was Monday night, and the job had pulled me back to the version of myself that sat in dark vehicles and listened to other people’s secrets.
The building we were watching was located at the edge of town where the streetlights gave up and the imposing mountain’s shadow took over.
Single story, flat roof, no sign out front.
It could have been a machine shop or a storage unit or absolutely nothing, and nobody driving past would have cared enough to wonder.
Donovan’s SUV was parked fifty yards south, tucked behind a closed laundromat where the lot was empty and the angle gave us a clear view of the building’s only visible entrance.
Engine off. Windows cracked an inch. The night air came through sharp and cold, carrying the thin bite of early autumn at altitude.
We’d been here for forty minutes.
Jace’s voice came through the phone propped on the center console, low and precise. “Feed’s almost live. I’m piggybacking off the cellular signal and activating the mic remotely. Martinez’s phone is in his pocket or on a table—either way, it’ll pick up ambient audio in a fifteen-foot radius.”
“Does he have any idea his phone’s been compromised?” Donovan asked.
“The guy doesn’t even have a passcode on his lock screen. He’s using default settings on every app. It’s like breaking in to a house where someone left the front door open and put out a welcome mat.” Keys clattered in the background. “Almost there. Three, two… Okay, you should have audio now.”
A soft pop came through the phone’s speaker. Then static, layered and dense, the sound of a live mic picking up a room full of overlapping noise. Voices. The shuffle of cards. A sharp click, then another. Chips hitting a table surface.
“We’re on,” I said.
“Okay, good luck.” Jace hung up to let us work.
The audio settled into a rhythm. Six voices, maybe seven, talking over one another in the loose cadence of people who were comfortable and not in a hurry. Laughter. Someone calling a bet. The clink of glass against wood.
Then a voice I recognized. Thicker than it sounded at the station, slower around the consonants, but unmistakable. Martinez was telling someone he was all in, and the table erupted in mock outrage.
Donovan leaned back in his seat. “We got it. Underground poker game.”
“That’s what it sounds like.”
We listened. The bets weren’t terribly large—a hundred here, two hundred there. Someone accused someone else of bluffing. Martinez laughed and said he never bluffed, which got a round of responses that suggested everyone at that table knew otherwise.
Donovan leaned back in his seat. “So Martinez moved from online betting to an illegal card game.”
I stared at the building. A man with a gambling problem sitting at an underground poker table on his night off.
Illegal, technically. Something that could end a career if Internal Affairs got hold of it.
But it wasn’t corruption. It wasn’t feeding information to a syndicate moving Drift through Summit Falls.
It was a guy scratching an itch he’d supposedly kicked two years ago.
“We’re not here for this,” I said.
“No. We’re not.”
Jace’s online gambling data had told us the betting stopped. Watching Martinez at Brannigan’s tracking that basketball game with white knuckles at the bar the other night had told us it hadn’t—it had just moved somewhere digital couldn’t follow.
Local game, cash bets, no footprint. That explained the irregular deposits.
“Let’s sit on it,” Donovan said. “Keep listening.”
“Agreed. If something bigger comes through, we’ll know. If it doesn’t, I’m not interested in ruining a man’s career over a card game.”
Donovan nodded. “Same.”
We settled in. The audio kept rolling.
The game went on for another hour. Through the phone, the rhythm was steady and predictable. Bets placed, cards turned, chips sliding across a surface. Martinez’s laugh was getting louder by the half hour, his words starting to soften at the edges.
“Hit me again, would you? No—the Johnnie Walker. Yeah. Thanks, brother.”
The pour was audible. Not a shot glass. Something bigger. His third that we’d counted, probably not his third of the night.
My breath had started fogging in front of me. I tucked my hands under my arms. Donovan hadn’t moved, but I could see the tension in his shoulders—two hours in a dead-engine vehicle at seven thousand feet, and the cold had stopped being an inconvenience and started being a fact.
Someone at the table asked Martinez about work. Not pointed, not strategic. Just something to fill the space between hands.
“Don’t even get me started.” Martinez’s voice was looser now, the consonants going round.
“They changed the rotation last month, and nobody adjusted the overtime. I’m pulling more hours for the same check.
Brought it up to the shift commander, and he looked at me like I’d asked him to do long division. ”
Laughter around the table.
“And then there’s Briggson. Same rank as the rest of us, but acts like he’s running the place.
” Martinez cleared his throat and dropped his voice into a low, grinding rasp.
“‘That’s not protocol. You want to do it your way, go get your own department. Why couldn’t you hold on to that suspect?
Maybe if you didn’t use so much lotion when jerkin’ off, your hands would actually be able to hold a perp. ’”
The room lost it. Even through the phone’s compressed audio, the laughter was real. Someone slapped the table, a voice wheezed between breaths.
Martinez was laughing too, riding the wave. “Somebody brought donuts to the station last week—the good ones, from that bakery on Main—and Briggson stood there eating two of them while telling everybody the department had gone soft. He’s a good cop, honestly. He’s just a complete asshole about it.”
Donovan exhaled a short breath through his nose. “He’s not wrong.”
The laughter died down, and someone called for a new deal.
The conversation drifted. The older voice picked up a thread about a property deal that had fallen through, and two other guys argued about a Broncos trade for a few minutes.
Cards were dealt. Bets went around. Martinez was quiet through most of it, just a laugh here and there, the occasional side comment.
Then the talk circled back, and Martinez was in the spotlight again.
“So we got this guy, right? Honestly, I shouldn’t say his name, but he lives up on Birch.
So we know he’s the one hitting those storage units on the south side.
We know it. Got his prints on two of the locks, got him on camera at the gas station across the street twenty minutes before one of the break-ins.
” The excitement in his voice grew. “But the evidence hasn’t been processed yet because the lab is backed up six weeks, and in the meantime, this guy is still walking around town like he owns the place. ”
I straightened in my seat. These were details he shouldn’t be sharing.
One of the players asked a follow-up—casual, just finishing a story someone had started. Martinez answered without hesitation. Gave a street name. Mentioned surveillance that was ongoing. Dropped a detail about a witness statement that contradicted the suspect’s alibi.
Fuck. “Did he really just give up details about an ongoing investigation?”
“Sure as hell did.”
We waited. Martinez won a hand, and, if anything, the victory made him expansive. His voice went up a register, the volume of a man who was feeling good about himself and had stopped monitoring what came out of his mouth.
Each story earned him the table’s full attention. More questions, more laughs, more leaning in. And I could hear it happening—the shift from cop blowing off steam to cop holding court. Martinez had found his audience, and the whiskey had filed down whatever filter he’d walked in with.
He wasn’t calculating what he gave away. He was chasing the feeling of being the most interesting person in the room, and every detail he dropped was the price of admission.
“He’s not just loose,” I said. “He’s a security risk. In real time.”
Donovan had gone still beside me. His breath came out in a thin cloud. “And nobody at that table has any reason to stop him.”
And then he crossed a line that couldn’t be uncrossed.
“They’ve got somebody on the inside over in Alamosa,” Martinez said. His consonants were softening further, words bleeding into each other. “County’s had a CI feeding them information on one of the operations out near the ridge. Some business owner, I think. Been at it for months.”
“No shit?” someone asked. “Like a real informant?”
“I probably shouldn’t even know about it, but the sheriff’s guys were at the station last week and I was right there when they were briefing our chief.
” Pride in his voice now, the satisfaction of a man who’d been in the right place at the right time and wanted credit for it.
“They’re being real careful with this one.
Deep cover, from what I gathered. Months, maybe longer. ”
“Damn. What kind of business is the guy running?” Everybody at the table was obviously interested. Why wouldn’t they be? This was exciting stuff.
And could also get the county confidential informant hurt or killed if it happened to get in the wrong hands.