Chapter 7 #3
He takes that in. I watch him process the shift, the difference between a door that's locked and a door that's locked until you bring the right key.
"Rainey has everything. She has photos, financials, and copies of all of Grant's evidence. We find her and get the evidence to Torres, and the FBI has a case."
"Where do we start looking for Rainey?"
"Flint doesn't know where she went. She called him once, about six weeks ago from a blocked number.
She said she was safe, said she was scared, said she'd come forward when someone could guarantee her safety.
" I pull out my notebook. "But we've got my journalism contacts.
A photographer who abruptly left the circuit and closed all her social media leaves a trail. We just have to find it."
He starts the truck. The engine catches and settles into its diesel rumble, and the ranch shrinks in the rearview mirror as we pull down the dirt road toward the highway.
"The handler at the Albuquerque pens," I say. "The new kid. I was going to approach him tomorrow."
"No."
"He's jumpy and scared. That's exactly the profile of someone who'll talk if you offer them a way out."
"He's jumpy and scared because the last handler who talked to someone is in the wind.
You walk up to that kid with your press badge and your questions, and one of two things happens.
He runs, and Merrick knows we're closer than he thinks.
Or he talks, and Merrick finds out he talked, and he ends up like Vic. "
"Or he gives us the drugging protocol and we have a direct witness to the operation."
"You're not going near him."
"That's not your decision."
"It is when your safety is the variable."
"My safety is always the variable. I walked onto this circuit knowing that. You don't get to use my safety to veto every lead that makes you uncomfortable."
He doesn't answer. His hands adjust on the wheel, and neither of us speaks for the next forty miles.
He's wrong about the handler. I'm almost sure of it.
The kid is ripe to turn. But Colt can't see past the math that says approaching him puts me in Merrick's crosshairs, and I can't reach the handler without Colt knowing, and the lead dies in the gap between what he's willing to risk and what I'm willing to risk.
It's the first time his protectiveness has cost us something concrete. It won't be the last.
Somewhere past Santa Fe, he turns the radio on.
Country station, low volume. He's never played music in this truck.
The gesture is so un-Colt that it takes me a second to read it — not an apology, not a concession.
Just a man who knows the silence has gone on long enough and doesn't have the words to end it any other way.
I let the music fill the cab and stop replaying the argument.
His hand drops from the gear shift to my thigh, a brief, firm squeeze, and then returns to the wheel. The gesture is so casual and so possessive that my breath catches before I can stop it.
"Flint recognized something," I say, because the truth of it is sitting behind my sternum like a splinter, and if I don't say something, it'll work itself deeper.
"Recognized what?"
"He said I look like Grant. Around the eyes."
Colt's hands go still on the wheel. Then they resume, the movement deliberate and controlled.
"What'd you say?"
"I told him I have one of those faces."
He looks at me and holds the look longer than is safe on a dirt road. Whatever he sees makes his nostrils flare.
"That cover of yours has a shelf life," he says. "You know that, right?"
“I know."
"When it breaks, and it's going to break, you better have a plan for what comes after."
"Do you always assume the worst?"
"I assume what experience tells me. And experience tells me that lies have expiration dates."
The words land harder than he probably intends, or maybe exactly as hard as he intends. I can't always tell with Colt whether he's being blunt or surgical.
Either way, the silence that follows is thick with everything we're not saying, and the space between us in the truck cab feels both too small and too large at the same time.
He turns back to the road. The afternoon sun pours through the windshield, and I watch the highway unspool ahead of us and feel the timer counting down on something I can't stop.
The truth is, I don't have a plan for what comes after.
I've been so focused on the investigation, on finding Grant's killers, that I haven't let myself think about the detonation that's coming when Colt finds out that the woman he's been sleeping with is the sister of the man whose death he can't forgive himself for.
The woman sitting in his passenger seat with his best friend's face hiding behind a fake last name.
I stare through the windshield and feel his hand ghost over my thigh again, lighter this time, almost questioning, and I cover it with my own before I can think better of it.
His fingers lace through mine and hold on. The grip is warm and steady and entirely too real for something built on a lie.