14. Sniper
fourteen
Sniper
Bruiser didn’t knock; he never knocked. He shouldered into my office with a posture that said he’d been arguing with himself for the last ten paces down the hall and finally lost. He held a fat stack of printouts in one hand, three fingers curled around the top edge so tight the pages bent to a curl.
The other hand pinched a pencil at the very end, the way a nervous smoker holds their last cigarette.
He dumped the stack onto the center of my folding table with a deliberate thud. I didn’t look up right away, because I’d seen the look on his face—the brittle confidence of a man who knew he’d found the answer but was about to wish he hadn’t.
My office wasn’t much. Eight feet by twelve, windowless, cinder block walls painted the gray of discount detergent, floor a slab with so many black marker lines it looked like a dry-erase board.
A single overhead fluorescent buzzed with a dying ballast, flickering at a rate you could only clock if you were in here for hours at a time.
The table was a veteran of three clubhouses, and at least six bar fights; the left corner was chewed through, and the steel legs wobbled if you didn’t brace them with a foot.
Behind it, a corkboard jammed with a year’s worth of data: faces, receipts, gas station time stamps, and enough thread and pushpins to knit a murder blanket.
I kept my eyes on the map. “Talk.”
Bruiser’s breath shivered once, then he started in.
“Ran the list again. Cross-referenced every woman reported missing in Mohave in the last two years against our own member files. I used the actual legal names this time, not just what they put down on Facebook or at the DMV.” His voice was higher than usual; he’d been at this for hours, probably wired on Four Loko and the self-loathing it inspired.
I reached for the stack. He didn’t let go right away, so I pulled harder.
Pages fanned out, slick with static. First was a spreadsheet, neat columns, black text, four highlighted cells.
Three were marked out with a hard X in the margin.
The fourth was circled, not in highlighter, but in red pen—a fat, bloody loop that said this was the whole fucking point.
I followed the line across. Name: Ashley Reeves. Age: twenty-seven. Last seen: Walgreens parking lot, Kingman, fourteen months ago.
I kept reading. Next page: Kingman PD missing persons poster, faded photo in the upper corner, a DMV headshot where she tried and failed to smile.
Under that, two news clips—one from the local paper, one from a blog nobody read.
Both said the same thing: “Last seen leaving work, possible domestic, no evidence of abduction.” The third article was a dead link.
I made a mental note to run it down later.
The next page was a cold case file, stamped INACTIVE in a crooked blue rectangle.
I flipped through. Police summary, last confirmed sighting, the perfunctory note that “family member declined to comment further.” The printout ended on a single line: “No additional leads. Case closed pending further evidence.”
I set the stack down and flattened my palms on either side of it. “Reeves,” I said. “That’s T-Bone’s sister.”
Bruiser nodded, then reached for a legal pad and flipped it to a flagged page. “Yeah. I triple-checked the club rosters. Her legal last name, his birth certificate, the whole works. T-Bone has a sister—had, I guess. She went missing last April. Club never talked about it. The cops didn’t care.”
I let the information run through my head, cold and slow. I could feel the ache of it settling into my molars. “Why bring it to me now?”
He dropped the pencil on the table and let it roll.
“Because it matches. Pattern, timeline, everything. I went through all the logs from the Kingman phone bank—there’s a six-month window where every single disappearance in the county lines up with a spike in out-of-town vans coming through the 93 corridor.
All female, all mid-twenties to early thirties, all vanished without a trace. No ransom, no follow-up, no bodies.”
He tapped the red circle on the spreadsheet. “This one’s ours. Or as close to it as it gets.”
I thumbed the edge of the printout, letting the pages flick by, one at a time, a rhythm to match the pulse in my ears. “What’s the real play, Bruiser? You want me to tell T-Bone, or you want me to keep it quiet?”
He didn’t answer right away. “He’s going to find out. You know that. We either get in front of it, or we wait until it blows up and takes half the crew with it.”
I lifted the top page and looked again at her face.
I set the page down. “How sure are you?”
“Hundred percent. It’s her. The last confirmed sighting was at a pharmacy ten blocks from the last cell phone ping. She had her keys, her wallet, her car. It was parked the next morning three miles away, doors unlocked, nothing stolen.”
He waited, watching for the reaction.
I didn’t give him one. I took the legal pad and drew a line under her name, then set the pen down with care.
I said, “Get T-Bone. Quietly.”
Bruiser’s mouth worked like he wanted to say more, but he didn’t. He gathered up the rest of the pages, left the top one where I’d set it, and walked out, not bothering to close the door behind him.
I sat there, eyes on the photo, and let the silence press in. The buzzing from the fluorescent seemed to pick up, gnawing at the base of my skull.
***
The door frame filled up with T-Bone before I even saw his face.
He was six-four, three hundred pounds on a slow day, and moved with the unconscious grace of a man who’d spent half his life making sure nobody ever tried to put him on his back.
He ducked the lintel and stepped in, eyes scanning the room, then locking onto the space right behind my head.
I knew that trick—never look at a man’s eyes until you’re ready to see what’s there.
Bruiser brought up the rear, glancing from me to the spreadsheet, then to T-Bone’s hands, as if waiting for one of us to start breaking furniture. I gave him a look that said “leave,” and he did, pulling the door shut with a care that didn’t match the noise in his fingers.
T-Bone waited, arms loose at his sides. The patch on his vest was old, the thread faded almost to yellow, but the lines of it were crisp. Eleven years in, and he hadn’t replaced it once. He let the silence stretch, a muscle flexed and held past the point of comfort.
I didn’t waste time. “I’ve got news.”
He nodded, once. “Yeah?”
I laid the printout flat on the table, sliding it so the name and photo were directly in front of him. “Missing persons. Bruiser cross-referenced every case in Mohave with club ties. Your sister’s on the list.”
The effect was chemical: all at once and everywhere.
His jaw locked so tight the veins stood up on the side of his neck.
He didn’t blink. He put one hand—open, gentle—on the edge of the table, and the chipped laminate creaked under the weight.
It wasn’t aggression, just a man bracing for impact.
His eyes flicked once, taking in the photo, then the INACTIVE stamp, then my face. He didn’t say a word.
“She went missing April last year,” I said. “Case went cold in three months. No follow-up, no witnesses, no body. Cops closed it out.”
He breathed—inhale through the nose, exhale slow. His other hand found the table, thumb and forefinger curling under the edge like he was about to tear it loose. He stared at the paper, but I could tell he wasn’t seeing it anymore.
I waited. Sometimes the job was just being a wall and letting the other guy punch until he got tired.
Finally, he spoke. “You think it’s the same crew?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I do.”
He nodded again, slower. The breath this time caught in his throat, a little whistle. I watched his shoulders settle, then square up. It was like watching a safe lock turn, all the tumblers clicking into place one at a time.
“She might still be alive,” I said. “If she is, it’s because she’s like Jasmine. Tough. Mean as hell. Harder to break than most.”
He looked at me then, and I could see the wet edge under his left eye. He blinked it away, and it was gone.
I didn’t soften. “This changes nothing. You get me?”
He gripped the table, knuckles gone white, then let go. He stood up straighter, rolled his shoulders, and set his eyes level with mine.
“What do you need me to do?” His voice was sandpaper, but steady.
“Keep riding. Keep your ears open. If anything feels off, you tell me, not Bruiser, not Buck, not the prospects. Me.”
He nodded. “When we find her—”
“We will,” I said. “And we’re bringing all of them home. You get that?”
He didn’t answer for a beat, then: “Yeah. I get it.”
He turned, every move deliberate, and walked to the door. His hand hovered on the knob for a second, then he pulled it open and left. The door clicked behind him—a soft, final sound.
I sat back in my chair and watched the crack in the paint over the door, trying to measure how many years it would take to break open and bring the whole fucking wall down.
Not as many as you’d think.
***
When I got back to the war room, Bruiser was already hunched over the laptop, typing with the kind of velocity that meant he’d found a new thread and was afraid he’d lose it if he let up for even a second.
The blue glow from the screen made the bones in his hands look like something dug up from a crime scene.
I closed the office door behind me. The printer on the side table was already spooling up, groaning and snapping as it ground out another page.
He said, “We’re down to four.”
I didn’t ask “Four what.” The partial from the blue van—the only good lead we had—had come back with four possible matches in the entire county.
He slid the first one across: a Dodge Ram registered to a business in Bullhead City.
“Alibi,” he said. “Owner’s an electrician, didn’t leave the city limits the whole week. ”
Next up: a beat-to-shit Econoline with a Salvation Army logo. “Retired. Used as a donation pickup. Not in service the day of.”
I nodded.
The third was a personal vehicle, a seventy-three-year-old woman. “It’s been in her driveway for six weeks. Neighbor verified.”
He didn’t bother with the fourth, just pointed at the screen. “This is it. 2019 Ford Transit. Dark blue, high roof, no windows. Registered to Ridgeline Asset Holdings—P.O. box out of Flagstaff.”
He clicked through a few windows. “They’re a shell. No phone, no web presence, nothing. I ran the LLC paperwork—it’s a law firm in Phoenix, but they file for a hundred companies a year, all of them single-asset property holders.”
He jabbed at a new page as it loaded. “Ridgeline owns exactly one property in Mohave County. Parcel number crosswalks to a chunk of land in the Cerbat Mountains. Twelve miles north. Last property tax paid six weeks ago.”
He hit print, and the machine spat out a county records page, lines of black ink so fresh it glistened in the light. He tore it off and handed it over.
I read the lines, every one of them humming like live wire. Address: “Unincorporated. Registered as ‘storage facility,’ permit issued two years ago.” Owner: “Ridgeline Asset Holdings, c/o legal agent.” No phone, no other business, no mail except two property tax notices in the last year.
I dropped the printout onto the map. The topo was already out, the whole region ringed in red marker, with half a dozen points already X’d. I ran my finger along the highway, counted off the twelve miles, then traced the access road up the canyon. There was only one.
Bruiser watched, silent.
I tapped the spot, slow and hard. “There.”
He nodded, just once. “You want to check it yourself, or bring the whole crew?”
“I’ll go,” I said. “If it’s the wrong play, then it’s on me.”
He got it. He gathered the printouts and clipped them together, then started running through the checklist—fuel, comms, route planning. He knew the drill.
I stayed by the map, fingertip pressed into the paper, thinking of Jasmine, thinking of the look on T-Bone’s face, thinking of all the girls who never got a last chance. My skin itched with the sense that every second wasted was another step closer to the worst-case scenario.
Bruiser’s voice cut in, soft. “You think she’s alive?”
I didn’t look up. “If she is, she’s fighting.”
He let that hang, then nodded, turned back to the task.
I looked at the map, at the tiny, circled spot in the endless desert. I thought of Jasmine. I thought of Ashley Reeves.
And I knew, down in the bone, that we had one shot at this. That all the rage and hope in the world wouldn’t mean shit if we didn’t get it right, the first time.
I picked up the marker, drew a black ring around the spot. I pressed the tip until it bled through the paper and stained the desk.
“There she is,” I said.
And I got to work.