Chapter 23
Jake had been watching the blue Honda Civic for forty minutes when Angela Costa finally appeared.
From his position two blocks away in a strip mall parking lot, Jake watched her check her mirrors three times. Amateur counter surveillance, but not bad for someone whose only training had come from three weeks of terror and a husband who used to move money for people who killed witnesses.
She pulled out. Jake gave her a four-car buffer and followed.
The drive took thirty-seven minutes. Angela drove exactly the speed limit, signaled every turn, stopped completely at every sign.
She took a route that meandered through residential neighborhoods before hitting the rural roads that led toward the fish camps and hunting cabins scattered through the swamp country east of Tampa.
A route designed to flush any tail, executed with the paranoid precision of someone who knew that one mistake would cost her husband his life.
Jake stayed far enough back that she wouldn't spot him, close enough that he wouldn't lose her if she turned.
He'd done this kind of follow more times than he could count, but never with stakes this personal.
Never with his pulse doing things it hadn't done since his first patrol, never with the emptiness that came from knowing Emily was sitting in her office, tracking time, wondering if he was coming back.
The property appeared exactly where his research had suggested it would.
A shell road leading off the state highway, posted signs warning about trespassing, a gate that stood open because nobody had been out here to close it since the owner died.
Angela turned without slowing, and Jake kept driving.
He circled back through a hunting access point three miles south, parked the Range Rover in a boat launch area where it would look like any other weekend fisherman's ride, and spent twenty minutes working his way through cypress and palmetto to a tree line that gave him a clear sight picture of the cabin.
Angela was already there. The Civic was parked beside the structure, and she was unloading the bags. Jake stood behind a fallen pine and raised his camera.
Through the lens, he watched her work. She didn't approach the cabin. Instead, she carried the cooler and bags to the edge of the tree line on the north side and set them down. Then she stepped back and called out to Ryan, he assumed.
She waited.
Forty-three minutes later, a man emerged from the woods.
Even through the telephoto lens, Jake recognized him immediately. Thinner than his DMV photo, hair longer, clothes that had been clean a week ago. But the face was unmistakable. Ryan Costa. Alive. Hiding in plain sight fifty yards from a cabin that had been searched by U.S. Marshals.
Jake took seventeen photos in the space of two minutes.
Costa collecting the supplies. Costa looking toward the cabin.
Costa glancing around with the furtive wariness of a man who'd been living in the woods for three weeks.
The clearest shot came when Costa turned back toward the tree line - profile, three-quarter view, and a straight-on image that would stand up in any courtroom.
Then Costa melted back into the woods, moving southeast, and Angela got in the Civic and drove away.
Jake stayed in position for another hour. Costa didn't reappear. No other vehicles approached. By 2:30 he was confident he'd seen everything there was to see.
Ryan Costa was hiding in a structure that didn't appear on any county survey.
A smokehouse, most likely, or an old hunting blind.
Built by the original property owner decades ago and forgotten by everyone except a grandfather who'd told stories to a grandson who'd grown up and become an accountant who moved money for criminals.
He worked his way back to the Range Rover the same route he'd used coming in. The photos on his camera were worth more than Emily's career and Costa's life combined.
He was loading his gear when it hit him.
Not the tactical analysis. Not the operational implications of finding Costa or the next steps needed to bring him in safely. A entirely different feeling.
Sitting in the front seat of the Range Rover with the engine running and sweat cooling on his forehead, Jake Walsh realized he didn't want to be alone anymore.
For twelve years, the work had been enough.
The mission, the team, the certainty that came from knowing exactly what you were trained for and being very good at it.
When operations ended, you went back to base.
When deployments ended, you went home to an apartment that was clean and yours.
When you left the unit, you found work that used the same skills and fed the same part of you that had always been satisfied by moving through the world with purpose.
But sitting here, with proof that would close Emily's case and photographs that would put Dominic Vance in federal prison for decades, all Jake wanted was to drive back to Tampa and tell her what he'd found.
Not because she needed to know for the case, though she did.
Not because Ray needed to be briefed, though he would be.
Because for the first time in his life, he wanted someone to stay.
He wanted to walk into a room at the end of the day and find Emily there. Not visiting. Not spending the night. There. In a space that belonged to both of them, with a dog that had claimed them both, in a life they'd built together one conversation at a time.
He wanted her to stay, and he wanted to be the kind of man someone like Emily Callahan would choose to stay with.
The realization sat in. He'd crossed a line he hadn't seen coming, and there was no retreat from this side of it.
He was in love with her completely, not just attracted or attached or drawn to her competence and warmth.
In love with her in a way that made every other way he'd felt about anyone else seem like practice.
Jake pulled out his phone. Typed three words.
Coming in. 20 minutes.
He hit send and pulled out of the boat launch, heading for Tampa and the woman who'd changed everything without trying.
The text came at 2:47 on a Thursday afternoon.
Emily was in her office with depositions spread across the desk in a pattern only she could follow, the photo frame glowing beside her laptop.
She'd stopped catching herself staring at it.
That wasn't true. She noticed every time the image changed, tracked the rotation like you track the second hand on a clock when you're waiting for news you aren't sure you want.
But she'd stopped letting herself linger, because lingering meant thinking about where he was and whether he was safe, and that line of thinking had been eating a hole through the center of her concentration for two days.
Her phone lit up on the desk.
Coming in. 20 minutes.
Three words. No context, no detail, no explanation for forty-eight hours of silence. Emily read them twice, and the relief that moved through her was so immediate and so total that she had to set both hands flat on the desk and hold them there until the shaking in her fingers stopped.
He was alive. He was coming back. Everything else was information she could get later.
She picked up the phone. Her thumbs moved before the prosecutor could intervene.
Parking garage. Don't make me come find you.
She sent it. Read it back. Decided she meant every syllable and didn't care what it revealed about what the last two days had cost her.
Then she stood, closed the laptop, and walked to the elevator with the intentional stride of a woman who had somewhere to be and God help anyone who slowed her down.
The parking garage was the same as it always was.
Concrete and motor oil and fluorescent lights that turned everyone the color of skim milk.
Emily leaned against a pillar near the elevator bank with her arms crossed and waited.
Her heart was doing a thing she refused to dignify by naming, because naming it meant admitting that Emily Callahan, who had cross-examined cartel lieutenants without a tremor in her voice, was standing in a parking garage with her pulse visible in her throat because a man had texted that he was twenty minutes away.
She heard the Range Rover before she saw it.
The specific note of that engine, the one he'd told her the Syria story about on their first day together in the field, back when she'd thought he was arrogant and interesting and a problem she didn't need.
The sound grew, tires on concrete, echoing off the low ceiling, and then the black nose of it came around the turn on the second level and she pushed off the pillar and started walking toward it without deciding to.
He parked three spaces from the elevator. The engine cut. The door opened.
Jake Walsh stepped out of the Range Rover looking like he'd slept in his clothes, which he probably had.
Jeans, a dark t-shirt she didn't recognize, the backwards hat that she'd once found insufferable and now associated with every version of him she'd fallen for.
Two days of stubble that was heavier than she'd ever seen on him.
His eyes found her immediately, as they always found her, as though she were the first coordinate his operating system locked onto when entering any space.
"Hey," he said.
Emily crossed the distance between them.
Not the five feet from her apartment parking garage, that closing of a gap between two people still negotiating the terms. This was fifteen feet of open concrete and she covered it without slowing down, without measuring her steps, without performing the controlled approach of a woman who'd spent two days pretending she wasn't terrified.