Avenger of Talon Mountain (Men of Talon Mountain #8)

Chapter 1

SELA

Palmer Regional smells like every hospital I've ever worked in.

Antiseptic layered over industrial cleaning solution, with undertones of cafeteria coffee and that particular staleness that comes from recycled air.

I recently transferred from Fairbanks, and I still catch myself expecting the layout to match my old ER.

I keep reaching for supply cabinets that aren't where I expect them to be or I turn down hallways that dead-end instead of leading me to where I expect.

Today's different, though. Today I'm getting a locker.

"Whose was it?" I ask, though something in Sandra's careful neutrality already tells me the answer.

Sandra's pen stills against her clipboard. "Emma Blackwater's. Nobody wanted it after..." She trails off, waves a hand like she's clearing smoke. "Superstitious nonsense, if you ask me. But you're new enough that you don't have the baggage."

Emma Blackwater was a murdered nurse. I'd heard the basics during orientation, some kind of trafficking investigation gone wrong, killer still at large, whole thing swept under federal jurisdiction and buried in classified paperwork.

Hospital staff don't talk about it much, but I've caught the careful silences and conversation shifts when her name comes up. Someone mentioned that she worked trauma too, that she'd been good at her job, and that she'd cared about things most people looked away from.

"I'm not superstitious," I say, which is true. I've held too many people together with my bare hands to believe in ghosts.

Sandra nods, satisfied. "It's unlocked. It's been sitting empty since..." She doesn't finish. "You might want to give it a once-over before you start using it."

She leaves me standing there with an empty locker that nobody's touched since someone cleaned it out. I wait until her footsteps fade down the hallway before I pull the door open. Right. Because this is exactly how I wanted to start my week.

Locker 47 opens with a metallic groan that sounds like it hasn't been used in a while.

Inside there's an empty shelf, hooks for scrubs, and a mirror on the door with a crack running through the lower left corner.

It's a standard issue hospital locker, identical to the forty-six others in this room except for the three feet of clearance and the sticky note that somebody forgot to remove.

I run my hand along the shelf, checking for debris.

Someone did a decent job cleaning it. No dust, no forgotten belongings, nothing except the faint smell of industrial cleaner that makes my eyes water.

That's good enough for me. I start transferring my things from the temporary locker I've been using: extra scrubs, protein bars, the emergency makeup kit I never actually use but keep anyway because optimism dies hard.

The shelf liner's peeling at the back corner.

I almost don't notice it. Just a small curl of contact paper lifting away from the metal, probably loosened by time and temperature fluctuations.

But it catches my eye while I'm arranging my things, and nurses have a pathological need to fix what's broken.

That comes with the territory. You spend enough time trying to hold human bodies together, you start applying the same logic to everything else.

I peel the liner back to smooth it down, and my fingernail catches on something that shouldn't be there.

Not just the adhesive backing, but something else, something deliberate.

I work the liner up further, peeling it away from the metal shelf inch by inch.

The contact paper releases with a soft tearing sound that seems too loud in the quiet staff room.

Something's taped underneath. It's small, rectangular, wrapped in clear packing tape that's yellowed at the edges.

My hands go still.

A USB drive. It looks like a standard 32GB stick, nothing fancy, the kind you can buy at any office supply store.

It's wrapped carefully in layer after layer of tape creating a waterproof seal, positioned precisely where the shelf liner would hide it from casual inspection.

Whoever did this went to a lot of trouble to keep it hidden.

Emma Blackwater hid this.

The certainty hits me before logic can catch up.

Her locker, her liner, the nurse who documented everything according to the whispered stories in the break room.

But why? Why go to this much trouble, why wrap it in layers of tape, why position it so carefully where nobody would look unless they were fixing something that bothered them?

Nurses are trained to find the why. Patient presents with chest pain—why? Vitals dropping—why? Behavioral changes—why? The symptom matters less than the cause, and the cause tells you what you're really dealing with.

Whatever made Emma hide this, it mattered enough to protect. Enough to risk. Enough that someone killed her for it, and the killer walked free because federal jurisdiction meant classified silence meant bureaucracy that moved slower than glaciers.

I should report this. There's hospital protocol, chain of custody, all the rules that exist for good reason.

But my fingers are already working the tape loose, peeling away the layers with the same methodical care I use when removing surgical dressings.

The adhesive's old enough that it comes away clean, leaving the drive intact in my palm.

Cool plastic, surprisingly light, warm now from my body heat.

Whatever she thought important enough to hide, to protect with her life: it fits in the palm of my hand.

I slip it into my scrub pocket and finish organizing my locker like nothing's changed.

Like I'm not carrying a dead woman's secrets.

Like my heart rate hasn't kicked up to the point where I'd tell a patient to sit down and take slow breaths.

I go through the motions. I hang scrubs, stack protein bars, close the locker door with the broken mirror, and spin the lock.

My brain processes what just happened while my hands stay busy. Emma hid this. She died. Whatever's on this drive has been sitting in this locker while federal investigators filed reports and closed cases and moved on to other priorities.

I have hours until my break. Hours to decide what to do with what I'm not supposed to have.

Turns out trauma nurses are good at waiting, too.

The break room is empty when I finally get there at two in the afternoon, that dead zone too late for lunch and too early for shift change.

The coffee maker gurgles in the corner, half a pot of something that looks like it's been sitting since morning.

I grab a cup anyway, more for the excuse to be here than because I want it, and boot up the staff computer tucked in the alcove behind the supply cabinet.

The computer takes forever to wake up because hospital IT budgets prioritize life-saving equipment over administrative convenience, which is fair but annoying. I plug in the USB drive while Windows struggles through its startup routine, trying to ignore the way my hands shake.

This is the first time in years my hands have shaken.

The first time since Fairbanks, since Joel told me I was too intense and he needed space and I realized I'd spent months pretending to be smaller than I was just to make a man comfortable.

The first time since I transferred south and swore I'd stop apologizing for being good at my job.

The files populate slowly. There are folders labeled with dates and alphanumeric codes that don't mean anything to me. I click one at random.

Encrypted.

I try another. It's the same thing. Some kind of password protection I don't recognize, files that won't open no matter what I click. Whoever set this up didn't want anyone getting in without the right credentials.

But metadata's still visible. I've read enough spy thrillers during night shifts to know that much—file properties, creation dates, basic information that encryption doesn't hide. I start scrolling through, piecing together what I can see:

Photos—dozens of them, judging by file sizes and extensions.

JPEG format, high resolution, timestamps spanning over a year.

Creation dates cluster around specific locations.

I click on one folder's properties and see GPS coordinates embedded in the metadata.

I copy them into Google Maps on my phone.

A roadhouse off the Parks Highway. I try another set of coordinates. Truck stop outside Wasilla. Another one pulls up a parking lot near a rest area on the Glenn Highway. The kind of places where business happens off the books.

Someone was watching these locations. Probably documenting who came and went.

Transaction records. CSV files, spreadsheets, the kind of data structure you use when you're tracking patterns. File names include references to dates and dollar amounts, all encrypted but organized with the methodical precision of someone building a case.

Text files that won't open without the password, but the naming convention suggests intercepted messages. Some are marked with codes that might be phone numbers or email addresses. Others are labeled with single words: CONFIRMATION. PAYMENT. DELIVERY.

Timeline documents. More spreadsheets, cross-referenced by date and location. I can see column headers in the file properties: DATE, LOCATION, VEHICLE, SUBJECTS, NOTES. Someone tracked movements over months, maybe years.

My coffee goes cold while I catalog what's here.

This isn't personal files. This isn't music or photos or the random digital debris people accumulate.

This is documentation. This is proof. This is the kind of thing someone builds when they're trying to prove what matters enough to hide, what's dangerous enough to encrypt, what's important enough to die for.