Decker
I’ve had eyes on her since the gate. Not close. Far back enough that if she’d checked her mirrors, I’d have read as any other truck working the switchbacks. She didn’t check. Not once, the whole way down the mountain.
I leave the truck out of sight once the road levels into town and cover the rest on foot. Slow. Unremarkable. A man with nowhere particular to be, same as half this town on a weekday.
The depot run is clean. In, out, forty minutes, nothing about it that reads wrong. If I were building today’s case off the depot alone, I wouldn’t have one.
It’s the hardware store that starts pulling at something. She’s in for two items and comes out wearing a face that’s working too hard at looking like nothing’s wrong. I lose her for a second on the sidewalk—that odd flicker she does—but I narrow my eyes and she comes back into focus.
She cuts around the side of the building instead of back toward the van.
I hang at the corner and watch her take the narrow lane behind the stores.
Gray asphalt, a dumpster, brick that nobody’s bothered painting in twenty years.
The lane opens into a gravel lot at the far end.
The kind of place a person picks when they want two minutes with somebody and nobody walking past to notice.
I let out a breath that tastes like disappointment.
So this is it.
I find a gap between the hardware store and the building next to it, narrow enough I have to turn sideways, and it gives me a view the length of the lane without putting me in it. She’s stopped halfway down, phone at her ear.
Her spine goes rigid. Whatever’s coming through that line isn’t the exchange I drove down here to catch her making. No packet changes hands. Nobody’s waiting to take anything from her. She’s just a woman standing very still in an empty lane, talking on a phone.
She lowers the phone. Doesn’t move for three full seconds.
Then it happens.
A man steps out at the far end, where the lane opens onto the lot.
I go still too. He’s not hurrying, because he’s already exactly where he means to be.
He was here before she was, waiting. Average build.
The kind of face you’d forget on a train, which is its own kind of tell.
Men that unremarkable don’t end up standing alone at the mouth of a dead lane by accident.
A second one closes the other end behind her, where the lane meets the street.
Neither has wings. Two men on foot, broad daylight, walking toward a woman with nobody around to ask questions. That’s a job somebody planned to be quiet.
“You’ll be coming with us.” The near one says it warm, easy.
Grace doesn’t answer. Her hands come up an inch from her sides.
“No sense in fighting it.” He steps in, unhurried. “Some of them run. Costs everybody more time than it’s worth.” A glance past her at his partner, then back. “You’re not going to make us do this the hard way, are you, Grace?”
Her voice comes out thin, but steadier than most would manage in her position. “Do what?”
“You knew this was coming the second that line went quiet.” He says it gently, and the gentleness is the threat.
“I don’t know what you mean. I have valuable information.”
I exhale slowly, because this is why I came here. The proof I was waiting to find. But there’s more to this story.
“Actually, you don’t.” He shakes his head. “You’re a loose thread. Nobody keeps a thread hanging once it stops being useful.”
“I’m not a thread.”
“No.” His tone doesn’t change at all. “You’re a liability. Different word. Same outcome.” His hand drifts toward the inside of his jacket, no urgency in it. “Nothing personal. You’d do the same, in our shoes.”
She’s in this to her neck, no doubt about it. But she’s not the leak I came here to catch. She’s the loose end they’re cutting before it can talk.
Grace’s whole body locks the way something locks when it’s run out of directions to run. I know that stillness. I’ve watched it in things I’ve cornered myself, and it’s never meant surrender. It means something’s about to happen. And it’s not going to be good.
“Wait.” Her voice cracks around it. “I can still—”
She doesn’t finish.
I’m already through the gap.
Four strides, and the near one doesn’t hear me until the fifth, which is one too late for him.
His hand’s still inside his jacket when I take his wrist and turn it a direction it isn’t built to go.
Something gives under my grip. He folds onto the gravel with a short strangled sound, and the gun he never got clear of his coat skids off somewhere I don’t waste time tracking.
A crack to the back of his head has his eyes rolling back.
Grace flinches at the sound of him going down, and flinches at me a half-second later. Like I’ve just become the bigger problem in the lane.
The second one’s already moving.
He’s better than the first. Gets a shoulder into me before I’ve finished turning, and a short hard punch lands under my ribs that costs me a breath I don’t have time to spend getting back.
I take it, plant my feet, and put my forearm across his jaw hard enough to feel the hinge of it shift.
He staggers and doesn’t drop, comes back in low for my legs, and I catch him coming up with a knee that folds him clean over it.
He goes down retching. I set a boot on the hand still working toward his coat and feel the small bones give under my weight.
A kick to his temple puts his lights out.
Two down. My ribs are already stiffening on the left. Worth it.
I turn for her.
She’s not where she was.
Goddammit.
She’s running. Away from all of it. Away from me most of all. Cutting for the gap on her side of the lane with terror written all over her.
“Grace.” I don’t chase her yet. “I’m here to help.”
That surprises me, because it’s not why I came.
She doesn’t stop. Doesn’t look back to check if it’s true.
That’s when I hear the engine.
Close. A vehicle taking the corner off Main too fast for a town this size. And under it, doors: one, two, three, maybe a fourth still climbing out.
Fuck.
There’s a version of this where I walk her calmly to the van, drive her up the mountain, hand Viktor a clean story with a bow on it.
This isn’t going to be that version.
“Grace, there’s more coming—”
She hits the gap at a dead run. She’s three strides in when a shape fills the far end, already reaching for her arm.
“Let go!” The scream tears out of her, the first loud sound that’s broken through this empty lane. She twists out from under his hand fast enough to tear free. But the same motion that gets her clear spins her hard into the side of the dumpster. Her head cracks the steel edge. Her legs give out.
She’s down before I reach her.
I put the new one headfirst into the brick wall and don’t wait to see if he gets up. I’m on my knees in the gravel with one hand under her jaw and the other finding the pulse at her throat, because that’s the only thing that matters to me right now.
It’s there. Fluttering. But there.
Blood’s starting above her ear, dark against how pale the rest of her has gone. Her whole body’s stopped fighting. Stopped fighting them, stopped fighting me, stopped fighting all of it.
More boots behind me. I don’t stop to look at them.
I get an arm under her knees, one under her shoulders, and stand.
She weighs next to nothing. That’s the thing that lands hardest as I lift her—how little there actually is to her, how easy it would’ve been for any one of these men to finish this if I’d been thirty seconds slower.
Her head falls against my neck. Her scent is right there, closer than it’s been all week, and the thing under my ribs that has always been restless suddenly goes still.
Not the readiness before a fight. The other thing. The thing that’s been circling, looking for somewhere to land.
It lands now. With her blood on my collar and men still coming up the lane behind us.
The man in me knows exactly what I’m carrying. Aurora’s suspect. The name I was sent to build a case against, an hour from closed.
Whatever’s under the man doesn’t care what she is on paper. It’s got one word, and it isn’t asking permission to keep it.
The bear says, Mine.
There’s an explosion from behind me. A round takes a chip out of the brick a foot from my head. I turn my shoulder into it and run, her weight cradled against my chest, gravel giving way to blacktop, the shouts behind us picking up into something closer to a hunt than a cleanup.
The truck’s four blocks out. Four blocks is a long way to carry a woman who won’t wake up, with men behind me who don’t much care if she does.
I don’t look back to count them.
I just run.