Chapter 12
PERIMETER MOTION — ALLEY EAST — OUTER ZONE.
Outer zone meant inside the alley but not yet at the building. The team had thirty feet of warning, give or take. Cara flew out of bed and crossed to the window, pulling the curtain away with two fingers, just far enough to allow her to see out.
Two men in dark jackets strode through the alley toward the back door. They moved with an ugly, confident grace. They’d done this before. Many times.
Her phone vibrated again. Gabe, from the living room.
Up. Weapon. Eyes on stair.
She typed back.
Eyes on alley. Two of them. Pros.
A floorboard creaked in the hall. Wade, up from the basement.
The bed behind her was empty. She hadn’t heard Skye leave. Where was she?
In the spare room, Owen slept on. Cara almost felt grateful on his behalf.
The team comm channel pinged on her phone.
Tom, from his house: I see them. Two. East alley. Moving toward back door. Cameras are tracking. Hold positions and let me watch.
She stepped back from the window an inch so her silhouette wouldn’t draw a glance.
The two men came down the alley, past the dumpster, then the back door of the bookstore, and finally past Diane’s soft-green paint on the alley side of the bakery, the color Diane had insisted on against Cara’s instinct because the alley is somebody’s view too.
They passed the edge of the streetlamp halo and entered the dimmer stretch closer to the bakery. Twenty feet from the back door, they stopped.
One of the men raised a hand to his ear in the small gesture of a person listening to something he hadn’t expected to hear. The other tilted his head a fraction and scanned. Looking for the cameras or the sensors, or whatever it was they had been told to watch for.
The first man pulled out a phone, put it to his ear for ten seconds, and hung up.
Tom: Signal traced to a relay in Portland. Too quick to get the endpoint in real time.
Wade: Either they made one of our cameras or they have a way of reading our alarm field.
Gabe slipped into her room, Skye a beat behind him with a kitchen knife held low against her thigh.
Cara's relief landed first — Skye was here, safe.
Then worry landed. She recognized the knife. It was the boning knife from her own block by the stove. Skye had been in Cara's kitchen at some point in the night, taking the time to grab a weapon.
And Skye had been up before the alarm pinged. Already prowling. Already with a knife.
She didn't get up because of the alert. She was already up.
A chill skittered up the back of Cara's neck.
"Front's clear," Skye said. "I'd have known if a second team came in that way."
Cara wanted to ask how long she’d been awake, but something stopped her.
"Eyes still on them?" Gabe asked her.
She nodded without looking away. The men in the alley conferred for thirty more seconds, then they headed back the way they had come.
Tom: Tracking. They're in the marina parking lot. Black SUV.
Cara let the curtain fall.
Pressed a hand to the small of her back for the length of a breath.
“Basement,” he said. “Now.”
She nodded.
Skye jerked her head toward the other bedroom. “We should let him sleep.”
“Agreed.” Cara eyed the knife.
“This is nice quality,” Skye said, holding up the blade. “I’ll put it back now.”
“That would be great.” Cara bit back the rest of her questions. For now.
Cara, Gabe, and Skye went down the back stair to the bakery kitchen. Cara keyed the basement door and pressed her thumb to the reader. The lock released.
The team gathered in the basement at four AM. Wade came in through the back kitchen door a beat behind them — he had gone out the moment the men cleared the camera frame, sweeping the alley.
He set his service weapon on the workbench, didn’t look at it, looked at Gabe. “Perimeter’s clean. No devices. No chalk. No tape. Nothing planted.”
Tom appeared on the center monitor of his rig, his sleep-creased face lit blue gray from the camera feed. Behind him, the corner of a kid’s poster on a closed bedroom door, and the soft yellow of a kitchen light. Piper, presumably, still asleep.
“Two men,” Tom confirmed. “Black SUV with Oregon plates. A rental. The same company the team flagged for the vehicle Wade clocked at the marina Wednesday morning.”
Wade grunted. “Sloppy tradecraft.”
Skye perched on the conference table in her sleep clothes, leggings and a long thermal, and tucked her bare feet under her. “Same job. Different shift. They came to confirm what they knew. They wanted to see if we’d react.”
Exactly what Cara would have done.
Gabe moved into the camera’s view. “You okay to stay on this from home, Tom?”
The other man scratched his head, thinking. “For sure. I’ll need to get Piper to school today. I don’t want her on the road alone after this.”
“No kidding.” Cara didn’t want the girl anywhere near this job at this point. “Let me know if you need any help.”
Owen appeared in the basement doorway in pajamas. Sneezing. Agent at his ankles. “Did I — sleep through something?”
Gabe shook his head. “Just business as usual around here, dude.”
From the main screen, Tom gestured at the man. “Go back to bed, Owen.”
One dark eyebrow rose into a thatch of tousled hair. Owen rolled his eyes, the movement made all the more dramatic by the glint of the monitors on his glasses. “Yeah, right.”
He sank down on a folding chair next to Tom’s monitor and watched the alley feed without another word.
Wade brought down a tray of coffee. The team drank it standing — Tom from his house, the rest of them from the basement. Cara couldn’t face the hot liquid yet, but she needed something to hold.
After fifteen minutes, the team scattered. Gabe and Wade went up to the kitchen to set a watch rotation through dawn. Owen went back to bed under protest, Agent trailing him. Tom stayed on the channel from his house.
Cara stayed in the basement.
Skye stayed too.
They sat at the conference table. For a long minute neither of them spoke.
“I brought this to your door,” Skye said. “All this trouble.”
“Maybe, but we’ve been hunting Neptune for a while now. They were coming whether you ran here or not.”
“No. I mean this. Tonight. And Owen. Maybe they’d come for you, but now he’s involved.”
Cara let her have that.
Skye picked a piece of lint off her leggings. “I didn’t mean to. For what it’s worth.”
Cara knew the feeling. She hadn’t meant to do a lot of things in her life. Growing in faith meant growing in grace, too.
She smiled at Skye. “It’s okay. You made it to the right place. This is what we do.”
Skye cocked her head, as if she didn’t quite understand. “Not Owen.”
“You don’t get to carry that. His uncle put Owen in play. Not you.”
Skye pursed her lips, staring up at the ceiling. “Maybe that won’t be a bad thing.”
“For Owen?”
Skye shrugged. Smallest shrug. “That, too. But I meant for us.”
Cara stared at the strange woman. She would not have guessed Skye had that kind of insight.
As if reading her thoughts, Skye smiled shyly. “I know, right?”
Cara didn’t know what to say to that, so she simply nodded.
"What's your favorite kind of bread?" Skye asked.
Cara opened her mouth. Closed it. Tried again. "I haven't decided yet."
Skye nodded as if she'd guessed the answer. "I miss my grandmother's pierogies."
"Polish?" Cara asked.
"The heart of Western Pennsylvania."
A piece of Skye that Cara now had. Not a name. Not an address. But a piece. More than she herself gave for sure.
"My mother made tamales every Christmas Eve," Cara said. "I’d die for one right now."
Skye took the offering the way she'd taken Owen's apple Friday morning — pocketed it without eating it. Kept it.
A longer silence.
"Ray used to make me eggs," Skye said.
"Were they good?"
"Not even close. He was a terrible cook. Burned them every time." She huffed, a small sound that was as close to a laugh as Cara had seen from her. “I mean, you’d think he’d get it right by accident once in a while.”
Cara grinned. “It would only be logical. The percentages have to go in your favor occasionally.”
"I don't know why I just told you that," Skye said.
"Because we both have to start somewhere."
Skye nodded slowly, as if digesting the words. “We should eat.”
“We should.” Cara rose, waving Skye toward the stairs. “No good comes of philosophizing on an empty stomach.”
Skye snorted. “No good comes of philosophizing at all.”