Chapter 6
Kenzi
I’ve run out of things to say somewhere between leaving the last gas station and arriving at this one. That should alarm me more than it does or maybe it alarms me exactly the right amount, and I just don't have the bandwidth left to react to the alarm.
Either way, we sit in the parking lot of a Sheetz that smells like diesel, old coffee, and something fried that has probably been under a heat lamp since the Bush administration.
The engine ticks as it cools, and for the first time since I climbed into this vehicle nine hours and one ambush ago, I have absolutely nothing to say.
Nothing.
I always have something to say.
It's, as previously established, my one reliable personality trait. The thing I can count on showing up even when nothing else does. I can always come up with a joke or at the very least, a completely unnecessary fact about malware or cameras or forensic decomposition. I have many years’ worth of stories about Dexter, which is my go-to verbal life raft I throw into every silence before it can get uncomfortable.
There is no life raft for this situation.
Reyes is dead. I barely know the man. I only met him briefly when we’d arrived at the county office to retrieve the body.
We’d barely exchanged introductions. That's the part that bothers me most, he was a stranger, I shouldn't feel this much pain at his loss.
I knew his name. I knew what he looked like. I knew the way he checked his weapon before we rolled out and the way his voice sounded over the radio when things got bad. That's it.
And then he's gone.
My brain understands that he’s a stranger, but apparently my heart doesn't care. Maybe it’s because I can tell he meant a lot to Dozer. I’m unsure what to do in this situation, so I stare at my hands. They're resting in my lap now, palms down, but I can still see the faint tremor in my fingers.
I hate that. Not because I'm ashamed of being scared.
I'm not. Fear is a biological response. It's useful. It's information. It tells the body to prepare for something unpleasant and potentially fatal. It’s fully scientific. What I hate is that my body is still reacting when my brain has already decided the immediate danger is over. My fingers shouldn’t still be shaking at all.
So I do what I always do when something gets too close, I analyze it.
Normal physiological response to acute stress.
Elevated adrenaline.
Fine motor tremor.
Respiration, still slightly elevated.
Should resolve.
It should have resolved in eleven to twenty minutes, depending on the individual. I know the studies; I've read the studies. I've written reports based on those studies. Knowing the science never helps as much as people think it should. It just gives the fear vocabulary.
I flex my fingers. Once, twice and nothing.
"Stop." Dozer's voice is quiet.
I look at him. "Stop what?"
"Watching your hands."
Damn it. He noticed. "I wasn't."
"You were."
"I'm a forensic specialist. Observing things is literally my job."
"You're observing yourself."
I open my mouth to rebut, but then close it, because he's right. I hate when people are right and I’m wrong. Especially when they're right without being smug about it.
I turn toward the window. A family is loading into an SUV. A little girl is wearing sparkly pink headphones and carrying a stuffed dinosaur by one leg. Her mother says something to her, and the girl laughs.
The sound hits me harder than the gunfire did. Not because it's sad, but because it's normal. There are people buying snacks, the couple at the pump next to us are complaining about gas prices. A teenager is begging his mother to buy him an energy drink.
None of these people have any idea that six miles back, a man died on a county road because somebody knew exactly where we would be.
The world hasn't changed for them. Not like it’s changed for Dozer, Hunter and Reyes’ family. And, it has for me. I swallow hard and bite back the unexpected tears that are stinging behind my eyes. I won’t cry. Absolutely not.
Dozer doesn't try to fix any of it. He doesn't tell me to breathe or offer me some inspirational quote he probably saw on a military coffee mug. He just sits there, hands resting on the steering wheel even though the engine is off.
Letting me exist in the silence until I’m ready to move. I realize that's probably the strangest thing about him. He doesn't seem afraid of silence. Maybe because he knows silence doesn’t always have to be empty.
"You're not going to say anything comforting," I say eventually. My voice comes out smaller than I intend.
"No."
I look at him. "Most people would try."
"Haven’t you discovered by now that I'm not most people?"
I look back toward the windshield. "You're really not."
He turns his head and looks at me. Not the assessing look he pinned me with in the briefing room. This time, he just looks like he's checking something and doesn't need words to do it.
"You're allowed to not be okay," he says. "For a minute. Then we move."
That's it. Six words about not being okay and four more about moving. And somehow it does more for the tight, wrong feeling in my chest than any of the careful, rehearsed Are you doing all right? conversations I've had since my brother died.
Those conversations had always felt like people standing outside a locked door, knocking over and over because they were uncomfortable with the fact that nobody was answering.
They wanted me to open it and tell them exactly what I needed, even when I didn’t know what it was myself. They wanted me to make my grief easier for them somehow. Take some of the burden and heaviness of it off their shoulders, by removing the awkwardness.
Dozer doesn't ask me to do any of that, instead he gives me a minute and simply sits with me while I process. Then, he gives me a job. It shouldn't feel like kindness, but somehow it does.
"He had a family?” I ask. The words come out before I can stop them. "Reyes. I don't know if he did. I don't know anything about him except that he died because we were on a road somebody knew we'd be on." My throat tightens. "And I keep thinking, if I'd caught the second position faster—"
"You caught it in time to matter." His voice is flat but not exactly comforting. "You didn't miss it."
"I could've seen it sooner."
"You didn't."
"But—"
"You caught it." He looks directly at me. "That's not nothing."
I look away. "Feels like too little, too late. Feels like nothing."
"It's not nothing." The words settle between us.
I stare at him for a long moment. This man apparently thinks two sentences constitute a full emotional conversation, and maybe with anyone else I'd be annoyed. But I don't need him to say more.
I don't need him to make it better by telling me Reyes died doing something heroic. Promises that the people responsible will pay aren’t going to fix it, either.
I know they will. I know Hunter will make sure of that.
And telling me everything is going to be okay would be a lie, and I don’t respect people who lie to me.
I just need someone who understands that sometimes not okay is the most honest answer available.
"Okay," I say. “It’s not nothing.” And I mean it as more than agreement. I mean I believe you.
Dozer nods once, like that settles it. Then he reaches for the radio to talk to a team member. I watch him for a second longer than I should. There are people who make you feel safe because they tell you everything is going to be okay. Dozer makes me feel safe because he doesn't.
He makes me feel safe because he looks at the worst thing in the room and starts figuring out how to get everyone through it.
That might be the most dangerous thing I've learned about him so far.
Because I think I could get used to having someone around who assesses danger and then protects me from it.
"They knew our route," he says after ending the conversation he’s having. “It’s confirmed.”
I straighten. "That's not luck."
"No."
"There’s a leak and it had to happen somewhere between Hunter's office and that road,” I tell him.
He looks at me. "Until we know where it is, we can't trust standard channels."
My brain immediately clicks into place. This is the part I understand, it’s where I excel. I can look at the data, see the pattern and find out where the information moved from one person to another. People always think digital security is about computers. It isn't. It's about people.
Computers don't decide to betray you. People do.
"From here on out there will be no check-ins on the usual frequency," he continues. "No hotel bookings under real names. Nothing that puts us on a schedule somebody could predict twice."
"So we're improvising,” I say. “I can do that.”
"We're surviving smart,” he corrects. He looks at me, and something in his expression is different now.
"Which means from here, you don't leave my sight."
I open my mouth, the argument is already loaded and ready. I've never liked being told what to do when the person doing the telling assumes I don't have a say. It's a whole thing. Ask literally anyone who's ever tried to manage me through a migraine.
Then I close my mouth. Because underneath the flatness of his words is something I recognize now. He’s not trying to be in control over me, he’s trying to protect me. There is decidedly a difference. It’s the same thing that sat underneath You're allowed to not be okay for a minute.
He's made a decision that keeping me alive is non-negotiable and he delivers the decision the same way he’d tell me the sky is blue. It’s just a fact to him. I know arguing will do neither of us any good. Plus, I kind of want to stay alive.
"Okay." I surprise myself by saying it without arguing.
His eyes hold mine for a second, something passes between us.
Understanding, maybe. Then it's gone and he starts the engine.
The vibration settles beneath my feet, and I reach for the case.
My fingers brush the edge of the evidence container, and the reality of what we're carrying settles over me again.
There’s a dead man in the back of the van. I don’t even know his name. And evidence somebody wants badly enough to kill for. A conspiracy that reaches farther than it should. A leak inside a system that is supposed to protect people like us.
And now Reyes.
I look out the window as we pull away from the gas station. Somewhere behind us is a wreck and a man who won't be going home tonight.
And somewhere ahead is Washington, D.C., where whatever is inside this case is supposed to change everything.
I think about my brother. Afghanistan 2011.
The folded flag in my townhouse, the dog tags I dust weekly because touching them makes me feel closer to him.
I understand sacrifice, I’ve understood it my entire life.
Every holiday my dad wasn’t home for, every big event he missed and then my mom wailing over my brother’s flag draped casket.
I definitely understand sacrifice. Military families don't get the luxury of pretending service only belongs to the person wearing the uniform.
I press my forehead lightly against the cool glass of the truck.
Maybe that's why Reyes bothers me. I didn’t know him, but somebody did.
Maybe his mother or sister will be the ones getting the knock on the door, or a wife and children.
Somebody will be standing in a doorway when Hunter comes, and they will hear the words I'm sorry and know that nothing after those words can possibly fix what came before them. They will live life in the before and after. Before Reyes died and after. The divide has been made and there’s nothing I can do to change it.
I wouldn’t wish membership of this club on anyone.
I don't know his family, but I know the trauma of living through that moment. And suddenly the case isn't just a case anymore, it’s a silent promise to Reyes and his family, that we will get this evidence to D.C. and not allow anyone to prevent that from happening. We owe Reyes that much.
I sit back as the road stretches ahead. Four hundred more miles of it.
Eventually, my voice comes back. A small joke creeps out and then another.
I make a random observation about the stupidest billboard I’ve ever seen.
I tell Dozer my completely unnecessary theory about why every interstate rest stop seems to have the same three types of people.
Dozer answers occasionally, mostly with one or two words. But he listens to me and that's enough. Talking is how I stay a person instead of becoming nothing more than a set of competent hands doing a job.
So, I talk. That's who I am, ambush or no ambush, grief or no grief, fear or no fear. I'm a talker. Some people can't tolerate that about me, but I've learned, the hard way, that those aren't my people. My people understand my need to babble, and they let me be exactly who I am.