Chapter 7
Dozer
I clear the room before I let her past the doorway. Bathroom first, shower curtain shoved back hard enough to confirm empty and then the closet, behind the door itself, the window latch, under both beds.
Kenzi watches me from the hallway, arms crossed. "It's a Best Western," she says. "I don't think there's a sniper in the ice machine."
"Probably not."
Her eyebrows lift. "Probably?"
"I don't work off probably."
She studies me for a second, then nods like that answer makes perfect sense.
Maybe that's one of the things I'm starting to appreciate about her, she doesn't need everything explained.
She questions plenty, but when something matters, she knows the difference between curiosity and arguing for the sake of arguing.
I've noticed she picks her arguments carefully, not because she lacks opinions because she has those in abundance, more than most people I've worked with, but because she seems to know instinctively which hills are worth the climb. This isn't one.
I step aside and wave her in. She crosses the threshold, drops her bag on the bed nearest the window without asking why I've chosen that one for her instead of me, and looks around the room.
One night. That's the plan. Sleep in shifts, keep moving before dawn, stay off anything that looks like a pattern or is predictable.
After the ambush, I abandoned half the original plan.
The rest gets rewritten every time I replay the attack in my head.
Someone knew our route and the timing. They had enough information to put shooters in the right place to hit us.
That doesn't happen by accident. I don't like coincidences.
I trust patterns because patterns are honest. People aren't.
I take the chair by the door, where I have a line of sight on both the window and the hallway, and start breaking down my sidearm for a clean I don't strictly need yet but want anyway.
Something to do with my hands. Something familiar, something that keeps the parts of my brain still running the ambush occupied with a task instead of a replay.
Because the replay is there, waiting. Reyes's voice. The tire blowing. The lead vehicle leaving the road. The silence after I call his name.
I push the images down. Not gone exactly, just contained. That's the difference between control and denial, or at least that's what I tell myself.
Across the room, Kenzi settles cross-legged on her bed with a legal pad of motel stationery she must have grabbed from the desk.
I can’t help but notice how beautiful she is.
Not in a fashion model kind of way but in a unique, quirky kind of way.
She reminds me of a cross between Penelope from Criminal Minds and Abby from NCIS.
Artistic, creative and brilliant. Her eyes are like a magnet, drawing me to them.
She produces a pen from somewhere inside that sticker-covered bag like a magician pulling something more interesting than a rabbit, then starts drawing.
Not writing but drawing. Quick, loose lines that don't look like anything specific from where I sit.
She only has one pen, dark blue ink, but she uses pressure to create different shades, building something with more detail than motel stationery deserves.
Neither of us talks for a while. I break the weapon down piece by piece, checking each part with the kind of attention that doesn't require thinking behind it anymore. I’m years past thinking, straight into muscle memory.
She draws. The room settles into a quiet that feels almost strange after the day we've had.
Not tense, not waiting, just two people occupying the same space without needing anything from each other.
That's rarer than people give it credit for.
Most people can't sit in a room with another person without filling the air.
Kenzi normally isn't like most people. She's usually the person filling the air.
Tonight, she isn't, and I like it more than I expect to. It means she’s comfortable with me and I hope, feeling safe.
That realization catches me off guard. I don't like being caught off guard, not by enemies, not by circumstances, and definitely not by a woman with paint on her boots and a habit of talking through every silence she encounters.
I glance at her again. Her head is bent over the paper, hair fallen forward, hiding part of her face. There's still a smear of blue paint near the edge of one boot. She hasn't noticed it, or she has and doesn't care. Either option feels very Kenzi.
"You always draw after something goes wrong?" I ask eventually, mostly because I've caught myself watching her hand move more than I've watched the slide in mine. I need a reason to look somewhere else that isn't just looking away.
She doesn't glance up. "Usually or I paint. Art is cheaper than therapy and faster than a nap."
"Does it work?"
"Sometimes." Her pen keeps moving. "Tonight it's mostly making a mess of motel stationery." A pause. "But the alternative is thinking about Reyes, so."
I understand that better than I plan to say out loud. Cleaning a weapon I don't need to clean is my version of the same math. It’s something that occupies the hands and buys the mind a little leeway before it lands on the thing it’s actively avoiding.
I finish checking the firing pin. "What is it?" I nod toward the pad. "If you don't mind me asking."
She stops drawing. For a second, she just looks at the page.
Then she turns it around and holds it up without much ceremony.
Rough lines, nothing photographic about it, but I can make out the shape of a tree line, sharp angles for branches, something that might be a road cutting through the bottom edge.
"The ridge," she says. "From today." Her mouth pulls into a small, humorless smile. "Second shooter's position."
I study the drawing. "You're reconstructing it."
"Kind of." She turns the pad back toward herself. "I process things better when I draw them." The pen moves again. "Turn them into something I looked at on purpose instead of something that happened to me."
That lands harder than it should. I look at the drawing again and there's something in it, the same instinct that had her clocking the muzzle-flash pattern from a footwell in the middle of an ambush, the same mind that spotted inconsistencies in a dead man's body while everyone else was still trying to figure out what the mission actually was.
Her brain doesn't know how to stop working a scene once it has one. She just uses different tools than I do. For her, it’s a camera, computer, pen, memory, whatever works.
"Smart," I say.
She looks up. "Don't sound so surprised."
"I'm not surprised." I meet her eyes. "I'm agreeing."
She studies me for a second, the way I've caught myself doing around her more than once already, then goes back to the drawing without further comment. I respect that. Some things don't need to be turned into bigger conversations than they are.
The room falls quiet again, and this time I let it.
I don't check the door. I don't check the window.
Not immediately. For a few minutes, I just sit there and watch her draw.
That's probably not smart, I'm supposed to be watching the room, and watching her shouldn't be part of the job, but there's something about the way she concentrates that holds my attention.
When she's talking, she's all movement, hands and expressions and words that come faster than most people can keep up with.
When she's working, she's totally different. She’s still, precise, almost fierce.
It's the same woman, two completely different versions, and I'm beginning to wonder how many more versions there are and wanting to meet each one.
It's past ten when I realize she hasn't eaten.
I do the math without meaning to. The briefing room, drive, facility, morgue, ambush, four more hours of driving and not once in all of that have I seen her put food in her mouth.
Coffee at the gas station. Coffee isn't food.
I know that math too well from years of running on the same fuel myself, and I also know what happens when a person keeps pushing past exhaustion.
Judgment gets sloppy. Hands shake. Reaction time slows.
People make mistakes. Right now, I need Kenzi's hands steady enough to read a dead man's skin for lies and respond to danger.
I finish reassembling the sidearm, set it aside, and stand.
She looks up. "Where are you going?"
"Nowhere."
Her eyes narrow. "That's generally not how walking works."
I don't answer. I step into the hallway. The vending machine at the end of the breezeway offers a selection that appears to have been assembled by someone with a personal grudge against nutrition. I pick the two least depressing options; a protein bar, a pack of peanut butter crackers, and a bottle of water. Good enough for government work at least. I’ll make sure she gets a real breakfast in the morning.
I come back inside and set everything on the nightstand beside her legal pad. She looks at the food, then at me, then back at the food.
"You didn't have to—"
"You haven't eaten since this morning."
She blinks. "I've been a little busy, almost dying."
"I know." I sit back down in the chair and pick up the sidearm mostly, so my hands have something to do that isn't watching her reaction too closely. "Eat anyway."
She's quiet again, really quiet, not the working quiet, not the grief quiet, something softer, something I don't have a name for, and I don't go looking for one.
"Nobody's done that for me in a while," she says, her voice barely above a whisper. "Just..." She looks down at the food. "Noticed." A pause. "Without me asking."
Something tightens behind my ribs. I know what it's like to go unnoticed, to have people assume that because you can carry the weight, you should, to have someone look at a capable man and decide capability means he doesn't need anything.
I've lived most of my adult life that way.
Maybe that's why I noticed her. Maybe that's why it bothers me that she thinks being cared for has to be requested.
"Somebody should," I say. I don't look up when I say it. I don't want to see whatever is on her face when it lands, because I have a feeling it will be something I won't know what to do with, and there's a whole mission still ahead of us. We have a leak to figure out, a conspiracy, a dead man, and people who just tried to kill us. None of that has room for whatever this is starting to become. And, I’m certain, it’s starting to become something. After only a day with this woman, and it feels like so much longer, I’m feeling things I haven’t felt in years.
That could spell distraction and distraction means danger.
I hear the wrapper open. She takes a bite, then another. The room stays quiet. A few minutes later, the pen picks back up, slower now, less urgent, like the food has done exactly what I hoped it would.
I glance over. She's drawing again. This time, she adds something to the bottom of the page. It’s a vehicle, our vehicle with two tiny figures inside. I don't ask why. She doesn't explain. Maybe she doesn't need to. Maybe that's the point. Some things are easier to put on paper than say out loud.
I go back to checking my weapon. She goes back to drawing. Neither of us says anything else for a long time, and I don't mind it. In fact, I find myself wanting to stay exactly where I am. That's new. So is the fact that I don't feel the need to question it.
Outside, a car rolls through the parking lot. Headlights sweep across the curtains. My body reacts before my brain does, my hand goes to the weapon, my eyes on the window. Kenzi stops drawing. We both wait.
The vehicle keeps going. I lower my weapon. She exhales.
"Was that your version of relaxing?" she asks quietly.
I look at her. "Yes."
She smiles, it’s a small, tired smile but it’s real. "You're terrible at relaxing."
"So I've been told."
She looks down at her drawing. And maybe because she’s actually smiling again but the silence that settles around us doesn’t feel empty or uncomfortable. It feels right.