Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
Dove had noticed the SUV two blocks from the Aegis office.
Dark. Small. Tinted windows deep enough that the driver was nothing but a shape behind smoked glass.
It pulled out from a side street as they cleared the parking lot—no signal, no hesitation—and settled three car lengths back with the practiced patience of something that didn't need to rush because the driver already knew exactly where they were going.
She didn't say anything yet. Just watched it in the passenger mirror, tracking without turning her head. The vehicle matched every speed change. It held the distance like a precise, deliberate measurement.
“We’re being followed,” she said.
“I just noticed that.” Trent's hands shifted on the wheel.
She pulled her phone, kept it below the window line, and fired off a text to Buddy and Dawson. Four words and her location. Dark SUV. Following us.
Buddy responded in three seconds that he was on it.
Dawson responded right after that, his ETA was twelve minutes.
She mapped the route to her rental in her head, the way she'd been trained to map everything—exits, choke points, sight lines.
Two miles to the town limits. After that, the road opened up and narrowed down at the same time, the buildings dropping away and the Everglades closing in on both sides, no intersections, no cover, no one close enough to see or hear anything that happened out there.
She unholstered her weapon and held it low against her thigh, muzzle toward the floor.
Out the window, Calusa Cove slipped past in pieces—the diner with its hand-lettered specials board, the hardware store, the bait shop with the pelican sign so faded you could barely read it.
All of it slow and sunbaked and ordinary.
A woman pushing a stroller. A kid on a bicycle.
A man loading bags into the back of a minivan.
All of them obliviously to the situation.
The last stoplight in town turned yellow. Trent didn't slow down. He glided through the light.
So did the SUV.
The sign thanking people for coming to Calusa Cove appeared in the mirror.
Then shrank. Then disappeared. And just like that, the town was gone—the buildings swallowed by sawgrass, the road narrowing, the sky opening up overhead in a way that always made Dove feel exposed, like a moving target on an empty table.
The bridge now only a few miles away.
The SUV sped up.
"Shit, they're closing in," she said.
“What do you want me to do, because if we don’t turn soon, we’re gonna be stuck on this road for a while.”
One car length. Half a car length. The dark grille filling her mirror, details emerging as it closed the gap—a rental plate, she caught that much, and a crack in the lower left corner of the windshield, and then she didn't have time for details anymore.
“Brace yourself,” she managed.
The impact exploded through the truck like a detonation.
Metal shrieked. The world lurched sideways.
Her shoulder slammed into the door so hard she felt it in her teeth, her head snapping back against the headrest, her weapon hand pressing down hard on the dash to keep the muzzle pointed safe.
The truck fishtailed—tires screaming, rear end swinging right—and for one nauseating second, she was looking at the shoulder of the road and the drainage ditch beyond it and the sky tilting at an angle it shouldn't be.
Then Trent's hands moved, and the truck straightened.
She pushed off the dash and got herself upright. The mirror showed the SUV dropping back, recalibrating, the driver steering it back to center after the ram.
"They're not done," she said.
“I didn’t think they were, but we’ve got to do—”
“Duck!” She put her head between her legs and swallowed her breath.
A shot cracked from behind them.
Not a pop—a crack, the deep, flat percussion of a rifle, and the back window exploded inward.
Safety glass cascaded over her shoulders and into her lap, tiny cubes of it, some sharp enough to sting.
She felt two or three hit the back of her neck, felt the bright, quick pain of them, and registered it and filed it away because it wasn't important yet.
She had her window down before the glass finished falling.
The wind hit her like a wall—hot and wet and tasting of sawgrass and road heat. Behind them, the SUV was accelerating again, the engine note climbing, and she could see the passenger window down now and an arm extended.
“They're gaining. What do you want me to do?” Trent asked with a voice too calm for the situation.
"Don't swerve yet." She grabbed the door frame with her left hand, leaned into the wind, found the SUV in her sights. "Keep it steady. Thirty miles an hour. Whatever you do, don't touch the brake."
"There's a curve—"
"Take it. Then a straight line. I need a platform. Steady speed, straight road."
He took the curve. The truck leaned and she leaned with it, knuckles white on the door frame, everything in her body fighting the centrifugal pull while she kept the weapon up and the muzzle tracking.
They came out of the curve and the road opened ahead of them—flat and empty, a quarter mile of nothing but cracked asphalt and the heat shimmer rising off it.
Two shots came in fast succession from the SUV. One punched through the tailgate—she heard the hollow bang, felt the truck shudder. The second caught the trailer hitch with a sound like a hammer striking an anvil and the whole rear of the truck vibrated with the impact.
"I need you to breathe," she said. Her own voice surprised her—flat, almost conversational, the voice she used when the world was on fire and conversation was the only thing that kept it from getting worse.
"Working on it."
"Closer." She adjusted her grip, squared her shoulders against the wind. "Close the gap just a little. Ten feet. Can you do that?"
"You want me to slow down while they're shooting at us?”
"Yes."
"And you think me living with gators is nuts.
" He lifted off the throttle, and the SUV rushed forward in the mirror, filling it, thirty feet and then twenty and she could see the shooter more clearly now—passenger seat, upper body out the window, rifle braced on the door frame.
Experienced. Anchored. Taking his time because he thought he had it.
He didn't have it.
She breathed out.
Found the left rear tire—not the center, not the inner edge, the sweet spot just behind the valve stem where the sidewall met the tread and the rubber was thinnest—and fired twice.
The first round clipped the sidewall. The second punched through dead center.
The tire didn't slowly deflate. It detonated—a sound like a second gunshot, and then the SUV lurched hard left, dropping onto the rim, the back end swerving and fishtailing and dragging along the shoulder in a rooster tail of sparks and shredded rubber.
The shooter disappeared inside. The rifle dropped out of frame.
"Move to the right, give me the angle,” she said.
"They're still—"
"Move right."
Trent drifted the truck toward the centerline. The SUV wrestled itself back to the road—two-wheel drive on a flat rim, still doing forty, the driver working hard to keep it from spinning out. She'd give him credit. He was good.
Not good enough.
"Lift off again," she said. "Just for two seconds."
“Are you serious?”
"Two. Seconds."
He came off the gas.
She breathed in. Breathed out. The wind tried to drag the barrel left, and she compensated without thinking, the same micro-adjustment she'd made a thousand times from overwatch positions in places that didn't exist on maps.
The right rear tire filled her sight picture.
The truck's motion. The SUV's motion. The wind variable, twelve miles an hour out of the southwest—
She fired.
The right tire exploded.
The SUV dropped hard on both rear corners simultaneously, the chassis slamming down onto two bare rims, and the sound of it was catastrophic—metal on asphalt, shrieking and grinding, a fountain of sparks that lit up the shoulder like something burning.
The vehicle slewed sideways across both lanes, tires gone, momentum carrying it in a long, ugly arc, and then it scraped to a stop half on the road and half in the shoulder with the driver's door crumpled against the guardrail and both rear quarters torn open.
Still.
Smoke rising from the wheel wells.
For one second, nothing moved.
"Go," she said. “Straight to my place.”
Trent floored it.
The truck surged forward and the wrecked SUV shrank in what was left of the rearview mirror—two doors cracked open now, figures moving inside but moving slow, moving hurt, not following. In the distance, faint but growing, the sound of sirens. Dawson, vectoring in from the south.
She pulled herself back through the window.
Slumped into the seat. Her shoulder was going to bruise where she'd hit the door—she could feel it already, a deep ache spreading outward from the joint.
Glass fell from her hair onto her lap. She pressed the back of her hand against her neck and felt the sting of three or four small cuts, nothing deep, nothing that needed more than a few minutes and some antiseptic.
She texted Dawson. Informed him of the SUV’s current location and warned him that the perps were armed.
She looked at Trent. His knuckles were white on the wheel, jaw set, eyes forward, a thin line of blood at his hairline where a piece of glass had caught him.
Close. Too close.
She reached up and touched the cut. “You’re bleeding.”
“I’m fine.” His gaze went from the road to the side mirror, to the rear mirror, back to the road, before repeating.
Physically, maybe he was fine. But he wasn’t any better than she’d been during the fifteen minutes she watched him deal with a gator and a snake. Two dangerous worlds that neither one quite understood and, in the matter of days, got to experience firsthand.