Chapter 17 #2
They drove in silence for a moment. The adrenaline still moved through her—she could feel it in the edges of her vision, in the slight tremor starting in her hands now that the shooting had stopped.
She pressed her palms flat on her thighs and let it run its course.
This was just chemistry. This was just her body finishing what the threat had started.
“Buddy always told me you were a good shot.” Trent reached across the cab and took her hand.
"Don't sound so surprised."
Something crossed his face that wasn't quite a smile and wasn't quite not one. "I'm not. I just—" He exhaled. "I've never watched anyone do that. While being shot at. It's terrifying and impressive at the same time.”
“So is watching a man untangle a python from a gator.”
That won her a chuckle. “I suppose it is.”
She looked at the road ahead. Her rental was four minutes out—but she knew—even before they turned the corner. It was particular knowledge that lived below thinking, below language, in whatever part of her had been paying attention to the world long enough to start understanding its grammar.
Holding her breath, she glanced between the clock on the dash, and the house coming into view. That unsettling feeling filled her gut. The same one she’d had before she knew she'd have to pull the trigger.
Trent slowed his his truck as it approached the house. It wasn't much to look at. An old stucco Florida modular home that looked like it had seen better days.
Shit. The front door was open.
Not open like someone had forgotten to close it.
Open like it had been argued with and lost—the frame splintered around the deadbolt, the door itself hanging inward at an angle that made her back teeth ache, wood pulp scattered across the concrete step like something that used to be solid and wasn't anymore.
Trent pulled the truck to the curb and cut the engine. “I think we should text Dawson.”
“On it.
Dawson's response came back immediately—officer en route in 8 minutes.
She held her up weapon and slipped from the vehicle. “We do this the same way we did my uncle’s place. Got it?” She glanced over her shoulder.
Trent was a step behind, Glock drawn, moving to her left to take the flank. “I’ll follow your lead, but I’m not asking for permission to shoot anything or anyone that comes at us.”
“Just don’t shoot me.” She went in slow and low, pivoting right off the doorframe, sweeping the entry.
The living room was a disaster.
Couch overturned, cushions slashed. The bookshelf knocked forward, her paperbacks and one framed photo—her team, taken three months before they died, eight people smiling in the Kandahar sun—face down in a scatter of pages and broken glass.
Every drawer in the end table pulled out and was thrown.
The abstract print she'd actually liked, the one she'd driven forty minutes to a consignment shop to find because something about the colors felt like the water here, lay face down on the floor with the backing torn off and the frame snapped in two.
“Clear,” she called out of habit.
They moved through the space in sequence, covering each other's blind spots—she took point, Trent covered her six, both of them in the operational silence that operating in a cleared space required.
Not the silence of calm. The silence of listening hard for breath, for movement, for the sound of weight shifting on a floorboard.
She was impressed by the way Trent instinctively knew what to do. Perhaps from years of sneaking up on prehistoric creatures.
She pushed herself against the wall near the opening of the kitchen. Trent was on the opposite side. “Ready,” she said softly.
He nodded.
Easing into the room, she scanned every inch with her heart in her throat. She’d done this a million times, but it had never been this personal.
Every cabinet open. The contents swept from the shelves and onto the floor—canned goods rolled to the baseboards, the box of pasta she'd bought last week split open and spilled across the linoleum.
The coffee maker on its side, the carafe cracked.
The bourbon she kept above the refrigerator—the good bottle, the one she'd been nursing for six months—was shattered against the baseboard, and the smell of it filled the room, sharp and sweet and wrong, mixing with the damp heat coming through the open door.
“Clear,” she managed with a thick lump in her throat. “My bedroom next.” She inched down the small hallway, one foot in front of the other, placed softly on the floor as not to make a noise. She held her breath as she pivoted and the room crossed her line of sight. “Fuck,” she muttered.
The mattress was dragged off the frame and left at an angle, the box spring exposed.
Closet emptied, her clothes in a pile on the hardwood, hangers bent and broken.
Every box she'd stored on the closet shelf torn open—winter gear, tax documents, an old go-bag she'd never gotten around to tossing—contents spread across the floor in a forensics pattern that told her exactly how systematic this had been.
Methodical. Room by room. Not rage. Purpose.
Her go-bag—the current one, the operational one she kept loaded and ready—unzipped and dumped against the far wall. Spare magazine, medical kit, backup phone, the folded emergency cash she'd carried since her second year in the Army. All of it scattered.
She catalogued the violations with the part of her brain that did that, and she let the rest of her feel absolutely nothing about it. There would be time to feel later.
This time she didn’t bother saying clear. There was no point. No one was in the house. If they were, they would’ve come at them or bolted. But she remained at the ready because the one thing she’d learned over the years was to be prepared for the unexpected.
With her heart hammering in her chest, she turned her attention to the guest bedroom across the hall.
Stood in the doorway, tears threatening to break free.
She’d handed her uncle a cup of coffee right here in this hallway.
She’d laughed at one of his stupid jokes, and she’d blushed just a little when he’d made a comment about Trent and her spending the night the morning she’d come back to get a change of clothes, and her uncle had left to visit a friend.
That was the day he’d been murdered. The last time she’d seen him.
Trent came up behind her, resting a gentle hand around her waist, thumb rubbing softly on her hip. They’d gotten off to a really bad start months ago. She wasn’t in the right headspace to be anything other than a good time, and he used his alligators as a form of female repellent.
Damn, things were growing on her.
She sucked in a breath and focused on what the job called for and she needed to treat this as a job. She could fall apart later.
“This room is worse than the others,” Trent said.
The mattress hadn’t just been dragged off the bed—it had been slashed across the middle in two long cuts, the foam batting pulled out in handfuls and scattered.
The pillow her uncle had slept on, still in the case she'd washed after he left because she hadn't been able to bring herself to launder it before he died, was torn open, stuffing pulled loose and dropped on the floor without ceremony.
The nightstand drawers were gone. Not emptied—gone, ripped from the housing and taken entirely, or thrown hard enough that they'd broken apart and she couldn't find the pieces in the mess.
The desk had been upended, its underside examined and discarded. The closet rod was yanked from the wall. The baseboards on the left side had been pried away from the wall—she could see the tool marks, the raw wood beneath the paint—and shoved back imperfectly, not quite sitting flush anymore.
Someone had taken this room apart with the focused, systematic intensity of a person who knew what they were looking for and had searched every place it could be hiding.
She looked at the mattress her uncle had slept on, which had been slashed.
The pillow torn and the stuffing littered on the floor.
She gave it one full second. Let it hit her the way it needed to.
The violation. The hands on his things. Someone had stood in this room—the room that still smelled faintly of Old Spice and coffee—and had torn it apart looking for what he'd tried to protect.
“What the hell was he hiding?” she whispered the question. “Why couldn’t he have trusted me?”
“I get the feeling he didn’t trust anyone with it.” Trent rested his hand on her shoulder. “But whatever they were looking for, it had to do with the empty folder with my father's name that we saw at your uncle's townhouse.”
She holstered her weapon.
“The question is, do they have it?” She turned and held Trent’s gaze. “Or did my uncle hide it somewhere else, and now it’s up to us to find it?”