Elias #2
None of them explained why seeing her smile at another man felt like taking a punch I never saw coming. The gym smelled of old socks, dried sweat, and the bitter sting of liniment oil rubbed into bruises that never quite disappeared.
It sat beneath the old boiler house off Route 9, hidden below street level where nobody asked questions. Thick river-stone walls held the cold year-round, and the exposed pipes overhead rattled every time the ancient furnace kicked somewhere upstairs.
A heavy bag swayed lazily from an iron beam. Chains creaked. Leather groaned. Someone had left an old radio humming in the corner, country music crackling through static that was almost louder than the song itself.
This place made sense. No missing women. No politicians. No reporters. No Sheriff Walker. Just fists.
Derek tightened the Velcro around his gloves before bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet.
"You remember Jalalabad?" he asked.
I snorted while wrapping my hands.
"You're gonna have to narrow that down."
"The one where you nearly got court-martialled."
I looked up.
"You're still gonna have to narrow that down."
Derek laughed.
"The brick."
I groaned.
"Oh hell."
"You punched a guy with a brick."
"He had a knife."
"He had a butter knife."
"He still had a knife."
"He was making breakfast."
"He shouldn't have threatened me with breakfast."
Mason, sitting on an old wooden bench wrapping fresh tape around his knuckles, didn't even look up.
"He wasn't making breakfast."
Derek pointed.
"See? Mason remembers."
"He was making coffee."
"There you go."
"He threatened Elias with the mug."
"It was ceramic."
"It wasn't loaded."
"I didn't know that."
"You threw the brick before he even stood up."
"He looked like he was thinking about standing up."
Derek shook his head.
"You've always been impossible."
A bell rang softly as Derek climbed into the ring.
"Come on then."
I climbed through the ropes opposite him.
"You buying the beers after?"
"If I win."
"You've never beaten me."
"I've gotten close."
"You've hallucinated."
He grinned.
The grin lasted about fifteen seconds.
He came in fast. Always fast. Three sharp jabs. A hook. Low feint. Cross. He'd always relied on speed. Academy boxing. Military combat. Technical. Clean. Predictable.
I slipped the hook, stepped inside, and drove my shoulder into him. A short right to the ribs. His breath vanished with a sharp grunt. He stumbled backward, recovered, and came again. Faster this time.
"Still telegraphing your left," he laughed.
"So are you."
"What?"
I stepped into him before he'd even finished speaking. Body. Body. Head. The last punch landed square against the protector with a dull, satisfying thud. Derek folded.
"Jesus Christ."
He landed flat on the mat, one glove still hanging in the air like he'd forgotten gravity existed. I leaned over him.
"You alive?"
"Give me a minute."
"You've had one."
"I need another."
Mason looked at the stopwatch.
"Twenty-three seconds."
Derek looked offended.
"I wasn't ready."
"You were."
"I had a plan."
"It was a bad one."
Derek rolled onto his back.
"I hate both of you."
"We know."
Mason stood. He didn't stretch. Didn't bounce. Didn't shake out his arms. He simply climbed into the ring. Watching Mason fight was always unsettling. There wasn't any wasted movement. No showmanship. No aggression. No anger. Just mathematics.
Derek circled. Feinted. Jab. Cross. Hook. Mason barely reacted. He simply wasn't where the punches landed. Half an inch. Every time. Like he'd already seen them coming.
"You gonna hit me?" Derek puffed.
"No."
"No?"
"You'll walk into it."
"I won't."
"You will."
Derek threw another combination. Mason stepped inside the final hook, caught Derek's wrist, turned his hips, and let gravity do the rest.
Derek left the ground completely before slamming onto the canvas with a loud whump.
The ring shook. Silence. Derek blinked at the ceiling.
"I walked into it."
"You did."
"I hate it when you're right."
Mason climbed back through the ropes before Derek had even sat up. Fight over. Fuck Forty seconds. An hour later, the gloves lay abandoned across the bench. Three paper cups of coffee were steamed beside us. Derek sat on the edge of the ring rubbing fresh bruises into his ribs.
"I'm getting too old for this."
"You've said that since twenty-seven."
"I meant it then too."
I leaned against the cold stone wall, sweat still dripping from my jaw onto the concrete. The adrenaline had finally burned itself out. Leaving only the case. Always the damn case. Mason folded his arms.
"Walker's hiding something."
Neither of us answered immediately. Because we'd all been thinking about it.
"He shut that lead down too quickly," Mason continued.
"The flatbed?" Derek asked.
"The tracks."
"He didn't even look."
"He didn't want to."
Silence settled again. I stared into my coffee.
"It's everything. The timing. The questions. The way he watches people when they aren't looking. He feels...wrong."
Mason gave a slow nod. The gym fell quiet. No jokes. No punches. Just three tired men sitting with thoughts none of us liked. Derek finally broke the silence.
"This isn't on you, Elias."
"Feels like it."
"It isn't."
"Ten women."
"You didn't take them."
"I also haven't fucking found them."
"Yet."
The word hung there. Yet. I leaned my head back against the cold stone wall and closed my eyes. Ten women. One killer. One sheriff I didn't fucking trust. One deputy that made my skin crawl.
We sat against the rough river-stone wall, our shirts soaked through with grey circles of sweat, our chests rising and falling in the damp quiet of the basement.
I held a plastic bottle of freezing water against the raw, scraped skin of my knuckles, the cold stinging the cuts until my fingers went numb.
The machine was finally winding down, the heavy, manic heat from the station leaving my blood.
"Something doesn’t make sense with this kidnapping and the way Walker is acting."
I said, my voice dropping into the quiet room, the heavy bag still swaying gently an inch from my boots. Nobody laughed. Nobody disagreed. Mason took a long swallow from his bottle, his eyes tracking the dark knots in the overhead timber.
"He shut down three separate leads on the flatbed tracks. He didn't even log the mileage for the secondary search grid before he called the state investigator in. That’s not a jurisdictional panic, Elias. That’s a burial."
"And Collins..."
Derek added, his voice losing every trace of its playful cadence as he leaned his head back against the stone, his brow furrowed. He paused, his fingers tracing the edge of his eagle tattoo.
"I don't like him. I don't like the way he stands in the back of the room. He’s too clean."
"Neither do I,"
I muttered, the image of his uniform shirt pressing down on Seraphina’s car door flashing behind my eyes.
"He watches people," Mason said, his gravelly monotone falling like an axe into the quiet.
"Not like a cop," I noted, looking at him.
"No," Mason whispered, his slate-grey eyes finally lifting to meet mine, cold and unblinking.
"Like prey. He looks at a room like he’s counting the exits before he takes the meat."
The line sat in the basement like a block of ice.
It was a chilling thing to hear from a guy who had spent half his life tracking human target arrays, and it told me everything I'd been trying to avoid since Tuesday morning.
The leak wasn't coming from the outside.
The dark was already inside the building.
Derek shifted his weight, his blue eyes turning serious as he looked across the canvas at me.
"Those women, Elias... the ten pins on that board. They're not gone because of you."
I didn't answer. I just kept my eyes fixed on the raw skin of my knuckles, the water from the bottle dripping onto my boots with a steady, maddening precision.
Drip.
Drip.
"You can't carry everybody that disappears in these mountains, man," Derek continued, his voice quieter now.
"You're a detective, not a saviour. You didn't build the woods."
I didn't say a word. Because the ledger didn't care about philosophy, and every time I closed my eyes, I could still see the ten empty spaces where those lives used to be, their names floating in the dark like unread case files.
Mason quietly reached over, his rough, scarred hand settling heavily on my shoulder.
"He’s going to carry them anyway," Mason said softly.
The room fell silent again. Not the comfortable kind.
The kind that sits between men who know the truth but don't have enough evidence to prove it.
The gym was almost completely dark now, save for the single yellow bulb hanging over the workbench.
The heavy bag had finally stopped swinging, hanging perfectly still in the center of the room like something waiting.
I leaned back against the padded wall, my shirt clinging cold to my ribs, my lungs burning pleasantly from the workout.
I closed my eyes. The darkness behind them didn't stay empty for long.
It became the valley. The logging roads.
The old quarry. The abandoned cabins. The creek crossings.
Every place we'd searched. Every place we'd come up empty.
Ten women. No bodies. No usable forensic evidence. No tire impressions that survived the rain. No witnesses. No mistakes.
Just...Fucking…Gone.
As if the mountain had swallowed them whole while the rest of Blackridge bought groceries, complained about the weather, and remembered to lock their front doors.
"Where the hell are you?"
I whispered into the empty basement. My voice came out rough, scraped raw. The stone walls swallowed it without giving anything back. And for the first time since Walker had slammed that file shut...my mind didn't picture the killer. It pictured ten women still waiting for someone to find them.