9. Sniper
nine
Sniper
The holding cell at Kingman PD was twelve by seven, and six hours in, I’d measured every inch of it with my eyes.
The walls were cinder block, painted the blue-gray of a bruise, with just enough surface variance to catch light and shadow in a way that let your mind invent faces if you stared long enough.
Two benches ran opposite the bars, poured concrete that radiated cold no matter how high they ran the thermostat, which tonight wasn’t high at all.
The floor sloped to a drain just off-center, a scar in the smooth, stained slab where decades of vomit and blood and cleaning solution circled before vanishing.
Overhead, a single tube light flickered at intervals that never resolved into a pattern.
They’d put me in here alone. Smart. I didn’t move much: back pressed flat to the wall, boots on the floor, hands folded on my knees.
The wall’s chill seeped through the leather of my cut, the patches doing less than nothing against the damp, chemical chill.
I’d been stripped of everything but the vest, the shirt under it, and the jeans that were now a solid two grades dirtier than when I’d put them on.
No shoelaces, no belt, no phone. My jaw ached from keeping it locked, but I left it that way.
My eyes adjusted to the flicker. Every so often, a shadow moved in the corridor beyond the bars: a cop’s boots, a cart rolling by, the flit of a radio attached to a doughy hip. Nobody made eye contact. Not that I expected them to.
The only thing that changed was the noise.
At first, there was a regular shuffle—guards, admin staff, someone two cells down who wouldn’t stop humming “Wichita Lineman” under their breath.
After the first hour, the station settled, the music cut, and it was just the buzz of the light, my own heartbeat, and, every ten minutes, the sharp slap of a clipboard hitting the desk outside.
Once, someone argued on the phone, their voice rising in three short peaks before dying away.
Probably a lawyer. No one was coming for me.
I let my mind drift. Not sleep, but a kind of low-energy thinking, a shutdown mode where I could flip through the last forty-eight hours without getting stuck on the places it hurt most. Jasmine: the text, the car on the shoulder, the empty seat and the tire tracks running off into the dark.
The way the search grid kept coming up empty, and how every hour that passed felt like another pound of flesh was getting peeled off my bones.
Bruiser’s face when he realized this wasn’t going to be a quick grab-and-punch job.
Briggs’s voice on the phone, low and careful, like he was breaking bad news to a child.
I knew the game they were playing. Book us on breaking and entering, hold us until the city’s legal team figured out whether it was worth pressing.
They’d let Bruiser stew in a separate cell, keep the two of us from talking strategy, then drag me out for a “voluntary” statement once they’d had their fun.
I’d played the part before. You sat still, you said nothing, and you let the world come to you.
An hour passed. Maybe more. My knees ached from being at a right angle so long, but I didn’t shift.
Eventually the shadow outside the bars resolved into a uniform with a gut like a laundry sack, and a keychain that jingled with every step.
He unlocked the door, didn’t speak, just gestured with his chin.
I stood, slow so he wouldn’t get excited, and walked out, hands loose at my sides.
They took me down a hall, past a break room with a TV tuned to muted cable news, past a printout taped to a corkboard that read “NO COFFEE AFTER 10PM.” At the end of the corridor, the interview room waited.
The walls in here were off-white, marked with smudges at eye level from a thousand heads leaning back in frustration.
The table was fake wood, the kind with a core of pressed sawdust. Two chairs, plastic, both the color of a hospital sheet.
The room was cold, the air sucking the moisture off your skin.
The only detail out of place was the one-way mirror, which had a crack running diagonally through the lower corner like someone had tried to punch their way out and left a souvenir.
Chief Briggs was already inside, standing with his back to the mirror, hands in his pockets.
He wore a rumpled uniform and a face that was a day late for shaving, but the look in his eyes was full of sleep.
He didn’t nod or smile or even register surprise.
He just pulled a chair, dropped into it, and waited for me to sit across.
I did. I locked my eyes on his, and we both pretended this was a normal night.
He started. “You know why you’re here.”
I let the silence hang, the way you let a dog sniff your hand before you pet it.
Briggs set his elbows on the table, leaned in. “The owner of that little flop house on Eucalyptus is threatening to file assault charges against you and two of your guys. He’s got photos of a broken jaw, a kicked-in door, and three witnesses who say you made threats.”
I said nothing.
He continued. “Your boy Bruiser will get processed for B and E. Maybe reckless endangerment if the DA’s feeling spicy.
The rest of your crew will get citations.
If I’m honest, we both know this is going to end with a warning and maybe a weekend in county for one or two of you.
But I’m running out of favors to cover your ass. ”
Still nothing from me. I wanted to see where he’d go if I just sat there.
Briggs shifted, his weight making the chair groan. “You want to tell me what you’re really doing, Marcus?” He used my name like a weapon. “Because if you were looking for someone, you could have just asked.”
My jaw worked. “I did ask. Four days ago. You said you’d handle it.”
He inhaled slowly, fighting the urge to roll his eyes. “You know we’re stretched thin. You know half my squad is tied up on the cartel thing, and the other half is in training rotation. You want to play hero, fine, but you bring me a goddamn body next time, not a mess.”
I watched him for a full count of ten. The fluorescent tube buzzed, spiked, then steadied.
I kept my voice even, just above a whisper.
“My wife is gone. She was taken in broad daylight, on a state highway, and all you have is a set of tire marks and a finger up your ass. I’m going to find her.
You can help me, or you can get out of my way.
But if another day goes by and I don’t have a lead, I will make that whorehouse look like a parking ticket. ”
Briggs didn’t flinch. Not scared, just calculating. He let his eyes drop to the tabletop, traced a mark in the laminate with his thumb, then looked back up at me. “You’re a stubborn son of a bitch.”
I nodded.
He leaned back, folding his arms. “If you want to go full Charles Bronson on this town, you do it outside my jurisdiction. I can’t clean up after you forever.”
I let the silence build. Then: “We’re done here?”
He stared a moment longer, then nodded. “Yeah. We’re done.” He stood, tucked his chair in, and moved to the door.
He didn’t shake my hand or offer any final warning. He just opened the door, nodded to the uniform outside, and left.
I sat there for a second, breathing in the cold, the taste of burnt ozone and cheap vinyl. My hands were steady. My mind was blank.
When the guard came to fetch me, I followed him out.
Six hours in a box, and it hadn’t changed a thing. I still had a job to do.
I let them walk me to the exit. The station was dead silent, the only movement the shiver of a flag outside the front window. I stepped out into the lot, the door clanging shut behind me, and for a second, the night felt colder than I remembered.
Then I exhaled, rolled my shoulders, and started walking.
Outside, the parking lot was baked to a hard crust by a day’s worth of sun, and even at midnight, the surface radiated heat like a living thing.
The air was so dry it hissed in my ears.
There were only three cars left—one Crown Vic with a bald tire, a city pool maintenance van, and Bruiser’s battered Silverado pulled nose-to-nose with my bike.
Bruiser leaned against the Road King under a sodium vapor light that turned his skin the color of old cheese.
He wasn’t on his phone, wasn’t pacing, just standing arms crossed, eyes on the ground, like he could out-wait geology if he had to.
When I pushed through the glass doors, the motion set the lot’s floodlights shivering awake, and I saw the muscle in his jaw twitch once before he locked it down.
I stopped in the middle of the concrete, boots marking time, and tilted my face to the sky.
There were no stars, just the haze from the Vegas sprawl and a hard white moon hanging crooked above the civic building across the street.
My jaw hurt from the hours in lockup. I rolled it side to side, like maybe if I worked it hard enough I could grind the memory of that room into powder.
Bruiser didn’t say anything. He just reached into his jacket and pulled out a gas station coffee cup, the cardboard sleeve stained with sweat.
He offered it at arm’s length, and I took it.
It tasted like the inside of a burned-out circuit panel—old, acrid, and barely warm.
I drank it in three long pulls, the heat scraping my throat clean.
When it was gone, I crushed the cup in my hand and dropped it next to my boot.
Neither of us spoke for a minute. The only sound was the click and whine of a power relay cycling somewhere in the eaves, and the far-off bark of a cop laughing on the back side of the building. Bruiser kicked at a pebble, missed, then settled for picking at the edge of his sleeve.
I pulled my phone from my pocket. The battery was half-dead, the screen already spiderwebbed from a fall last week. I hit Bram’s number. He picked up before the first ring finished.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Out,” I answered.
He didn’t say good. He didn’t say anything for a second, then: “The house?”
I kept my voice flat. “Terrell’s. No Jasmine, just trafficked girls. Local muscle, not cartel. Two witnesses, three calls to cops, one video.”
He let that process. “Bruiser with you?”
“Yeah. And Buck. Fang peeled off.”
“Anyone else?”
“No.”
He grunted. “Chief Briggs called. Says you’re on borrowed time.”
“Copy.”
He waited. “You want me to pull you off this?”
“No,” I said, too quick. “Not yet.”
There was a long pause, the kind that said he was thinking about all the ways this could go sideways and none of them ended with a thank you. “You need to stop hitting targets on impulse, Marcus.”
I kept silent.
“I mean it,” Bram said, his voice dropping to a near whisper. “Next time, you check in first. You think through the angle. You let me make the call.”
I felt Bruiser’s eyes on me, but I kept my gaze on the moon. “Understood.”
Another silence. “You’re not sleeping,” Bram said.
“No.”
He sighed, a sound like a car seat settling. “Come home, get your head clear, then go again.”
“Can’t.”
He didn’t argue. He just let the silence spin out, as if hoping it would squeeze a better answer out of me.
Finally, he said: “The prostitution house was a bad call.”
I closed my eyes. “I know.”
A beat.
“What’s next?”
The words didn’t come. For the first time in four days, I had nothing—no lead, no theory, just the map burned onto the inside of my skull and the cold certainty that I’d run out of productive moves.
I kept the phone to my ear, not ready to let the call go dead. Bruiser started checking the bike’s tire pressure, thumb pressing the valve just hard enough to make it hiss. He was close, but not close enough to hear the other end of the line.
The sodium light buzzed overhead. My hand was still curled around the phone, knuckles so white they shined.
“I’ll think of something,” I finally said.
Bram’s voice was smaller, like he’d moved away from the phone but was still holding it. “You always do.”
He hung up, no goodbye.
I stared at the dead screen until it timed out and went black. I felt the weight of the night settling on me, heavy as the concrete under my boots.
Bruiser straightened up, checked the bike’s mirror, then glanced over. “You want a ride home?”
I shook my head.
He nodded like he’d expected it.
He walked to his truck, got in, and just sat there with the engine idling.
I stood under the light, face turned up, and let the silence fill in everything the last four days had emptied out of me. There was nothing left to plan. For the first time since Jasmine disappeared, I had no answer, no next step, not even the illusion of control.
The sky stayed blank. The lot stayed empty. My head felt hollow, and the only thing that kept me standing was the memory of her voice—soft, unimpressed, always a half-second ahead of mine.
I held that silence as long as I could.
And then I climbed onto the bike, thumbed the starter, and let the world find me.