Chapter 8 #2
How long I stand there, I don't know. Long enough for the bulb to warm the air.
Long enough for the concrete to release the day's heat back up, turning the garage into something between an oven and a confessional.
Long enough that when the side door opens behind me, I don't startle.
I've been expecting it. Or dreading it. Hard to tell anymore.
Cole stops in the doorway. I feel him there without turning, the air pressure changing the way it does before rain.
His eyes find the workbench, the index card, my hand resting near it, and the calculation runs behind his face.
He's clocking the absence of wrenches. The absence of socket sets.
The fact that I'm standing in front of Hannah Brooks's name and not the tool rack, and the pretense I walked in with is as transparent as the garage's single-pane glass.
The air is raw. Last night's fight still live in it, neither resolved nor retreated from, banked like a fire smothered but not out.
I can smell him from here — garage on his clothes, sweat from whatever he's been doing since the silent coffee run.
His shirt dark between the shoulder blades.
His hair pushed back the way it gets when he's been dragging his hands through it, which means he's been thinking.
I don't move away from the bench.
"I want in," I say.
Flat. Stripped of ceremony. Not a request — logistics, the way you'd brief mission parameters to a squad leader who hasn't decided yet whether you're an asset or a liability.
"You're a known quantity in this town. They've had years to build a story around you — troublemaker, delinquent, Mick's problem kid.
Doors shut when you knock. I'm a stranger.
Gone a decade. A veteran with a service record that exists whether or not I ever talk about it.
People open doors for veterans in towns like this.
They respect the uniform even when it's not being worn. "
Cole makes a sound. Short, low, humorless. Not a laugh — something thinner, the vocal version of a door shut without being slammed. His eyes hold mine across the bench, and what's in them isn't surprise. It's assessment. A man weighing variables he didn't account for and doesn't trust.
"Why?" he asks.
One word. Flat. Like he already knows the answer and is waiting to see if I give him the one he expects or something he hasn't prepared for.
"Because that girl is seventeen."
The simplicity of it lands. No elaboration.
No tactical justification. Just the fact.
Hannah Brooks is seventeen. She got into Denny Voss's car.
She's pulled back from everyone since, and Cole watches her around town getting smaller by the week, and there's a pattern under it, and the pattern has names written in Cole's hand on cards that live on a workbench in a garage that smells like motor oil and regret.
Cole stares at me. His eyes are very blue in the yellow light, fixed on mine until the hair stands up on my arms, and for a second I think he might say something — break the pattern, name the thing in the room, which is that we're standing close enough to touch and neither of us is breathing right and the current between us has nothing to do with Hannah Brooks.
He looks away first. His hand finds the spine of the blue notebook — Annette's — and his knuckles go white around it, tendons standing up like cables. He doesn't say yes. Doesn't say no. The bulb buzzes. Somewhere outside, a car passes on Cembrook, its engine fading toward town.
"If you're in," he says finally, low and clipped, each word measured on the way out, "you follow my lead.
My methods. My contacts. My call on what gets shared and when.
This isn't the Marines, Trevor. There's no chain of command.
There's me, and there's the work, and if you can't live with that, walk now. "
My jaw tightens, the muscle ticking, and the part of me that spent years following procedure wants to push back. Wants structure. Wants the thing I'm good at — the hierarchy, the clarity, knowing exactly where I stand and what's expected.
I nod. One sharp dip of the chin. Marine affirmative.
The kind of yes that doesn't need elaboration, because elaboration is for people who haven't made up their minds, and mine was made up sometime between last night's fight and this morning's cold coffee and the moment I stood in front of Hannah Brooks's name and understood that walking away wasn't an option anymore.
The bulb buzzes. The concrete radiates heat. Her card sits at the edge of the bench, name face-up under the light, and the space between Cole's shoulder and mine stays exactly what it's always been, and neither of us does a damn thing to change it.
Cole starts talking. His voice takes on the clipped efficiency of a man who's explained this to himself so many times the words come out pre-formed, rehearsed in the dark hours when the only audience is the workbench and the maps.
"Two girls in four years, and now a third in motion.
Annette Coyle, four years back. Judy Marsh, three.
Hannah Brooks, happening right now, I'd swear on it.
" His finger moves across the map — back roads, county routes, circuits that skirt the main drag through Roan with the care of someone who understands what visibility costs.
"Pattern's consistent. Withdrawal first. They stop showing up.
Stop answering texts. Friends say they seem off, distant, like something's eating them from the inside.
Then the story — moving away, a sick relative, a parent's new job in the city.
Stories that hold up on paper and fall apart the second you press on them. "
His hand finds the blue notebook and flips it open to a page dense with dates. I lean in. My shoulder brushes his, a glancing contact neither of us acknowledges, and I reach toward a paragraph near the bottom where the margins are too tight to read.
Cole turns the page.
Not aggressively. No snap, no flourish. His hand just moves, the notebook rotates, and the paragraph I was reaching for is gone, replaced by a timeline across two facing pages — withdrawal dates, last known locations, report numbers in his cramped script.
I look at him. He's staring at the map, jaw set, like the page-turn didn't happen or happened for reasons too obvious to comment on.
It happens again. My eyes catch a detail on the Judy Marsh page — a witness statement, a name blacked out in Cole's own marker — and as I lean closer his fingers settle across the redaction.
Not his palm flat on the page; just his fingers, light over the blacked-out lines, casual enough to be coincidence and deliberate enough to be unmistakable.
The third time, I call it.
"Let me see the full Annette file."
His hand pauses on the notebook's edge. His eyes cut to me, then back to the pegboard, and for a second I think he'll refuse — shut the book, walk out, leave me with half a briefing and a growing certainty that whatever we agreed to lives mostly in my own head.
He reaches up, pulls the Annette file — a manila folder tucked between the map and the board, edges soft from handling — off the wall. Sets it on the bench. Face-down.
The message isn't subtle.
"What's the point of a partner who can't see the evidence?"