Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
Cole
Trevor stands across from me, arms folded, leaning against the counter with his weight on one hip.
His shoulder's tight — I can see it in the way he holds himself, the stiffness of a man whose old wound talks to him when the weather shifts.
The forecast called for rain by afternoon. His body's already listening.
"They're not watching the house." I tap the map with two fingers.
Hard. The paper crinkles. "They're watching me.
Look at the times. Seven AM. Noon. Sometimes four.
Never stops, never makes contact, just logs me.
Like clockwork." I flip a page. "Same pattern for weeks.
Every time I leave the property, that cruiser shows up within two blocks inside ten minutes.
It's not random patrol. Random doesn't work that way. "
Trevor doesn't move. His eyes track the map, the thumbtacks, the columns of my hand. His face gives nothing away. Marine face. The kind that says I'm listening without admitting that what it's hearing matters.
"My part." Flat. Functional. The kind of briefing you give when the briefing might be the last honest conversation you have.
"I drive Route 24 out of Roan at 10:15. Head toward Millhaven.
Make it look like a supply run for the garage.
Mick's expecting parts — I called it in yesterday, told him the distributor in Millhaven has a gasket set he's been waiting on.
I stay out all day. Visit the distributor, grab lunch, hit the hardware store, come back around six.
Give the tail something to follow. Burn a day. "
Trevor's jaw works once. "And if the tail doesn't bite?"
"Then we're back at square one and Hannah Brooks is fucked." I let it sit. Don't soften it. The truth has edges and the edges cut, and right now we need the cuts more than the comfort. "But it'll bite. It's been biting for weeks. They're not going to break pattern now."
He nods. Marine affirmative. The kind that says I've processed it and I'm moving to the next item.
"Your part." I reach under the table, pull out the second map.
Rougher. Drawn on the back of a gas station receipt, the roads east of Roan in pencil, the forested stretch toward the county line marked with a thick X where the pavement gives out and the gravel starts.
"Calloway's cruiser has vanished twice before.
Both Tuesdays, both times heading east on County Road 17, and both times he didn't show back up in town until after dark.
I couldn't follow without burning my cover. You can."
Trevor takes the map. His thumb finds the route, traces it from Roan's eastern edge through the forest, along the gravel that dead-ends at the lake. His fingertip stops at the X. Holds there. The focus of a man reading terrain the way other men read documents.
"Contingencies." I flip to the back of the notebook. "Code word by text if either one of us gets made. 'Supply run.' If the text goes unanswered more than two hours, the other calls Gary Wiseman." I read the number off the page. "215-555-0182."
Trevor pulls his phone. Scrolls, finds it, holds the screen toward me. The number matches. He pockets it without a word.
"Camera?"
He reaches into his jacket, pulls out the phone again, thumbs to the camera, checks the storage, the zoom.
"Phone's fine. Better than fine — nobody looks twice at a man holding a phone.
" He kills the screen. "I get close enough, I get faces, plates, the handoff if there is one. Stills and video both."
"Don't get close enough to get seen." I hold his eyes. "Long lens isn't an option, so distance is your cover. You shoot from the treeline and you don't move until the road's clear. Whatever you get, it doesn't matter if you don't make it back to send it."
"Understood." Flat. Marine flat.
I cross to the garage, unlock the steel box bolted to the workbench shelf. The .38 sits inside, oiled and clean, the way Mick taught me to keep it. I run the cylinder, check each chamber, snap it shut. The sound is precise. Deliberate. The kind that doesn't ask permission.
Neither of us says what we're both clocking.
That this is the only play left. That conventional routes died the moment Calloway walked up to Trevor on the sidewalk and smiled with those flat gray eyes.
That if this doesn't produce something Wiseman can act on — photographs, coordinates, anything heavy enough to make a Philadelphia cop drive four hours into a county he's got no jurisdiction in — Hannah Brooks goes the way Annette Coyle went, the way the two other names in my notebook went, and the arithmetic of that is simple and brutal and doesn't care how many contingencies we write.
The gear goes by the door in two backpacks.
Mine has water, a power bank, a change of clothes.
Trevor's has the phone, binoculars, a first-aid kit that's seen more use than either of us wants to admit.
I step outside, kneel in the side yard where the mud's still soft from last week's rain, and smear a handful across the toe and heel of my boots.
Force of habit. Makes me look like I've already been at the garage, like the day started hours ago and the dirt is evidence of work done rather than work about to begin.
Trevor watches from the doorway. Doesn't comment.
Doesn't need to. Two men who understand certain rituals exist because they work, and working is the only standard that matters.
We run through it once more. Faster. Tighter.
Times, routes, contingencies, the choreography of an operation with no margin for error, because the margin got used up weeks ago when Tally sat across from me in June's with a winter jacket zipped to her chin and told me an officer had come to her door.
The words come out clipped. Marine brief.
Trevor's shoulder aches. My hand shakes once, briefly, and I press it flat to the table until it stops.
Then there's nothing left to prep. The house goes quiet.
The clock ticks. Eileen's concentrator hums from the back bedroom, steady and indifferent, the soundtrack of a morning that feels both ordinary and entirely not.
Trevor's eyes find mine across the table.
Hold. One beat. Two. The look of a man who's said everything he's capable of saying and is waiting to see if the silence holds anything worth adding.
It doesn't. We both know it doesn't. So he picks up his backpack. I pick up mine. The screen door whines when I push it open. August heat rolls in, thick and insistent. Somewhere a dog barks. Somewhere an engine turns over and fades.
Trevor follows me out. Boots on gravel. The sound of two men walking toward something neither's entirely sure they'll survive, walking anyway because walking is the only move they've got.
Past midnight and the house is dark except for the low lamp I leave on in the hall for Eileen, a twenty-watt bulb in a fixture older than both of us put together, throwing just enough light to navigate by and not enough to wake anyone who's managed to fall asleep, which tonight is exactly one person in this house and it isn't me.
Trevor's in the doorway of his room. One hand on the frame, the other loose at his side, his body angled like he was on his way somewhere and changed his mind mid-step.
Gray t-shirt and boxers, no socks, his feet bare on the hardwood, and Trevor Hollander barefoot in a dark hallway does something to my chest that belongs in a category I don't have language for.
I come down the hall from the bathroom, still damp from the shower, a towel slung low on my hips, my hair pushed back and dripping onto my shoulders.
The towel smells like the soap Eileen buys, something cheap and floral that doesn't belong on my skin but is the only thing in the house, so it's what I use, and the scent follows me down the hall like a ghost that means well.
We stand there. One beat too long. My jaw is set the way it gets when I'm running something over and not saying it, which is most of the time, and the something tonight is about the size and weight of a cinder block and sits right behind my sternum where my heart should be.
Trevor rolls his shoulder once, slow, working the old wound, and my eyes track the movement without permission, following the line of his body the way they've been following it since I was a kid lying a hand's width from him in a twin bed, pretending not to notice, pretending so hard I almost believed it.
He doesn't move. Doesn't speak. Just stands in his doorway with his hand on the frame and his eyes on my face, and the look he gives me is complicated in a way that would take ten thousand words to unpack, and we don't have ten thousand words.
We have this hallway and this night and whatever comes after, which might be nothing, which might be everything.
I cross the hall. I don't say anything. I put one hand flat against his chest and walk him backward into the room, and he lets me, his body yielding to the pressure of my palm like it's been waiting for exactly this, and the door clicks shut behind us with a softness that feels both deliberate and entirely accidental.
It starts the way it always starts — rough, charged, my hands gripping his jaw, his fingers digging into my hips hard enough to bruise, both of us working out the fear and the adrenaline and the twenty years of almost in the only language we've managed to get fluent in.
His mouth is hot against mine. His stubble scrapes my chin.
The towel hits the floor and neither of us bends for it, because bending means stopping, and stopping is not an option, not tonight, not with the backpacks by the door and the alarm set for six and the weight of tomorrow pressing down on both of us.