23. Sofia
SOFIA
Callahan had picked a different diner this time, a place with a laminated menu still sticky from someone else's syrup and a bell over the door that announced me louder than I wanted to be announced.
He wasn't alone.
The man beside him wore a suit that fit too well for a diner booth, his hair gray at the temples, his stillness the kind that came from a career spent making other people nervous instead of the other way around.
"Reyes." Callahan slid over to make room, though nobody had asked me to sit yet. "This is Sanders. He runs the joint task force side of your case."
"I didn't know there was a joint task force side of my case."
"There's a version of every case that runs long enough to make the people funding it nervous.
" Sanders didn't offer a hand, just a flat, assessing look that took me in the way a man takes inventory of something he's already decided he doesn't need.
"Sit down, Miss Reyes. We have a few things to discuss. "
I sat, because the alternative was standing in a diner arguing with a man whose rank I hadn't fully clocked yet, and because some instinct older than training told me this conversation was going to happen whether I was sitting or not.
"Fifty days left," Sanders said, sliding a folder across the table that he didn't open and didn't need to. "Ninety day operation, no wire active, no recordings, no documented contact beyond one photographed manifest that a defense attorney would shred in about four minutes. That's what we have."
"I've been building something that holds up. That takes time."
"Time is the one thing this operation doesn't have anymore.
" He folded his hands on top of the folder, patient in the specific way of a man who had already decided the outcome of the conversation before it started.
"I've read your reports, Reyes. I've read Callahan's assessments of your reports.
Neither one of you seems to understand that patience has a shelf life with the people funding this. "
"I understand it fine."
"Then understand this too. There's another option on the table, and it's not a good one, but it's the one that gets used if this drags much further without results.
" Sanders' voice stayed level, no threat in the tone, which somehow made the words underneath it worse.
"We pull you, and we put someone in who isn't spending six weeks worried about the target's feelings. "
My stomach dropped somewhere I couldn't immediately locate.
"Someone reckless."
"Someone who gets the job done the way jobs like this used to get done, before departments started worrying so much about building the perfect case.
Loud. Fast. A wire on day one whether it's smart or not, an arrest the second there's enough on tape to justify one, cleanup after instead of caution before.
" He said it like a man reciting a menu, no relish in it, which was somehow worse than if he'd enjoyed it.
"Somebody who doesn't care if the whole house comes down around them, as long as the right names end up in the indictment. "
I thought about that house. I thought about Elena stealing chips off Kirill's stack, about Yuri's terrible boat stories, about Pavel's four hundred words spent generously on someone who wasn't even blood, about a man on a rooftop who'd handed me the realest version of himself I'd ever gotten from anyone.
"You'd be putting people in danger who don't need to be in it."
"Those people chose a life where danger comes standard, Miss Reyes.
Nobody's putting them anywhere they didn't already agree to stand.
" Sanders' eyes didn't move off mine. "I don't lose sleep over foremen and drivers.
I lose sleep over a case that costs the department its credibility because the agent assigned to it got comfortable. "
"I'm not comfortable. I'm careful. Those aren't the same thing."
"Convince me of the difference in the next thirty seconds, or I start making calls this afternoon."
Callahan shifted beside him, the first real movement he'd made since I sat down, and something in his face looked almost like he wanted to step between us and couldn't find the doorway to do it.
"She's produced more in six weeks than the last two agents combined produced in six months," Callahan said, quiet, careful. "That's not comfortable. That's competent."
"Competent doesn't close cases on a deadline the department didn't set and can't move." Sanders didn't look at him. "I'm not here to debate her work ethic. I'm here to tell her what happens if the timeline doesn't change."
The diner noise kept going around us, a waitress refilling coffee two booths down, a kid crying somewhere near the register, the whole ordinary world completely uninterested in the fact that a man across a laminated table had just described, casually, the exact way people I'd started loving might end up dead because someone decided patience cost too much.
"What do you actually want from me?"
"Something real. A recording, a document with a name on it that holds up, testimony you can put a face to in front of a jury.
" Sanders finally opened the folder, more for theater than information, and closed it again just as fast. "Something that lets me tell the people above me this case is worth the money it's costing instead of a liability waiting to become a headline. "
"And if I get it?"
"Then you keep your case, and whoever's currently sleeping easier because of how careful you've been keeps sleeping easier a while longer.
" He stood, buttoning his jacket with the unhurried finality of a man who considered the conversation already finished.
"If I don't see something real soon, Miss Reyes, I stop being the reasonable version of this problem.
Ask Callahan what the unreasonable version looks like. "
He left without waiting for a response, the bell over the door announcing his exit the same way it had announced my entrance, and Callahan sat there a moment longer, rubbing a hand over his jaw like he was deciding how much of the next sentence he actually wanted to say out loud.
"He's not wrong about the timeline," Callahan said finally. "I wish he was."
"He's talking about sending in someone who'll get people killed."
"He's talking about a version of this job that used to be the only version, before people like me convinced enough people upstairs that slow and careful actually works.
" He rubbed his eyes, tired in a way I hadn't seen from him before, not procedural tired, something closer to the real thing.
"I believe in what you're doing, Reyes. I need you to believe it fast enough that I don't lose the argument to keep doing it your way. "
"How long do I actually have?"
"Officially, however long it takes for Sanders to lose patience with me personally. Unofficially, less than that." He stood, dropping bills on the table that didn't cover either of our meals, same as always. "Get me something real. Please. That's not a threat. That's me asking."
He left, and I sat there alone in a booth that suddenly felt too big, staring at a menu I had no intention of ordering from, running Sanders' voice back through my head until it lost most of its shape and kept all of its weight.
Nina found me twenty minutes later in the precinct parking lot, leaning against my car like she'd been waiting there specifically to catch me before I could talk myself into driving straight to work instead of eating something first.
"You look like you just got fired," she said, holding out a small white bakery box like it was evidence in a trial only she understood the stakes of.
"Close. I got threatened with being replaced."
"By who, Callahan? He couldn't replace a stapler."
"Callahan's boss. Some guy named Sanders who talks like a spreadsheet learned to breathe."
"Fantastic. I hate him already." She pushed the box into my hands, insistent, the way she got when she'd decided the situation called for a specific kind of intervention. "Open it. I made an executive decision on your behalf."
I opened the box. Inside sat a single cupcake, chocolate, frosted with more care than the situation strictly deserved, block letters piped across the top in bright, cheerful blue.
CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR NERVOUS brEAKDOWN.
I laughed. It came out startled and a little broken, but it was real, the first real one I'd managed in longer than I wanted to admit, and Nina looked so thoroughly pleased with herself that I laughed harder just watching her enjoy it.
"You're insane."
"I'm supportive. There's a difference, and it comes with sprinkles." She leaned against the car beside me, arms crossed, watching me eat frosting off the top like a woman who'd earned exactly this and nothing more sophisticated. "Tell me the actual damage. Not the vague version. The real one."
"Fifty days left, officially. Less than that if I believe the guy who said it."
"And if you don't get whatever they want in time?"
"They pull me and put someone in who doesn't care what gets broken to close the case fast." I set the cupcake down on the hood of the car, appetite gone as fast as it had arrived. "Someone who'll burn the whole house down loud instead of building something quiet."
"That sounds like a threat aimed at you."
"It's aimed at everyone standing near me when it lands.
" I thought about Elena's laugh, about Kirill defending a plate of ruined ribs like his life depended on it, about a rooftop and a man who'd handed me his father's grief like it was the safest thing he owned.
"I used to think about this job as getting Maxim.
One name, one conviction, one clean ending. "
"And now?"
"Now I think about it as keeping everyone in that house alive long enough that somebody worse doesn't get sent in to do it instead.
" The words left me before I'd fully decided to say them, and hearing them out loud made them truer than they'd felt sitting quiet in my chest all morning.
"That's a different job than the one I signed up for. "
Nina studied me for a long moment, no jokes left in her face at all.
"That's a dangerous way to think about a target, Sofia."
"I know."
"I'm not telling you to stop. I'm telling you I see it happening, and I need you to see it too." She bumped her shoulder against mine, gentler than her words had been. "Whatever you're planning, be careful. Sanders sounds like the kind of man who doesn't understand the word."
I didn't answer that directly, because I didn't have an honest answer that wouldn't have worried her more than the cupcake had helped, and she let me get away with the silence the way she usually did when she already knew exactly what it meant.
I drove home with the empty bakery box on the passenger seat and Sanders' voice still sitting somewhere under my ribs, doing math I hadn't let myself finish out loud yet, fifty days on paper and considerably less than that if I was honest about how fast a man like Sanders lost his patience with people he'd already decided were liabilities.
I gave myself seven.
I had seven days to find something real enough to end this the right way, quiet and careful, before someone louder and less patient got sent in to end it another way, the way that left people I'd started loving bleeding out on a floor.
I didn't examine that word too closely, loving.
It had arrived in my head so easily it already sat there next to Elena and Yuri and Pavel and Kirill like it had always belonged.
Somewhere on the drive home I realized I'd stopped thinking of them as a case file long before tonight ever forced me to say it out loud.
Seven days. I set the number and didn't let myself think yet about what it would cost me to keep it.