24. Maxim
MAXIM
The call came in while I was still shaking a supplier's hand over a deal that had taken longer to close than it should have.
Kirill's voice on the other end had none of its usual patience. "The Ashland shipment took a hit twenty minutes ago. Sully's down. It's bad, Maxim."
I don't remember ending that call. I remember the drive, the terminal gates rushing up faster than I'd taken them in years, and the smell that met me before I even got the car door open, smoke and diesel and something underneath both of those I recognized immediately and wished I didn't.
Men moved fast across the loading dock, some of them still coughing from whatever had gone up, others dragging crates clear of a fire that hadn't fully caught but clearly wanted to.
A crane sat frozen mid arc above the wreck of a container that had been split clean open, its contents scattered and half burned across the concrete, and somewhere past the fire trucks I could hear someone shouting for more water like the two hoses already running weren't enough.
Kirill met me at the door of the room we used when a man got hurt badly enough that a real hospital would ask questions none of us wanted answered.
"How bad?" I said, already moving past him.
"Bad enough that Doc's been in there fifteen minutes and hasn't come out to update anyone." Kirill fell into step beside me, matching my pace without being asked. "Shrapnel. Leg's the worst of it. He was closest to the container when it went."
The room we walked into had been a break room a year and a half ago, with folding tables and a coffee machine nobody had ever cleaned properly.
Now it held a man laid out on a table built for lunch trays, blood soaking through a bandage faster than Doc could replace it, and Sofia kneeling beside him with both hands pressed to his shoulder like she could hold the whole situation together through sheer force of will.
"Maxim." She didn't look up. "He's asking for you."
"You're going to be fine," she said to him first, her voice low and steady, the kind a person used when they needed to believe their own promise as much as the man hearing it did. "You hear me? Fine."
"Bossy, for someone who still can't tell a bollard from a cleat." Sully's laugh turned into a wince halfway through it, and Sofia's hand tightened on his shoulder like she could absorb some of the pain for him.
"I learned bollard from cleat weeks ago. Keep up."
Sully O'Malley had worked that dock longer than I'd been alive, a broad, weathered man who'd taught half my crew how to read a manifest before I'd ever met most of them, and who'd taken to Sofia in her first month with the same gruff affection older men always seemed to save for people they'd quietly decided to protect.
"Hey, boss." Sully's voice came out thin, stretched over pain he was clearly trying to keep out of it. "Tell your driver he owes me a new jacket. This one's ruined."
"I'll have three sent over."
"Cheap. I liked this one."
Doc worked without looking up, hands steady despite the blood. "He's stable enough for now. I need him quiet and I need this room clear in about ninety seconds."
I crouched by the table anyway, just long enough to grip Sully's hand once, hard. "You did nothing wrong out there."
"Didn't feel like nothing." His eyes found mine, sharper than the morphine should have allowed. "Whoever did this. You make them regret it."
"I intend to."
Sofia stood when I did, and something in her face had gone flat and focused in a way I hadn't seen from her before, none of the softness that usually lived there when the subject was violence.
Kirill pulled me into the hallway before I'd fully turned around. "Upstairs. Now."
The war room hadn't changed in the twelve years since I'd inherited it, the same long table scarred with cigarette burns older than half the men who used it, maps of the docks and the surrounding blocks pinned up in overlapping layers that told the whole history of every line we'd ever drawn and defended.
Kirill spread a fresh one across the table, marking a red circle around the container bay with a pen that shook slightly in his hand, the only sign he gave that any of this had rattled him.
"Whoever hit us knew exactly which container to target." He tapped the circle. "Not random. Not opportunistic. Somebody told them which crate mattered."
"Doyle."
"Doyle's fingerprints, Doyle's timing. He's been itching for an excuse since the Ashland meeting." Kirill's jaw worked once. "This is him answering the door we left open."
Yuri and Pavel filed in behind us, both quieter than I'd ever seen either of them, Yuri's usual restlessness replaced by something coiled and waiting.
"Tell me there's already a name," Yuri said, dropping into a chair like sitting still was costing him something. "Because I've got a very short list of people I want to hurt right now and an even shorter amount of patience for waiting on it."
"Sit down and let Kirill work, and you'll have both faster."
"I am sitting."
"I want every man Doyle's put on the water this week," I said. "Names, faces, where they sleep. I want it by morning."
"Morning's optimistic," Pavel said.
"Morning's the deadline. Make it less optimistic."
Kirill was already writing, fast, efficient, the tremor gone from his hand the second he had something useful to do with it. "And once we have names?"
"Then we remind Doyle exactly why nobody's tested that line in twelve years."
"He's going to come back harder," Pavel said quietly. "Men like Doyle don't send one message. They send three."
"Then we make sure he doesn't get the chance to send a second.
" I looked at the map, at every warehouse and gate marked in decades of overlapping ink, and understood exactly how much I was choosing to risk by answering violence with more of it.
"Kirill, extra men on the compound tonight.
Everyone. Elena, Sully's family, all of it. "
"Already moving on it."
The room settled around that sentence the way it always did once a decision stopped being a question, and I turned to find Sofia standing just inside the doorway, arms crossed, watching all of it without the flinch I'd half expected out of habit.
"You're not going to tell me to wait downstairs," she said.
"Would it work if I did?"
"No."
"Then I'm not going to waste the breath." I studied her a moment, the stillness in her that hadn't been there the first time she'd watched me handle a problem like this. "You're not flinching."
"Sully's hurt. I'm past flinching." Her voice stayed even, but something underneath it had gone hard in a way I recognized, because I'd built my whole life out of that exact same hardness. "I want to help find whoever did this."
Kirill's pen stopped moving. "Find them how?"
"You're looking at who Doyle's put on the water.
I'd start with who had access to the shipment schedule outside this building.
" She crossed to the map, tracing a line from the gate to the container bay with one finger.
"Whoever hit that specific crate knew the route and the timing both.
That's not dock gossip. That's somebody who saw the manifest."
"That's an investigator's read," Kirill said, something careful entering his voice.
"That's common sense." She didn't look at him when she said it, kept her eyes on the map instead. "I've spent six weeks learning how this place runs. I notice things."
I watched her trace that line a second time, watched the exact angle of her attention, methodical in a way that had nothing accidental about it, and felt something shift into place that I couldn't yet name, some new weight added to what I was willing to believe she could carry.
"She's not wrong," I said, before Kirill could push further. "Get her the shipment logs from the last month. If she sees something we missed, I want to know about it before Doyle does."
Kirill held my eyes a beat longer than the moment strictly needed, some old argument sitting behind them that he'd promised not to raise again, and then nodded once and went back to his notes without another word.
We worked until the maps were covered in red ink and half the table had gone cold with coffee nobody had time to drink, names surfacing and getting crossed out, a pattern slowly closing in on three men Doyle trusted enough to hand a job like this one.
Sofia stayed through all of it, quiet, sharp, asking exactly the right questions at exactly the moments that mattered, and somewhere in the middle of it I stopped noticing that a woman was standing in a room built for men who solved problems with worse things than paperwork, because she'd simply stopped being anything but useful in it.
The room had mostly thinned out by the time she leaned over my shoulder to point at something on the manifest I'd already looked at twice, Yuri and Pavel gone to start running down names, Kirill still hunched over the last of the logs.
"There," she said. "That delivery window. Nobody moves cargo that late unless somebody told them exactly when the container would be light on watchers."
I looked at where she was pointing, then at her, a beat too long. The quick certainty in her face was familiar by now, sharper every week since the night I first let her sit in a room like this one.
"All right, Detective." The word left me before I'd fully weighed it, some easy half compliment that felt natural right up until it wasn't, and I heard it land wrong the second it cleared my mouth.
I covered the gap fast, forcing a short laugh into my own voice.
"You've clearly spent too many nights reading crime files instead of sleeping. "
"Too much true crime, that's all." She laughed too, quick and half a second behind mine, quick enough that neither of us had to look at how close the timing actually was.
Kirill didn't look up from his notes, but I caught the stillness in him anyway, the kind he wore when he'd heard something and decided not to comment on it yet.
I let the moment pass, because pushing at it would have meant admitting there was something there worth pushing at, and some part of me still preferred not knowing over finding out I'd been right.
"Get some sleep," I told her, quieter now, the war room emptying out around us. "Tomorrow's going to be long."
"I'm not tired."
"I didn't ask if you were tired. I asked you to sleep anyway."
She almost smiled at that, tired despite what she'd just claimed, and reached for her jacket without arguing further, which told me more than the argument would have.
I stayed behind after she left, staring at a map covered in names that would all be dead or worse within the week, and let myself think, just for a moment, about the exact sound of the word Detective leaving my mouth before I'd decided to say it.
Twenty years of reading rooms had taught me that a mind rarely handed a man a mistake like that one without a reason underneath it.
I didn't examine the reason, not yet.
She'd read that manifest the way Kirill read men, fast and certain, without a single wasted second, and the old, suspicious part of me wanted to know exactly where a woman with a folded freight company on her résumé had learned to do that so well.
I folded the map instead, turned off the light, and went to check on Sully one more time before I let myself sleep on any of it.