Chapter 4
A voice drifted through layers of darkness. Muffled. Sound through water. Male. Familiar, but . . . blurred in the fog that had become Stryker’s world.
Move. Open your eyes. Do something.
Nothing. His body remained a prison. Unresponsive to every command his mind screamed.
“I’m sorry, Stryker.” The voice carried regret. “This wasn’t supposed to go this way.”
Who are you? What happened?
He tried to force his eyelids open. C’mon, muscles. Respond.
The effort exhausted him. Consciousness began to slip away like sand through fingers.
Fingers. Move your fingers.
Were they moving? He couldn’t tell. The disconnect between intention and action had become absolute. His toes. Could he feel them?
The question dissolved, and darkness pulled him deeper.
Twenty-six years melted away.
“Third donut, King? How do you stay so skinny eating like that?”
Stryker glanced at Damien Sullivan across the patrol car’s center console. His partner’s gut strained against his uniform shirt, the buttons working overtime. Steam rose from their coffee cups in the October chill.
“Maybe you should trade beers for dumbbells,” Stryker said. “Then you could lift more than your cup, there.”
Damien snorted into his coffee. “Funny. Real funny.” He gestured at the donut box between them. “Seriously, though. Your metabolism’s unnatural. You eat twice as much as me and look like you stepped off a magazine cover.”
“Yeah, Mad magazine maybe.” Stryker pushed the last bite of donut into his mouth and wiped his glazed fingers on a crumpled napkin.
Damien laughed, and Stryker listened to the dispatch chatter. Three a.m. in Millie Beach meant mostly quiet streets, domestic disturbances, and the occasional drunk driver. This time, dispatch reported a shift change.
“How’d your fight go last weekend? You never told me,” Damien said.
“Good. Real good.” The buzz of the fight hadn’t worn off.
The crowd. The lights. That perfect combo of leg kick, jab, teep, and overhand right that dropped his opponent in the second round.
He’d trained that combo a thousand times, but man, it felt incredible to watch it land just like it was supposed to.
Earned him another interview with Martial Arts magazine. His fourth in the last year.
“That thud when the guy hit the mat? Best sound in the world.”
“Ah dude, wish I’d been there. It must be cool to watch a guy go down like that and know it was your fists that did it.”
Stryker had to admit, some part of him lived for it. But underneath sat something else. Something he didn’t want to examine too closely. Better to focus on the last glazed chocolate. Two bites and it was gone.
“Scouts showed up. International promotion.” He brushed crumbs from his uniform pants.
Damien’s coffee cup froze halfway to his lips. “Scouts? What kind of scouts?”
“The kind setting up a meeting Thursday.” The words tasted better than the donut. “They want to discuss opportunities.”
Damien whistled. “That’s big time. Like, pay-per-view big time.”
“Could be.” The empty street stretched ahead through the windshield. A streetlight flickered overhead, throwing broken shadows across the cracked asphalt. On. Off. On. Off. The rhythm matched the uncertainty bouncing around his head. “They’re talking contracts. Travel. Real money.”
“What about this?” Damien’s thick fingers swept toward the dashboard, the radio, the badge clipped to Stryker’s chest. “Your career? You’re good police, King. Better than most of the nitwits we work with. You just gonna quit?”
The question had been chewing at him for weeks.
He’d pinned on this badge to make a difference, to stand between decent people and the garbage that preyed on them.
Some shifts, he walked away knowing he’d done exactly that.
Lately, though . . . Too many nights like this one, sitting in a patrol car eating donuts while the real problems festered in places his badge couldn’t reach.
He took a sip of coffee that burned down his throat, buying him a few seconds to sort through the mess in his head.
They caught the dealers. Locked up a few wife beaters.
Pulled drunk drivers off the road before they killed somebody.
But every arrest felt like slapping a bandage on a severed artery.
“We’re catching bad guys, keeping people safe. But . . . I don’t know . . . There’s got to be more than just arresting perps and putting them behind bars.”
“More how?”
“Reaching people before they become criminals. Helping the ones headed down the wrong path. Kids especially.”
Kids like Aaron. Thirteen years old, already running drugs for his older brother. Three more years and he’d graduate to adult prison. Where was the intervention for kids like that?
Damien’s eyebrows climbed toward his receding hairline. “And you think full-contact combat sports is the answer?”
A piece of sugar glaze clung to his uniform shirt.
He picked it off and dropped it in the donut box, watching it land among the crumbs.
One scout had talked about marketing himself through community outreach programs and youth training centers.
Places where kids could learn discipline instead of destruction.
Better to strap gloves on their fists than wait in a cruiser for the next body to drop.
If character took root while he was at it, even better.
“I just feel like my heart isn’t completely in this anymore.” He shrugged. “Like God’s preparing me for something different.”
“God.” Damien huffed but kept his thoughts to himself. For once.
“Unit 47, this is Dispatch. Do you copy?”
Damien grabbed the radio. “47, go ahead.”
“Unit 47, respond to 5486 Flores Drive. Possible burglary in progress. Neighbor reports male subject fleeing residence.”
“10-4, Dispatch, 47 en route.” Damien shoved the shifter forward, tires spitting gravel as the cruiser lunged into the dark.
Less than ten minutes later, Stryker stepped out of the patrol car. One hand on his service weapon, the other holding his heavy-duty flashlight. He scanned the exterior while Damien radioed their arrival.
The house on Flores was a single-story ranch with a two-car garage.
Standard white stucco with black colonial hurricane shutters.
It sat dark except for a yellow porch light throwing a jaundiced glow that pulled in moths and gnats, wings pattering against the bulb.
Windows showed nothing. The air held nothing.
Driveway bare. House sealed tight, waiting.
“Back door.” Stryker jerked his flashlight toward the rear.
Damien dipped his chin once. No extra talk. They’d run this play too many times to need it.
Stryker cut along the siding, heels rolling soft, body low under the windows. Curtains hung still. No movement. He eased to the corner where the fence met the stucco and lifted just enough to scan over. Pool water caught the rear porch light in a dull shimmer. Empty deck. Empty yard.
He pushed through the gate, cleared each corner, then stopped at the sliding glass door. A gap no wider than a fist cut the black frame. An invitation no homeowner ever meant to give.
His radio crackled. Damien’s clipped words came through: “In position.”
Stryker raised his weapon, tracked the sight line across the frame, and closed the last feet to the door. The glass threw his outline back at him. A black figure, gun leveled. He tipped his head to the narrow gap, listening.
Nothing. The house held its breath.
He thumbed the mic. “Ready.”
A pause. Then Damien: “Three. Two. One.”
Stryker shoved the door wide and slid inside, muzzle up, flashlight braced beneath the barrel, weight pitched to the balls of his feet.
The dining room opened in front of him. A polished wood table, six stiff-backed chairs aligned like soldiers. China stacked behind glass, untouched. Nothing broken. No overturned chairs. No rush of violence had swept through here.
He moved on. Boots groaned against tile as he cut around the corner into the kitchen.
Square room, the island dead center. Stove jammed into the counter run on the right.
Refrigerator sunk into the wall on the left, its white face smudged with handprints.
Beyond it, the sink cut into the counter, positioned to stare out over the inky water of the pool.
Stryker paused in the kitchen. Something was off. Too still.
The radio crackled. “Living room clear.”
Stryker moved down the narrow hall linking front to back.
His shoulder brushed bare drywall. The hall ran narrow and undecorated, the kind of stripped quiet that came before something terrible.
No family portraits. No framed school pictures.
Just nail holes and bare paint, like someone had scraped the life off the walls.
The carpet muffled his bootsteps as he slowed at the first door.
Bunk beds against the wall. Picture books spread belly-down on the floor.
Plastic dolls and dinosaurs frozen mid-battle.
The air tasted of crayon wax. He yanked the closet open.
Ran his hand over the child-sized clothes on hangers. Nothing.
The second bedroom held a crib against the far wall.
Changing table lined with folded blankets.
A rocking chair angled in the corner like it had been set in place and left.
Everything spotless. No bottles tipped over, no toys dumped, no faint wail cracking the silence.
Empty crib. Empty room. Where was the baby?
“Stryker,” Damien yelled. “Master bedroom. Now.”
He rushed down the hall, drawn to the thin wash of light leaking from the open doorway. The copper stench struck before he crossed the threshold.
Blood. Lots of it.
The bedroom reeked of iron and death.
Damien braced a hand on the bed, bent over the woman sprawled across the mattress.
Blood soaked the sheets and pooled beneath her torso, then ran off the mattress edge in a slow ribbon, spreading across the hardwood in a glossy black sheet.
Stryker’s boots stuck a half-second with each step.
Knife wounds striped her back in jagged slashes, the flesh torn open.
Black hair clumped in wet strands spreading across the pillow.
“She’s gone.” Damien straightened, his hand flexing once before he pointed to the floor. “Other side.”
A man lay collapsed on his back, body twisted as if he’d fallen mid-struggle.
His chest hitched, shallow draws dragging air in and out.
His throat was hacked nearly through, and the cut yawned wide from one ear to the other.
Blood seeped with each faint throb of his heartbeat, pumping onto the hardwood, stretching the pool wider.
Stryker shoved his weapon into its holster and dropped to his knees beside him.
The man’s skin had gone slack and colorless, and his pulse flickered at the edge of nothing.
CPR would blast the rest of his blood onto the floor.
Pointless. He snatched a blanket from the bed’s footrail, crushed it against the wound, and leaned his weight into the pressure.
The cloth drank the blood instantly, blooming red beneath his hands.
“This is Unit 47.” He jammed the transmit button, his other hand locked on the wound, blanket squelching blood through his fingers. “Need paramedics, homicide, and backup. Two down. One critical.”
The man’s lids twitched open. No focus in them, just a cloudy glaze. Bubbles leaked at his mouth, a guttural gurgle sliding out before his chin sagged. Still breathing. Barely. The pulse under Stryker’s fingers fluttered like moth wings against glass, but it was there.
“No.” Stryker shoved harder. “Breathe. Stay with me. You don’t stop here.”
Across the room, Damien’s voice cut sharp. “King. Over here.”
Stryker flicked his gaze up. Damien stood planted at the closet door, his stare locked past the dangling clothes. Hands loose at his sides, jaw bunched. Not much rattled Damien, yet his skin looked bleached in the lamplight.
“I can’t leave him,” Stryker said, still grinding down on the pressure.
Damien crossed the room and dropped to a knee beside him. He pressed two fingers to the man’s neck, held them there a beat too short, and pulled Stryker’s hands off the wound.
“He’s already gone, King.”
Stryker felt the faintest twitch under his palm before Damien’s grip pulled him clear. A breath. Maybe. Or the body unclenching, as Damien said it was over. He couldn’t tell anymore.
Abandoning the man somehow still felt like desertion. But Stryker couldn’t save him. No one could. He stayed on his knees a beat longer, then rocked back, rose, and crossed the room.
Stryker froze.
The closet wasn’t empty. A girl—tiny, no more than four—was curled into the corner, swallowed by hanging clothes. Her knees vanished beneath stick-thin arms. She rocked, steady as a pendulum, back and forth, back and forth, as if the motion alone kept her anchored.
He sank to both knees again, close but not crowding her. “Hey, sweetheart. You’re safe. Nobody’s going to touch you.”
No flicker in her eyes. No shift in her rhythm. The world beyond her rocking didn’t seem to exist.
Stryker cut a look at Damien. The man stood stone still, saying nothing. The house pressed in with silence, broken only by the fan whirring overhead and the ghostly hiss of air escaping the dead man sprawled on the floor.