Chapter 16
Wade was cheating. Cara was almost sure of it.
They’d been playing poker for two hours—Texas Hold ’Em, dealer’s choice, using a bag of dried pinto beans Reagan found in the pantry as chips because nobody had thought to pack actual poker chips for a missing person investigation on the Oregon coast. The kitchen table was covered in cards, coffee mugs, and the remains of a gas station run that had produced beef jerky, two bags of Doritos, and a sleeve of Oreos that Reagan was working through with quiet determination.
It was four in the afternoon. They’d been waiting since morning.
Tom’s laptop sat open on the counter behind him, angled so he could see the screen from his chair. Pirelli’s phone was quiet. Had been quiet all day.
Wade pushed a neat stack of beans to the center. “Raise.”
Reagan studied her cards. “You’ve raised every hand for the last forty minutes.”
“Confidence.”
“Bullying.” She tossed in her beans anyway. “Call.”
Tom folded without looking up. His eyes kept drifting to the laptop. His right knee bounced under the table.
“We should be doing something,” he said. Not for the first time.
“Like what?” Cara asked, rearranging her beans into tidy columns.
“Like anything. I don’t know. Talk to some more people. Anything but sit here.”
Cards tight to her chest, Reagan blinked at him. “Did I just hear the King of Data say we should head outside?”
“This waiting is eating me up.” Tom shrugged sheepishly.
“The crash site,” Wade said immediately. “I want to walk the terrain below the guardrail. There’s a drainage pattern I noticed on the map that—”
Reagan held up another Oreo. “Or we surveil the hospital. Shift changes. Visitor logs. Someone at that facility knows something and is dying to tell it.”
Cara shook her head. “We go poking around Pacific Crest again, Graham’s people will know within the hour.
We spooked them once. They’ll be watching.
” She looked at her cards. Pair of sevens.
Not great. Not nothing. “We wait. Tom’s monitoring is our best lead right now.
If these guys are as panicked as those texts suggest, they’ll set up a meet. And when they do, we’ll be ready.”
“If,” Tom said.
“When,” Cara said.
Wade flipped the river card. King of diamonds. Cara watched his face for any reaction and got absolutely nothing. The man had been trained somewhere a long time ago to maintain composure under mortar fire. She was not going to read him over a pair of sevens.
She folded.
Reagan eye her over her own cards. “You know what I’ve been thinking about? The fact that you called Gabe this morning to report on the Voss situation and stayed on the phone for eleven minutes.”
Cara’s jaw tightened. “It was a debrief.”
Reagan scoffed. “Tom debriefs Gabe in four. Wade debriefs him in two, because Wade considers adjectives optional. Eleven minutes means either the Voss situation was significantly more complex than you described to us, or—”
“Or you were just talking,” Tom finished, without looking up from the laptop.
“I was providing context.”
“Uh huh.”
Wade pushed more beans forward. “Raise.”
“Wade, you cannot raise during someone else’s emotional crisis,” Reagan said.
“I’m not having an emotional crisis,” Cara said.
“I can raise whenever I want,” Wade said. “That’s literally how poker works.”
Reagan ignored him. She turned to Cara with the expression she reserved for moments when she was about to be kind and devastating in equal measure.
“He likes you. You like him. Everyone in Haven Cove knows it. Diane asked me about it last week. Piper texts me about it daily. This is not classified information, Cara.”
Cara set her cards down. “Gabe and I can’t be a thing.”
Tom’s knee stopped bouncing. Reagan’s Oreo paused halfway to her mouth. Even Wade’s expression shifted—a subtle rearrangement that on anyone else would have been a dramatic change.
Reagan chose her words with the care of a woman walking through a minefield. “He knows you’ve got a past. Clearly, he doesn’t care.”
“That’s not it.” Cara heard her own voice go flat and didn’t try to fix it.
“Everyone in Haven Cove has baggage. That’s half the reason people end up there.
But my baggage—” She stopped. Started again.
“My baggage could take Gabe down. Not inconvenience him. Not complicate his life. Take him down. His career, his reputation, his ability to stay in the town he’s building a life in. I won’t put him in that position.”
The table was quiet. Outside, the rain did its relentless thing against the windows.
Tom’s voice was low, measured. “He’s a grown man. He gets to decide what risks are worth taking.”
“Not if he doesn’t know what the risks are.”
Another silence. Reagan looked at Tom. Tom looked at his laptop. Wade looked at his cards, but he wasn’t seeing them.
After the silence, Wade straightened his bean pile with one finger. “Deep baggage. Everybody at this table’s carrying the kind that could get you dead. Or locked up. Or disappeared. We’re all still here.”
A sound from the counter—bright, electronic, insistent. Tom’s laptop. He was out of his chair before the second ping, crossing the kitchen in three strides, leaning over the screen with both hands flat on the counter.
“What is it?” she asked.
He held up one finger. Reading. He turned the laptop around. “This might be showtime, kids. Pirelli just got a text from the burner. They’re setting up a meet. Tonight.”
He read the exchange aloud.
Have you found her?
No.
She has the vial. If she talks to anyone, we’re finished.
I know.
Trailhead. Mile marker 47. After dark. Come alone.
Wade dropped his cards and rose. “Eyes only. No engagement. We observe. We identify. We leave.”
“Agreed,” Cara said. “Tom, you monitor from here. Track both phones. If either of them moves off-script, I want to know.”
“Reagan stays with me,” Tom said. “Backup comms. If something goes sideways, you’ll need someone on this end who can coordinate.”
They moved into the rhythm of preparation. Wade checked the car. Cara changed into dark clothes, boots with tread, nothing reflective. Reagan tested the comms equipment—two earpieces, short-range, encrypted. Cara had learned not to ask Tom how.
Tom double-checked Reagan’s earpiece before handing it over. His fingers lingered on the frequency dial a beat longer than necessary.
Reagan looked at him. “I know how radios work, Tom.”
“Just—”
He didn’t finish. She touched his wrist. “I know.”
Cara watched the exchange and felt something tighten behind her sternum. Not jealousy—recognition. The ache of watching two people reach for each other without hesitation.
Cara got in the car. Wade pulled onto the highway without turning on the headlights. The darkness swallowed them.