“If you hadn’t, I would have.”
“I know.”
Kinsman walked past him without another word.
Later—much later—Joe asked who the man was.
They were sitting in a different building, drinking coffee that tasted like burnt rubber. It was three in the morning. The operation was winding down. People were packing up, getting ready to move out.
"Not ours," Kinsman said.
"And if he files a complaint?"
Kinsman looked at him, calm as ever. "He won't."
Joe wanted to ask more. Wanted to know if the man had been arrested, court-martialed, or sent home.
But he didn't.
Because he already knew the answer.
Men like that didn't file complaints. They just disappeared into the machinery. Reassigned. Transferred. Sent somewhere else where the lines were just as blurry and the oversight just as thin.
And men like Kinsman made sure it happened quietly.
Now, the windshield wipers scraped on the windshield and Joe came back to the present. His hands were on the steering wheel and the snow had thickened.
He eased off the accelerator. Michigan winter didn't forgive impatience.
The memory stayed with him, sharper than it should have been after all these years. Not the violence. That part had been clean.
It was the look on Kinsman's face afterward that wouldn't let go. No emotion. Just a man who had stepped in, corrected a problem, and moved on.
Like it happened all the time.
Joe had told himself then that it was about discipline. About boundaries. About stopping something that shouldn't happen.
But now, driving through the dark and everything falling apart, he wondered if he'd been wrong.
Maybe it hadn't been about discipline at all.
Maybe it had been about control.
About a man who decided what the rules were and enforced them himself, without asking permission, without waiting for orders, without leaving a trail.
A man who operated in the spaces where oversight didn't reach.
A man who made people disappear.
He hadn't questioned why Kinsman never reported it up the chain. Or why no one ever followed up. Or why a man like that kept getting put into situations where the lines were always just a little too blurry.
He should have.
The tires hissed on wet pavement. The forest closed in on both sides, dark and indifferent.
The snow was falling harder now. The windshield wipers struggled to keep up. The road ahead was a tunnel of white, narrowing with every mile.
Joe kept driving, alone with the road and wondered what had happened to Bill Kinsman, if anything. Maybe the task force was wrong.
