Donovan was quiet for a long beat. “That’s not how a cop talks to a source.”
“No. It’s not.”
“And now he’s going from place to place, all somehow connected to the drug syndicate.”
“Exactly.”
The line went quiet again. I could hear Donovan breathing, could almost hear him running back through every interaction we’d had with Seth Briggson since we’d arrived in Summit Falls and watching the picture change.
“And now you’re telling me that the cranky asshole with a charity habit might have been our dirty cop all along.”
“Yes. Martinez was either a patsy or shit timing.”
Another silence. Longer this time.
“You need me back there?” No hesitation. No qualifications. Just the question.
“Not yet. You couldn’t get here in time right now anyway. Let me see where this goes.”
“Copy. Be careful. If he’s what you think he is, he’s been doing it a long time, and he knows how to handle himself.”
“I will.”
The call ended. I set the phone on the console and kept driving.
Jolly had rested his chin on his front paws, his breathing steady, his eyes half closed. Not sleeping. Just conserving, theway he’d always done on long ops. Saving himself for whatever came next.
Briggson hit a third location. A duplex on the south side, windows dark, driveway empty. Same pattern. In and out in under two minutes, his face harder when he came back than when he’d gone in.
I didn’t call Jace again. The pattern was established. Every stop was brief, every location connected to previous narcotics offenses. Briggson was searching for something or someone. The way he checked doors and windows, the way he peered into darkened rooms and came back empty-handed each time, looked less like a cop working contacts and more like a man turning over every rock he could find.
Then he turned onto a road I didn’t recognize, heading south past the commercial district into a stretch of town where the buildings got lower and the lots got emptier. The streetlights thinned. A storage facility on the left. A gas station shuttered for the night on the right.
He pulled into the lot of a motel. Single story, exterior doors with numbers, sign were missing letters. A vending machine near the office glowed a sickly yellow against the fading light.
He parked and went inside. Unit seven. The door was unlocked. He walked straight in and didn’t come back out.
I parked at the far end of the lot and waited.
Five minutes. Nothing.
Fifteen minutes. The door stayed closed.
Every other stop had been quick—checking a location and moving on. This time, Briggson had gone inside and stayed, and the length of it changed the calculation entirely.
Jolly shifted in the back seat. He’d been in the vehicle for over an hour now, patient as always, but I could see the restlessness building. I cracked the rear windows on both sides to let the evening air through and ran my hand along his flank.
“Easy, boy. Hang tight.”
He pressed his nose into my palm and settled.
I was a contractor, not a cop. I had no badge, no warrant, no authority to enter that room. Briggson was armed and trained, and if he was what I now suspected, he’d spent months operating under pressure without getting caught, which meant he could think clearly in tight situations. If I walked through that door and he decided I was a threat, the confrontation would happen fast, and it would happen close.
I had no backup. Donovan was in Denver. Rawlings didn’t know where I was. Nobody did.
None of that changed what was on the other side of that door. And none of it was enough to keep me in the truck.
I opened the door and stepped out.
