I’d seen it before. In the field, at restaurants, once at a gas station when someone dropped a metal trash can lid. The sound didn’t matter. What mattered was the split second when Donovan’s body went somewhere his mind couldn’t follow and the effort it cost him to drag himself back.
There were other things I’d noticed. The drinking. Not falling down, never that, but the nightly self-medication of a man who’d found one reliable way to quiet his own head. The way he looked in the mornings sometimes, eyes hollow, face tight, like he’d spent the night in a country he couldn’t talk about. The walls that went up hard and fast anytime the conversation drifted toward Afghanistan or what had happened on his final deployment.
I didn’t push. Didn’t bring up any of it. He’d tell me when he was ready, or he wouldn’t.
“Ethan’s been talking about a situation in Kenya,” Donovan said. His tone was casual, forward-looking, the verbal equivalent of a shrug. “Security detail for an NGO or something. He needs someone with tactical experience and K9 knowledge for threat assessment.”
“When?”
“After this wraps. Month, maybe two.”
“And after Kenya?”
“After Kenya, there’ll be something else.” He said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “That’s how thework goes. That’s how you guys talked me into drinking the Citadel Solutions Kool-Aid.”
It was how the work went, and it was why Citadel was a good fit for Donovan. It was also how a man avoided standing still long enough to hear whatever was chasing him. Standing still meant thinking. Thinking meant facing whatever had happened in Afghanistan that had taken the man I’d served with and put something heavier in his place.
“Well,” I said. “I’m glad you’re here now.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then, softer than I expected, he said, “Yeah. Me too.”
Reeves started moving again. Another house, another handoff at the door. I was logging the address when Donovan leaned forward.
“Hold on. That duplex he just hit—the brown one with the carport.”
“What about it?”
“I’ve seen that address before. Jace’s files on Porter. That’s one of his rental properties.”
I looked at the list of addresses on my phone. Seven stops so far. I couldn’t match them all from memory, but Donovan had spent more time with Porter’s property records than I had, and his recall for details like that bordered on photographic.
“You sure?”
“Positive. And I think the house on Maple was his too. The one with the chain link fence.” He was already pulling out his phone. “I’m sending the full list to Jace. Let him run them all.”
The reply came in under three minutes.
Donovan read the screen. His expression flattened. “Five out of seven.”
“Five out of seven what?”
“Addresses. Five of the seven locations Reeves has visitedtonight are Porter properties. Rental houses, apartment units.”
The SUV went quiet.
Jonathan Porter. Real estate developer. Suspected financial backer of the drug syndicate Rawlings couldn’t prove a connection to. The man who owned so much of Summit Falls that his name showed up on every other deed in the county.
And now a young cop with a burner phone and unexplained deposits was making nightly rounds to addresses that bore Porter’s name.
“Collecting payments?” Donovan said. “Delivering product?”
“Either one fits. Two phones, evening hours, brief contacts at specific addresses, and five of those addresses trace back to the man Rawlings thinks is bankrolling the whole operation.”
“That sure as shit does not feel like coincidence.”
What had started as cautious surveillance was beginning to look like the connection we’d been hunting for—a direct line between a Summit Falls officer and the suspected syndicate backer. The weight of it settled in the vehicle like a physical thing, pressing down on the night’s earlier patience and replacing it with something colder.
Reeves left his latest stop and headed south. Longer stretch this time. No turns, no stops, just the Civic moving through empty streets at a steady pace.
