Then he pulled into a gas station. Parked at the edge of the lot, away from the pumps. Didn’t get out.
“He’s checking his mirrors,” Donovan said.
We drove past without slowing. I watched through the side mirror as Reeves sat motionless, his head turning slowly, scanning the lot and the road behind him.
Two blocks later, Donovan pulled over.
Thirty seconds passed. Reeves pulled out of the gas station and took two turns in quick succession, then parked on a dark residential street and killed his lights.
He’d made us. Same headlights in your rearview for two hours, even at a distance, tripped something in the trained brain.
“Decision time,” Donovan said. “Pull off and lose him or commit.”
If we pulled off, Reeves would know someone had been following him. He’d tighten his patterns, and our window would close. If we committed, we’d have to explain why two Citadel contractors were tailing an off-duty officer through Summit Falls at ten o’clock at night.
But we’d also be confronting a man we now believed was connected to the drug syndicate. A man who carried a weapon and had every reason to use it if he thought his operation was exposed.
“We commit,” I said.
Donovan pulled up behind the Civic and parked. We got out.
Reeves was already standing beside the driver’s door. His right hand hovered near his waistband—not on the weapon in his holster, but close enough that the distance could disappear in a fraction of a second. The nearest streetlight was half a block away, and in the wash of ambient dark, his face was all hard angles and shadow.
We stopped ten feet out. Hands visible. No sudden movements. Two men approaching an armed cop on a dark street, each side holding a piece of a calculation the other couldn’t see.
He recognized us. The hand near his waistband dropped an inch, but it didn’t leave the vicinity. The tension didn’t break, but it shifted, cycling through something I could trackin the set of his shoulders: fear dissolving into confusion, confusion hardening into anger.
“You’ve been following me.” Not a question.
“Shane.” I kept my voice even. Donovan held a position slightly to my left. Not flanking. Just present.
“The hell is this?” His jaw was tight, and his feet had shifted into a wider stance—weight balanced, ready to move. A young cop’s training overriding whatever else he was feeling. “You’ve been on me all night. I spotted the same headlights an hour ago and figured I was paranoid. But here you are.”
“We noticed some unusual patterns. Wanted to make sure everything was okay.”
“Unusual patterns.” He repeated it back like I’d insulted him. “What does that even mean? You’re not my supervisor. You’re not cops.”
“We’re concerned. That’s all.”
“Concerned about what exactly?”
I glanced past him into the Civic’s back seat. Close enough now to see what I hadn’t been able to make out from two cars back. Insulated bags. The kind with handles, zippered tops. Several of them, some flat, some still holding their shape around whatever was inside.
“What are the bags, Shane?”
His hand finally came away from his waistband. Not because the tension broke, but because what replaced the anger on his face required a different posture entirely. A loosening around the eyes, a collapse in the set of his shoulders that looked less like guilt and more like the particular misery of a man watching his dignity walk out the door.
He looked at the bags. Looked at me. Looked at Donovan.
“It’s not what you think.”
“What do we think?”
He rubbed a hand over his face and leaned against the Civic. Crossed his arms, then uncrossed them, then shoved his hands into his jacket pockets. He couldn’t figure out what to do with his body because the shame had taken up all the available space.
“DashDrop,” he said.
Donovan straightened. “The delivery app?”
