I carried her toward the stairs. She broke the kiss long enough to look at me, and whatever she saw on my face stripped the last of the composure from hers. Something cracked open behind her eyes, raw and full and certain, and it hit me harder than anything that had happened all night.
“Ben.”
“Yeah.”
She didn’t finish whatever she’d been about to say. Just kissed me again, slower this time, her hand on my jaw, and I carried her up the stairs and into the room where the sheets were still tangled and the night still had hours left in it.
Chapter 21
Ben
Two days later, I was back in the cold.
The weekend with Kayla had been the kind of time I didn’t have a category for. Saturday morning, I’d walked back across the yard before William got home from Trish’s, and by that afternoon, I was at the fence gap watching Jolly and William throw pinecones while Kayla sketched on the deck and pretended she wasn’t watching me. Sunday, she’d brought over coffee, and we’d sat on my front step in the early light, shoulders touching, saying almost nothing, and it had been enough.
Now it was Monday night, and the job had pulled me back to the version of myself that sat in dark vehicles and listened to other people’s secrets.
The building we were watching was located at the edge of town where the streetlights gave up and the imposing mountain’s shadow took over. Single story, flat roof, no sign out front. It could have been a machine shop or a storageunit or absolutely nothing, and nobody driving past would have cared enough to wonder.
Donovan’s SUV was parked fifty yards south, tucked behind a closed laundromat where the lot was empty and the angle gave us a clear view of the building’s only visible entrance. Engine off. Windows cracked an inch. The night air came through sharp and cold, carrying the thin bite of early autumn at altitude.
We’d been here for forty minutes.
Jace’s voice came through the phone propped on the center console, low and precise. “Feed’s almost live. I’m piggybacking off the cellular signal and activating the mic remotely. Martinez’s phone is in his pocket or on a table—either way, it’ll pick up ambient audio in a fifteen-foot radius.”
“Does he have any idea his phone’s been compromised?” Donovan asked.
“The guy doesn’t even have a passcode on his lock screen. He’s using default settings on every app. It’s like breaking in to a house where someone left the front door open and put out a welcome mat.” Keys clattered in the background. “Almost there. Three, two… Okay, you should have audio now.”
A soft pop came through the phone’s speaker. Then static, layered and dense, the sound of a live mic picking up a room full of overlapping noise. Voices. The shuffle of cards. A sharp click, then another. Chips hitting a table surface.
“We’re on,” I said.
“Okay, good luck.” Jace hung up to let us work.
The audio settled into a rhythm. Six voices, maybe seven, talking over one another in the loose cadence of people who were comfortable and not in a hurry. Laughter. Someone calling a bet. The clink of glass against wood.
Then a voice I recognized. Thicker than it sounded atthe station, slower around the consonants, but unmistakable. Martinez was telling someone he was all in, and the table erupted in mock outrage.
Donovan leaned back in his seat. “We got it. Underground poker game.”
“That’s what it sounds like.”
We listened. The bets weren’t terribly large—a hundred here, two hundred there. Someone accused someone else of bluffing. Martinez laughed and said he never bluffed, which got a round of responses that suggested everyone at that table knew otherwise.
Donovan leaned back in his seat. “So Martinez moved from online betting to an illegal card game.”
I stared at the building. A man with a gambling problem sitting at an underground poker table on his night off. Illegal, technically. Something that could end a career if Internal Affairs got hold of it. But it wasn’t corruption. It wasn’t feeding information to a syndicate moving Drift through Summit Falls.
It was a guy scratching an itch he’d supposedly kicked two years ago.
“We’re not here for this,” I said.
“No. We’re not.”
Jace’s online gambling data had told us the betting stopped. Watching Martinez at Brannigan’s tracking that basketball game with white knuckles at the bar the other night had told us it hadn’t—it had just moved somewhere digital couldn’t follow.
Local game, cash bets, no footprint. That explained the irregular deposits.
