“Let’s sit on it,” Donovan said. “Keep listening.”
“Agreed. If something bigger comes through, we’ll know. If it doesn’t, I’m not interested in ruining a man’s career over a card game.”
Donovan nodded. “Same.”
We settled in. The audio kept rolling.
The game went on for another hour. Through the phone, the rhythm was steady and predictable. Bets placed, cards turned, chips sliding across a surface. Martinez’s laugh was getting louder by the half hour, his words starting to soften at the edges.
“Hit me again, would you? No—the Johnnie Walker. Yeah. Thanks, brother.”
The pour was audible. Not a shot glass. Something bigger. His third that we’d counted, probably not his third of the night.
My breath had started fogging in front of me. I tucked my hands under my arms. Donovan hadn’t moved, but I could see the tension in his shoulders—two hours in a dead-engine vehicle at seven thousand feet, and the cold had stopped being an inconvenience and started being a fact.
Someone at the table asked Martinez about work. Not pointed, not strategic. Just something to fill the space between hands.
“Don’t even get me started.” Martinez’s voice was looser now, the consonants going round. “They changed the rotation last month, and nobody adjusted the overtime. I’m pulling more hours for the same check. Brought it up to the shift commander, and he looked at me like I’d asked him to do long division.”
Laughter around the table.
“And then there’s Briggson. Same rank as the rest of us, but acts like he’s running the place.” Martinez cleared his throat and dropped his voice into a low, grinding rasp. “‘That’s not protocol. You want to do it your way, go get your own department. Why couldn’t you hold on to that suspect? Maybe if you didn’t use so much lotion when jerkin’ off, your hands would actually be able to hold a perp.’”
The room lost it. Even through the phone’s compressed audio, the laughter was real. Someone slapped the table, a voice wheezed between breaths.
Martinez was laughing too, riding the wave. “Somebody brought donuts to the station last week—the good ones, from that bakery on Main—and Briggson stood there eating two of them while telling everybody the department had gone soft. He’s a good cop, honestly. He’s just a complete asshole about it.”
Donovan exhaled a short breath through his nose. “He’s not wrong.”
The laughter died down, and someone called for a new deal. The conversation drifted. The older voice picked up a thread about a property deal that had fallen through, and two other guys argued about a Broncos trade for a few minutes. Cards were dealt. Bets went around. Martinez was quiet through most of it, just a laugh here and there, the occasional side comment.
Then the talk circled back, and Martinez was in the spotlight again.
“So we got this guy, right? Honestly, I shouldn’t say his name, but he lives up on Birch. So we know he’s the one hitting those storage units on the south side. We know it. Got his prints on two of the locks, got him on camera at the gas station across the street twenty minutes before one of the break-ins.” The excitement in his voice grew. “But the evidence hasn’t been processed yet because the lab is backed up six weeks, and in the meantime, this guy is still walking around town like he owns the place.”
I straightened in my seat. These were details he shouldn’t be sharing.
One of the players asked a follow-up—casual, just finishing a story someone had started. Martinez answered without hesitation. Gave a street name. Mentionedsurveillance that was ongoing. Dropped a detail about a witness statement that contradicted the suspect’s alibi.
Fuck. “Did he really just give up details about an ongoing investigation?”
“Sure as hell did.”
We waited. Martinez won a hand, and, if anything, the victory made him expansive. His voice went up a register, the volume of a man who was feeling good about himself and had stopped monitoring what came out of his mouth.
Each story earned him the table’s full attention. More questions, more laughs, more leaning in. And I could hear it happening—the shift from cop blowing off steam to cop holding court. Martinez had found his audience, and the whiskey had filed down whatever filter he’d walked in with.
He wasn’t calculating what he gave away. He was chasing the feeling of being the most interesting person in the room, and every detail he dropped was the price of admission.
“He’s not just loose,” I said. “He’s a security risk. In real time.”
Donovan had gone still beside me. His breath came out in a thin cloud. “And nobody at that table has any reason to stop him.”
And then he crossed a line that couldn’t be uncrossed.
“They’ve got somebody on the inside over in Alamosa,” Martinez said. His consonants were softening further, words bleeding into each other. “County’s had a CI feeding them information on one of the operations out near the ridge. Some business owner, I think. Been at it for months.”
“No shit?” someone asked. “Like a real informant?”
