Trent floored it.
The truck surged forward and the wrecked SUV shrank in what was left of the rearview mirror—two doors cracked open now, figures moving inside but moving slow, moving hurt, not following. In the distance, faint but growing, the sound of sirens. Dawson, vectoring in from the south.
She pulled herself back through the window. Slumped into the seat. Her shoulder was going to bruise where she'd hit the door—she could feel it already, a deep ache spreading outward from the joint. Glass fell from her hair onto her lap. She pressed the back of her hand against her neck and felt the sting of three or four small cuts, nothing deep, nothing that needed more than a few minutes and some antiseptic.
She texted Dawson. Informed him of the SUV’s current location and warned him that the perps were armed.
She looked at Trent. His knuckles were white on the wheel, jaw set, eyes forward, a thin line of blood at his hairline where a piece of glass had caught him.
Close. Too close.
She reached up and touched the cut. “You’re bleeding.”
“I’m fine.” His gaze went from the road to the side mirror, to the rear mirror, back to the road, before repeating.
Physically, maybe he was fine. But he wasn’t any better than she’d been during the fifteen minutes she watched him deal with a gator and a snake. Two dangerous worlds that neither one quite understood and, in the matter of days, got to experience firsthand.
They drove in silence for a moment. The adrenaline still moved through her—she could feel it in the edges of her vision, in the slight tremor starting in her hands now that the shooting had stopped. She pressed her palms flat on her thighs and let it run its course. This was just chemistry. This was just her body finishing what the threat had started.
“Buddy always told me you were a good shot.” Trent reached across the cab and took her hand.
"Don't sound so surprised."
Something crossed his face that wasn't quite a smile and wasn't quite not one. "I'm not. I just—" He exhaled. "I've never watched anyone do that. While being shot at. It's terrifying and impressive at the same time.”
“So is watching a man untangle a python from a gator.”
That won her a chuckle. “I suppose it is.”
She looked at the road ahead. Her rental was four minutes out—but she knew—even before they turned the corner. It was particular knowledge that lived below thinking, below language, in whatever part of her had been paying attention to the world long enough to start understanding its grammar.
Holding her breath, she glanced between the clock on the dash, and the house coming into view. That unsettling feeling filled her gut. The same one she’d had before she knew she'd have to pull the trigger.
Trent slowed his his truck as it approached the house. It wasn't much to look at. An old stucco Florida modular home that looked like it had seen better days.
Shit. The front door was open.
Not open like someone had forgotten to close it. Open like it had been argued with and lost—the frame splintered around the deadbolt, the door itself hanging inward at an angle that made her back teeth ache, wood pulp scattered across the concrete step like something that used to be solid and wasn't anymore.
Trent pulled the truck to the curb and cut the engine. “I think we should text Dawson.”
“On it.
Dawson's response came back immediately—officer en route in 8 minutes.
She held her up weapon and slipped from the vehicle. “We do this the same way we did my uncle’s place. Got it?” She glanced over her shoulder.
Trent was a step behind, Glock drawn, moving to her left to take the flank. “I’ll follow your lead, but I’m not asking for permission to shoot anything or anyone that comes at us.”
“Just don’t shoot me.” She went in slow and low, pivoting right off the doorframe, sweeping the entry.
The living room was a disaster.
Couch overturned, cushions slashed. The bookshelf knocked forward, her paperbacks and one framed photo—her team, taken three months before they died, eight people smiling in the Kandahar sun—face down in a scatter of pages and broken glass. Every drawer in the end table pulled out and was thrown. The abstract print she'd actually liked, the one she'd driven forty minutes to a consignment shop to find because something about the colors felt like the water here, lay face down on the floor with the backing torn off and the frame snapped in two.
“Clear,” she called out of habit.
They moved through the space in sequence, covering each other's blind spots—she took point, Trent covered her six, both of them in the operational silence that operating in a cleared space required. Not the silence of calm. The silence of listening hard for breath, for movement, for the sound of weight shifting on a floorboard.
