I moved. Tested everything—arms, legs, spine, neck. Nothing broken. A cut above my eye that was bleeding freely, probably from the glass. My ribs, where the knee had connected, felt like someone had parked a truck on them. Functional pain. The kind you worked through because stopping wasn't an option.
I found Wyatt against the side door—the door that was now the floor. He had a gash on his forearm and was holding his left shoulder at an angle that suggested something had been wrenched but not dislocated. Blood on his face, but his eyes were clear. Operator eyes. The eyes of a man who'd been in worse and was already calculating next steps.
The driver was dead. The impact with the steering wheel had been structural, and the rollover had finished what I'd started. I didn't feel anything about that. I'd feel it later, maybe. Right now he was an obstacle and an asset—his body would tell us something, and his death was a problem we'd have to explain.
Two of the escorts were dead. The one Wyatt had shot through the center mass was crumpled against the partition, motionless. The one I'd headbutted had taken the rollover badly—his neck at an angle that didn't permit questions.
The one Wyatt had shot through the shoulder was alive.
He was on his back, breathing in the wet, labored way that said the shoulder wound had been joined by something internal from the rollover—a rib, probably, pressing somewhere it shouldn't. Blood at the corner of his mouth. His eyes were open, tracking, still conscious.
I crawled to him. Grabbed his vest with one hand. Pulled his face close to mine.
"Who are you?" I said.
He laughed.
The sound was grotesque in the wrecked van—a wet, bubbling thing that sent blood out of his mouth in a fine spray. He laughed the way men laughed when they'd already decided they were dead and had stopped performing for the living.
"You're so fucked," he said. The words came out thick, slurred with blood and the clarity of a man who had nothing left to lose and wanted to spend his last minutes making sure you knew it. "You and your whole fucking family. Should've gone along."
"Gone along with what?"
He grinned. Teeth red. Eyes bright with the feverish energy of someone operating on adrenaline and blood loss and the knowledge that his timeline was measured in minutes.
"Craine's going to fuck you good," he said. "All of you. The brothers. The women. The whole operation. You had your chance. You could've cooperated." Another laugh. More blood. "Now he's going to take everything. Everything."
"Who is Craine?" I pressed. “Is he really FBI?”
The man's eyes went distant. The brightness fading—the way a light faded when the power cut and the filament held for one last second.
His mouth moved. I leaned in to listen.
"You … are fucked."
Then he was gone.
I sat back on my heels. The van creaked around me—metal settling, the engine making sounds that engines made when they were dying. Through the shattered windshield, I could see the sky. Blue. Charleston blue. The shade that had been overhead since the morning I'd arrived in this city, indifferent to everything happening beneath it.
"Grant." Wyatt's voice, from behind me. Steady but urgent. "We need to move."
He was right. We were sitting in a wrecked van on a deserted Charleston street with four dead men who'd been dressed like FBI and weren't, and every second we stayed was a second closer to someone finding us—police, civilians, the actual FBI, or whoever else Craine had waiting.
Craine. The name sat in my mind like a round in a chamber.
He'd separated. Deliberately. Sent the van ahead. Known what was going to happen in this vehicle, or after, and made sure he wasn't around when it did.
Should've gone along.
Gone along with what? What had been offered that the Danes had refused? What had Craine wanted that he was willing to kill for, and how long had this been building before a man named Grant Dane had walked into a bar in Texas and gotten on a plane to Charleston?
Questions for later. Right now, we had dead men and a wrecked van and a story that nobody was going to believe.
I pulled out my phone. Cracked screen but functional. I moved through the van, photographing each man's face—methodical, thorough, the way I'd been trained to document in the field. Close-up. Profile. Any identifying marks—tattoos, scars. I got the driver last, his face bloodied and compressed against the deployed airbag. I photographed him, anyway.
I sent the images to Ethan. Four photos. One message:
Find out who they are. Not FBI. Craine set us up. Van wrecked on [I looked through the windshield, found a street sign hanging at an angle from a bent pole] Morrison Drive. We're alive. Need cleanup. Now.
