“Pay,” I said in a flat voice.
“Jesus, I was just… okay… I’ve got it!” He pulled out his phone and pressed buttons. “There, done.” He sneered at me. “Thereareother cleaners, you know.”
I shrugged. “Then use them.”
I gave the room a final sweep. We hadn’t been inside long enough to leave any meaningful DNA, even if the fighter had died and a cop had to treat this like a real scene. Jeremy was clean. I was clean. The doctor carried the only visible blood, and that wasn’t my concern. There was nothing here that required our usual attention or DNA scrubbing. I left without another glance. Jeremy had the engine running. We loaded the fighter onto the designated bench in the alley behind the hospital, out of the camera’s reach, and secured him in place. I made one call. My contact inside would “discover” him within minutes.
“Clean the van down, and you’re done tonight,” I said.
Jeremy nodded and drove off to undertake the forensic sweep of the van. I walked a different route to my truck, parked four blocks away, checked my account for the payment from New-Doc, and headed home. I almost made it when my workphone vibrated with a 911 from Doc—Alejandro. Fuck it. He is, and always will be, Doc to me.
An address followed. I changed direction without slowing. Starlight Motel. The place the reverend had given me last week.
The highway gave way to a two-lane road that had once been the main road, it seemed, but it wasn’t lit up now; it was dark land under a sky thick with low cloud.
A van was already parked nose-out beside a collapsed fence line, and Doc stood a few feet from it. I killed my lights before I rolled the last ten yards and stepped out.
Levi nodded once. Doc didn’t waste the movement.
“You’re late,” Doc said.
“911 came in at 02:38,” I replied. “Twenty-three miles at posted limits puts me here now. I’m exactly on time.”
Levi’s lips twitched. “Caleb’s running thermal from inside.”
My gaze shifted to him automatically.
The van’s rear doors were barely open enough to vent heat. Blue light from multiple screens cast a faint glow into the darkness. Caleb stood inside, with his back to us, one foot on the step, shoulders squared toward the monitors. Even from a distance, I could see the tension in him—the way he leaned forward when he focused—and something tightened low in my chest at the familiar shape of him.
I’d watched him so often and memorized how he stood when he was thinking.
Slight forward lean.
The left shoulder lower than the right.
Weight on the ball of his foot.
Useful tells.
He turned at the crunch of gravel under my boots, and the screen glow caught his face, eyes scanning lines of heat signatures and structural overlays. His jaw flexed once when he saw me, and he was probably irritated.
My pulse quickened.
I cataloged faces and try to figure out expressions. I assessed threat, utility, and instability. Caleb was none of those in this moment. He was an asset—precision under pressure, a mind that could dismantle a network from a chair in a van—but that wasn’t what registered.
I wanted to be closer so I could test the reaction. I climbed into the back of the van. Caleb was running this op—he was the one I needed to talk to. I stopped about six feet behind him, close enough to see the screens and to reach him if something went wrong.
A useful distance.
Caleb didn’t acknowledge my arrival. “You’re blocking the light,” he said, eyes on the tablet in his hands.
I shifted half an inch.
“What is this?”
“Starlight Motel. Abandoned, but with a shit ton of fencing and security. We had a hit on two of the names you got from Neil Langston. BlueRoom69 and RexWantsBare.”
“Already?”
