Page 26 of Sawyer (The Maddox BRAVO Team #1)

I close the book and lean my head against the wall. The paint is cool. The cinderblock under it is older than I am. I tell myself I’m letting the building hold up some of the weight.

A cough from inside brings me upright. I don’t open the door. I don’t call her name. I put my palm against the wood directly over where I know her bed is—she likes to sleep with her head toward the window when she can. I don’t push. Just… anchor. It’s ridiculous. It steadies me anyway.

“Mr. Maddox?” Hartley again. He keeps his voice low. “We just got a heads-up: your boy Vale’s counsel is trying to get him wheels-up to Vegas ‘for meetings.’ We’re about twenty minutes from warrants.”

“Vegas is a hop to anywhere,” I say. “We can’t lose him. You got a legal way to sit on him until paper lands?”

“We can do a ‘consensual conversation’ that takes fifteen minutes and a lot of coffee,” he says, mouth twisting. “Or we can get lucky with code compliance on his office and have someone ‘notice’ an occupancy issue.”

“Do both,” I say. “I’ll call Dean to have the fed bark.”

He snorts. “Thought you’d say that.”

By the time I loop Dean in, his friend in the Bureau has already leaned on Vale’s counsel.

A polite but ironclad “do not travel” request is now in writing.

The kind that says “your boarding pass will print, but the men in windbreakers will meet you at the gate.” It’s not an arrest. It’s a glare that buys us an hour.

Rae drops a new pin in our shared map. Fox Hollow—co-working.

“Bane” logged in as “Stark” last night (they cross-sell day passes online).

IP address used to access a single page: municipal police scanner feed and a Craigslist posting for storage units near the airport.

She adds: He’s compulsive about checking his own myth.

Then: Hatcher likes us. He just texted an address on Third Street where Rourke sleeps when he’s between jobs. Cheap monthly. Unit 4B. We’re rolling.

“Riggs—do not hit 4B without me,” I say into the line, even as I know I can’t go. The words taste like broken teeth.

“I’ll put eyes and wait for the paper,” he promises. “Rae’ll give me a door cam in five. If he moves, I shadow.”

“Good,” I say. “If he spooks, don’t escalate. I want him alive to point at Vale.”

“You also want his teeth,” Riggs says mildly.

“I’ll settle for his phone,” I lie, because we both know I want both.

The fourth light flickers. Forty-seven seconds. Somewhere down the hall, a code page barks and slams through a different set of doors; an emergency we aren’t in. For once.

Gregory appears at the far end of the corridor like a ghost who got lost. He moves with the hesitance of a man who knows he isn’t welcome and wants to be punished for it.

Hartley slots into place at his shoulder before I have to stand.

He’s good at his job. I don’t move, except to tighten my hand into a fist on my knee.

Gregory stops a polite distance away. His eyes are a color softer than Cam’s but I can see the gene. “Is she?—?”

“Resting,” I say.

He nods as if he deserved a different answer.

He opens his mouth, shuts it again, opens it.

“I’m going to turn over my phone to Detective Hartley.

Everything. I’ve already called my general counsel,” he says, deflated.

“And I scheduled a press conference for tomorrow to apologize to the community?—”

“Cancel it,” I cut in, low, because the thought of Cam’s pain being chewed by cameras makes bile flood my mouth. “If you stand at a podium right now, you turn a target into a spectacle. Sit with law enforcement. Sit with your shame. Leave the podium until Cam isn’t the headline.”

He flinches. “I thought transparency?—”

“Transparency is telling your daughter with your own mouth before she hears it from a man she’s paid to trust,” I say, and even I hear the acid. “You missed that window. Don’t miss this one.”

Hartley steers him away again. I exhale and realize my shoulders are somewhere around my ears. I drop them one notch at a time.

The nurse returns with a fresh bag of saline. She glances at me, at the way my hands want to punch and pray simultaneously. “She asked me to tell you something,” she says.

I straighten before I can stop myself. “Is she…?”

“She’s not ready to see you.” The nurse smiles gently when my face betrays more than I want it to. “But she said to tell you she heard you at the door.”

“What did I say?” I ask, wrong-footed.

“Nothing,” the nurse says. “That’s the point.”

I swallow. It lands like glass and I don’t care.

My phone vibrates in a staccato I’ve set aside for one thing only: incoming GO texts from Riggs. I step to the window to read.

RIGGS : Eyes on 4B. “Bane” present—ball cap, ear nick, same build. He’s packing a duffel. Rae got warrants hot from Dean’s guy. SPPD is two out. You sure you don’t want to play?

I look at Cam’s doorway and think of what she needs, not what I want.

ME : Bring him breathing.

RIGGS : Always.

I text Rae separately: Don’t let SPPD burn the door. He’ll badge at a window if they spook him. Quiet, surgical.

She thumbs a and adds: Hatcher just sent me “Bane’s” preferred coffee—there’s a cart on the corner. I’m having the vendor call building security about a “spill” in the lobby to clear civilians. Don’t say I never give you gifts.

I almost smile. Almost.

The hall quiets in a way that isn’t silence—it’s the absence of footsteps that don’t matter.

Two Orange operators I posted at either end of the corridor trade a look with me that says we’ve got this slice of earth.

A phlebotomist slips past, humming something that sounds like an old Motown track under her breath.

The fourth light doesn’t flicker on time.

I notice and then it flickers anyway. Forty-eight seconds. Nothing is perfect. We move anyway.

Vanessa returns with enough coffee for a platoon and sets one beside my chair without comment.

“Black, no sugar,” she says. She doesn’t ask how I like it; somehow she knows.

Or she’s watched me long enough to guess.

“Tell her I’m here,” she says again. Then she curls in a seat down the hall, legs folded, phone face-down, for once silent.

At 18:12 my satphone rings with Dean’s brand of weary triumph.

“Vale’s phones are in a Faraday bag and he’s discovering he’s not half as clever as he thought,” he says.

“He’s at the SPPD building with counsel, which means we have him in a box.

Kestrel’s P.O. box is a dead end with a live wire attached: a clerk saw a guy matching ‘Bane’ pick up mail twice this month. We’re sending that across.”

“And Rourke?”

“Riggs will tell you, but early word is that he’s got a front row seat to the man discovering that his apartment door can be opened with a master key and a slapped warrant. Officers on scene say he was mid-duffel and not half as brave without a mask and a van.”

I close my eyes.

Dean huffs out a, “You did good, Sawyer.”

“Not good enough,” I say. “Not yet.”

“Then keep going,” he says, and hangs up.

I text Riggs: Status? He sends a photo I will never show Cam—a blurred still of a bruise of a man face-down on rough carpet, cuffs on, the notch in his ear proof of identity. Another text follows: Phone seized. SIMs. Two throwaways. One still warm. We’ll get him to talk.

I let my head hit the wall again, close my eyes, and for the first time since the van door slammed in my imagination and then in the world, I let my breath out all the way.

The sound it makes is a rough thing. Vanessa hears it and pretends she didn’t.

One of the Orange operators looks away pointedly. The nurse smiles like a small moon.

Through the door I hear a rustle and the faintest click of a bed control. I don’t move. I put my palm flat to the wood one more time and say nothing again.

A text glows on my screen. Cam : I need time.

My fingers hover. Then I type: Take it. I’m outside.

The dots appear. Disappear. Appear again. Don’t go far, comes back.

Never, I send.

I pocket the phone, sit back down in the ugly chair, and let the antiseptic and time do what they do while we do what we do better: hunt, build, close.

Because this is the part of war nobody likes to put in recruitment videos—waiting while the net tightens, while the warrants are served, while the man with the ear nick sits in a room under fluorescent hell and tells us where he hid the rest of the rot.

And when it’s done—when Vale signs the last paper that names his sin, when Rourke points to the last locker—we’ll walk out of here. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But we’ll leave, and when we do, we won’t be going back to the world we had before.

We’ll build a new one. With doors that hold. With walls that don’t need to be this thick to make us feel safe. With a table permanently stained with blue and copper and a laugh in a kitchen where the coffee doesn’t taste like waiting.

But for now: I keep watch.

Forty-seven seconds. Flicker.

I’m here.