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“I mean it, Cam.”
He went still at that. Nobody used his name.
“I know,” he said.
I was already moving. Down the hall, past the common room, past the pool balls and the laughter and every sound a compound makes when it thinks it’s secure.
Because I’d put men on the clinic. On Gerry. On the supply chain, on every road between Kirill Popov’s operation and my fence.
And when Fox told me Maple Grove had to wait until Monday for the right man, I’d said Monday morning out loud, in a gravel lot, like a man agreeing to a delivery date.
That car had been sitting in that lot while I said it.
I hit the stairs two at a time with a knee that had something to say and didn’t listen to one word of it.
Chapter Twelve
Maren
The callback log needed three signatures and I was the only one left to sign them. The fluorescents hummed overhead. The rest of the clinic was dark and locked, the way it was supposed to an hour after close on a Sunday night, which was the hour I had been telling myself for six years was a reasonable time to go home.
My pen moved across the page. Blue ink. Each initial formed with the same care I used for everything. Precise, measured, incapable of being misread.
Dana Whitlock’s form sat in my jacket pocket, folded into thirds, section four still blank.
Five o’clock Monday was fast approaching. I’d been carrying the thing for two days and had picked it up eleven times and hadn’t written one letter on it, and the deadline was going to arrive whether I had a position or not.
The bell above the side door jingled.
I looked up. Tessa stood in the doorway.
“Okay, so I know it’s late,” she said. The words came out in the bright sideways rush they always did. “And you probably want to murder me, which, fair, but I left my charger here and my cousin called and my battery’s at twelve percent and I just…”
“Grab it and go.” It landed flatter than I meant it to. Not unkind. Just empty of the energy required to match her pitch.
She crossed to the outlet strip behind the front desk. Knelt. Started unplugging the charger from between the computer cord and the desk lamp. Her voice kept running. Something about her cousin. Something about a text thread. I heard the words without processing them. My eyes went back to the log. Three signatures. I had two.
The backroom door opened.
From the interior side. The side that connected to the treatment area and was supposed to be locked from the outside because I had locked it myself at six-fifteen, after the last patient left and before I started the callback sheet.
Two men came through it.
They didn’t rush. Didn’t announce themselves. Moved with the unhurried quality of people who expected the building to be empty. The first was medium height. Heavy through the chest. Dark jacket. The second was leaner. Younger. Both of them had the blank competent faces of men who did specific jobs for specific people and didn’t waste expression on the work.
My feet planted.
The pen stayed in my hand. My voice dropped to the register I used for large sedated animals and people who needed to move now without understanding why.
“Side door. Now. Don’t stop.”
Tessa went rigid.
The change was immediate. The loud chatty girl replaced by something much younger and much quieter. Her eyes went wide. Her mouth opened. Nothing came out. She was nineteen years old and the charger was still in her hand and the two men were fifteen feet away and not looking at her yet.
I stood. Crossed the three steps to where she knelt. Put my hand between her shoulder blades and shoved. Hard. Not gentle. Pressure that said move now or don’t move at all.
She moved.
