Page 25 of Dozer

She doesn't thank me; she doesn’t even look up. She's too deep in the work by then to notice. Or maybe she notices and files it the way I've filed her competence, quietly. Because commenting on it would make it bigger than it needs to be. I respect that more than I expect to.

Whatever else is going on with her; the boots, the stickers, the nonstop commentary, the way she somehow makes an armored truck feel three degrees warmer just by occupying the passenger seat, this matters more. She's not a liability standing between me and a clean extraction.

She's the reason we now know this is a different job than the one we walked into. I've worked with a lot of people I've trusted with my life. It's a shorter list for the people I trust with a mission going sideways in real time and still come out with better information than we walked in with.

Kenzi Sullivan just put herself on that list.

I don't know what to do with that information yet.

So I do what I always do. I keep watch while she works. She moves quickly, but not carelessly. She photographs the hands, the feet, and the neck. Takes measurements. Checks the position of the body against the original recovery photographs.

Every movement is deliberate, she’s filing the results somewhere behind those green-and-gold eyes. She finishes in under five minutes and takes her gloves off. She ejects the camera memory card and pockets it. It’s like she’s done this a thousand times. It dawns on me then, she probably has. She worked for the DOD for years.

"Someone wanted this to look like something it wasn't," she says. "Which means someone's already covering tracks." She looks at me. "Which means we're behind."

"We're not behind." I tell her and she studies me. "We just know more than we did ten minutes ago."

Her eyes stay on mine, and for a second, neither of us moves. "You believe that."

"I don't say things I don't believe."

"No," she says slowly. "I don't think you say anything you don’t mean."

The words land harder than they should. She doesn't know me. Not really. She knows what I've shown her. Which isn't much. Most people don't bother looking past that. Kenzi isn’t most people and she has. I don't answer, some things don't need an answer.

I nod toward the door, and she falls into step beside me. She’s quiet again. But it's a different quiet, it’s a comfortable silence. The kind two people fall into after they've decided, without saying so, that they can work together.

I hadn't expected to like the sound of it, but I do anyway. We make it halfway down the corridor before she speaks.

"Dozer?"

I glance at her. "Yeah?"

"You're going to want to see something."

My entire body goes alert. "What?"

She pulls the evidence pouch from her bag and holds it up between us. "There's something else."

I look at the pouch and then at her.

"What did you find?"

Her eyes meet mine. "I don't know yet. But I think our dead man brought us a message."

And just like that, the mission changes again.

CHAPTER 5

Dozer

The first shot takes out our lead vehicle's tire, which means somebody has planned this, because you don't hit a tire by accident at sixty miles an hour on a two-lane county road with no other traffic in sight.

I have exactly one thought before instinct takes over completely. They knew our route. Then there isn't time to think anything at all.

"Contact left!" Reyes's voice comes over the radio, flat and fast, the way it gets when the adrenaline hasn't caught up to the training yet.

Our convoy is currently three vehicles; we’d planned it this way until we make it out of town safely. The lead, ours, and the follow, Malloy was driving that one with two of ours riding escort.