Page 73 of Forbidden Protector

The grain elevator has been dead since before I was born, a grey wooden hulk standing up out of mud-season stubble, windows gone to black squares with sky showing through the far side where the boards gave up decades ago. The pullout sits below it, gravel soft with the last of the melt, Birch Creek running high with spring runoff thirty yards east, loud enough to swallow a footstep if you know how to use it.

I park where the text told me to park. Headlights off, engine running, the earpiece warm against my jaw.

"In position," Holt says, quiet and close, like he's standing at my shoulder instead of four hundred yards up a scree slope in the dark. "Nothing moving up top. Elevator's got two doors, one at each end. He's set up on the same shelf of rock Knox used for the bridge overwatch three weeks back, good sightline on both the building and the two-track out. I'll call the one closest to your truck the near door, and the one by the water the far door. Both covered."

"Copy." Barely a voice at all. "No headlights on the road behind me."

"Knox has eyes on the bridge. Nothing yet."

Ten minutes of nothing is information, and none of it good. I sit with my hand loose on the wheel and my pulse doing the thing it does before a raid. It’s not fast, just loud, with every beat landing somewhere I can feel in my teeth.

"Tell me something," I say, because he told me to keep talking and silence is starting to feel like a held breath none of us can afford. "Anything. What's Miles's favorite color?"

"Orange." No hesitation. "Told me once it's the color of a run he wants to ski before he turns ten. Didn't ask which run has an orange trail marker. Some things a man doesn't correct in an eight-year-old."

"That's the most words you've ever wasted on nothing."

"Wasn't nothing. Kept you talking six more seconds." A beat, the smallest shift in the register of his breath. "Movement. Near door. One figure, low. Moves wrong for your witness. Parker Branton walks with a limp, left side. This one doesn't."

My hand finds my sidearm without asking permission first. "Description."

"Too far for detail. Moves like he's done this before." A longer pause, one that pulls tight enough I feel it four hundred yards away. "Second one. Far door. They're not together. Two different lines converging on the same building."

"That's not an ambush. That's two people who both think they're the only ones here tonight."

"Maybe." Holt Blackwater not sounding certain is louder than any alarm I've got wired to this truck. "Get out. The elevator's not your meet point anymore. It's a kill box. Come to my voice, not the building."

I move. Boots on wet gravel, the river loud enough to cover most of it, the elevator throwing a long dead shadow across the pullout that I skirt instead of cross, because dead shadows are exactly where a man waits.

The first shot comes from the near door, and it isn't aimed at me.

I hear the second figure go down before I understand there's been a shot at all. One flat crack the river almost eats whole, and then a scramble, boots on gravel, someone running for cover that doesn't exist between a hundred-year-old elevator and open ground.

"Contact, near door," Holt says, and every trace of the man who talked about ski runs is gone out of his voice, replaced by something colder, faster, and entirely without waste. "That's your witness who just went down, Tatum. Somebody got to him first."

Someone came to meet me tonight. Somebody with a name and a family and a reason he thought was worth the risk, and I will never get to hear it now, because someone else got there first and made sure of that with a single round I felt more than heard.

I don't have time to hold onto that. I know I don't.

I hold onto it anyway, for exactly one breath, because a man just died for information he was trying to hand me, and I'm not going to pretend that's nothing.

"Knox, shots fired, I need you rolling now." Holt's voice, and Knox's comes back tight and already moving. I'm flat against cold, splintering wood with my weapon up and my spine against a century of rot, and nothing in the plan we built in a kitchen an hour ago accounts for this.

"Tatum. Stay put." His voice again, closer now, and the control has a crack in it I have never once heard from him, not even in that hangar with a dead man foaming at his boots. It’s real fear, rationed down to almost nothing. "I've got a line on the shooter. Do not move."

I don't move. I press my back to rotting timber and listen to the river and a man dying somewhere on the other side of this building, and to the trained silence of a sniper four hundred yards up a ridge deciding, in the space between one heartbeat and the next, whether he's fast enough tonight.

"Holt."

Nothing.

"Holt, talk to me."

And then, so quiet it's barely sound at all, more like a man reporting his own last known position:

"I see him."

A beat. The river, running loud and brown and indifferent. My own heartbeat louder than it has any right to be.