41
HAWK
I’m close.
Every beat of my heart seems to sayDani, Dani, Dani…
Then my phone.
It’s Vinnie again.
I push it on speaker.“Yeah?”
“I pushed everything we’ve got to APD and county,” Vinnie says.“Coordinates, Reyes’s properties, the bus station footage, Belinda’s description of the place.They’re staging near the highway turnoff.You should see them in the next fifteen to twenty.”
“Got it.Thanks.”
I don’t tell him twenty is too long.I don’t tell him I can already feel time thinning and pulling apart.
“Tell them to kill sirens two miles out,” I say.“We can’t afford to spook them.If the…” I can’t finish.
I can’t bring myself to even think what is constantly on the edge of my mind.
“I told them.Hawk, don’t be a hero.Eyes only until backup arrives.I mean it.Raven needs you.We all need you.”
I love my sister.I love all my siblings.But they don’t need me like Daniela does.Not at this moment.
Right now, she’s my priority.My only priority.
“I’ll do what I can,” I say.“Call me if anything changes.”
I end the call just as my truck surges over a rut hard enough to punch the glove box open.My registration and some other papers fly out and onto the passenger seat.I leave them.I’m in a maze of back roads.Every ranch has these offshoots—old surveyor cuts that became maintenance roads that became afterthoughts.Dad used to call them arteries.
Right now?They feel like fucking land mines.
The road takes a sharp turn around a dry creek bed and then straightens for a quarter mile.I hit the gas.
The phone buzzes again.Vinnie.I jab the speaker button.“Yeah.”
“They rolled sooner than I thought.Cops are headed your way.”
“Got it.”
“And Hawk?”
“Yeah.”
“If you get eyes on the house?—”
“I’m not going in.”The lie is clean though it tastes like bile.“Not until they arrive.I heard you.”
Silence.
He doesn’t believe me.
Not that I expected him to.
A sigh.Then a deep breath.“Please be careful.”
