“How bad?”
“Catastrophic. A clean-up crew just scrubbed a John Doe in Bay 4. Some kid OD’d on something he shouldn’t have beensnorting. They were supposed to make it look like a hit-and-run.”
“Let me guess. Sloppy.”
“Worse. There was a witness.”
I stand. The motion is fluid, a reflex. I slide the SIG into the Kydex holster at the small of my back. The weight settles against my spine, a familiar grounding pressure.
“Who?”
“Dr. Iris Kincaid. Attending physician. She saw the needle marks. She argued with Mercer’s crew and pulled the chart.”
“Civilian.”
“Completely. Clean record. Honors student at Johns Hopkins. Volunteers at a free clinic on weekends. Checks on her elderly neighbors.”
Hutchinson pauses. The scratch of a lighter bleeds through the speaker, then a sharp intake of breath. He’s smoking again. He only smokes when the walls close in.
“She’s a bleeding heart. She thinks the system works.”
I let out a flat, irritated breath. A bleeding heart. The worst kind of asset. They hesitate. They ask moral questions in tactical situations. They try to save things already dead. They get killed because they can’t leave the stray dog behind.
“Is the threat active?”
I grab my jacket. Distressed leather, heavy enough to hide the print of the weapon, loose enough for a full range of motion.
“Mercer sent a secondary team to the hospital. Two shooters. They’re going to grab her in the parking lot. If they take her, she vanishes. If she talks, the senator goes down, and half the agency goes with him.”
“Rules of engagement.”
“Keep her breathing. Get her to the Glass House.”
“And if she resists?”
“She’s a doctor. Smart. She’ll realize she’s prey soon enough. Just don’t let them clip her. I need her alive. She’s the only leverage I have against Mercer.”
“I’m not a babysitter.”
“No. You’re the best protection detail I have. And you owe me.”
Silence stretches between us. The heavy, loaded kind. He’s right. I do owe him. I owe him for the last time, when things went south in Caracas. When the op disintegrated and I lost everything. Hutchinson buried the report. He buried the bodies. He kept me out of Leavenworth.
“I’m moving.”
I end the call.
I leave the apartment without looking back. Nothing there to miss. Just a staging area for a weapon that breathes.
The drive to Denver General takes eighteen minutes in normal traffic. I do it in twelve.
The city streams past, a smear of wet pavement and taillights. I don’t focus on the city. I map vectors. Choke points. Ambush sites. The thin civilian veneer peels away to reveal the operator underneath. The psych-eval doctors diagnosed me as hypervigilant. They used words like maladaptive and dissociated. They called it PTSD.
I call it staying alive.
Rain starts to fall, slicking the streets with a treacherous sheen. I adjust the intermittent wipers on the truck, a beat-up Ford F-150. It looks like a contractor’s work truck, rusted at the wheel wells, invisible in a crowd. Under the hood, the engine is upgraded, the frame reinforced, and the glass laminated against impact. Mobile armor. One of three vehicles I keep staged and serviced around the city. The F-150’s the sledgehammer; the quiet ones wait elsewhere.
The parking garage at Denver General rises out of the gloom like a concrete tomb.
