Kari pulled back inside and eased the door shut.
“One individual, armed, approaching from the north vehicle.Forty yards.”
“Can you exit south?Window?”
She checked.The south-facing windows were fixed—no hinges, no latches.Sealed units.The only exit was the east door, which put her directly in the approaching man’s sightline.
“Negative.One exit, and he’s between me and the culvert.”
“West side of the building.There’s a gap between this structure and the old trailer—three, maybe four feet.If you can get around the corner before he reaches the door, you can cut west and circle behind the trailer to the south.”
Kari moved to the west wall.There was a window here, also fixed, but smaller.She could see the gap Ben described—a narrow slot between the office building and the original construction trailer, just wide enough for a person to squeeze through.
She pulled her sidearm.Then she opened the east door, staying behind it, and listened.
Footsteps on gravel.Steady, unhurried.Getting closer.
Kari slipped out the door and went left, pressing against the building’s north face, moving toward the west corner.The footsteps were on the east side now—ten yards, maybe less.She reached the corner and turned it, dropping into the gap between the buildings.
The gap was tighter than it looked—she had to turn sideways, her pack scraping against the trailer’s corrugated wall.She shuffled through, emerged on the west side, and took three steps toward the south corner.
A flashlight beam swept across the gap she’d just exited.
She froze.The beam held for a second, two seconds, then moved on.She heard the east door open.Footsteps inside the office.
He’d find it.The forced cabinet lock, the displaced files, the open drawers.He’d know someone had been here.She had seconds before he came back out, and when he did, he’d be looking.
Kari moved south along the trailer wall, reached the corner, and broke into a run toward the culvert.Open ground.No cover.The floods turned her into a shadow on a lit stage.
She made it twenty yards before the shout.
“Contact south!Stop!”
She didn’t stop.She ran harder, angling toward the culvert, the pack bouncing against her back.Behind her she heard the office door slam open and boots on gravel.
A gunshot.The round snapped past her left side—close enough to hear the air part, close enough that her body flinched before her mind registered the sound.She dropped into a zigzag, the way she’d been trained, making herself a harder target.
Another shot.This one hit the ground ahead of her, kicking up a spray of dirt and rock.He was shooting to stop, not to kill.Not yet.A warning, or a professional’s calibration—disable the target, don’t destroy the evidence she might be carrying.
The culvert was fifteen yards away.Kari dove for it, hitting the concrete lip with her shoulder and rolling into the drainage channel.She pressed herself flat against the bottom, breathing hard, her sidearm in her hand.
“I’m in the culvert,” she gasped into the radio.“One shooter, east of my position, closing.”
“I see it on the camera.He’s moving to cover behind the storage shed.Kari, he’s going to flank you from the north.You need to move south, now.”
She moved, crawling along the culvert’s bottom, the concrete rough against her knees and elbows.Behind her, she could hear the shooter repositioning—the crunch of gravel, a professional’s careful footwork, someone who knew how to close distance without exposing himself.
Ben’s voice in her ear, steady and calm: “He’s at the shed.Moving north along the fence.He’s trying to get above you.”
Kari reached the end of the culvert where it opened into the wash.She rolled out and dropped into the streambed, gaining four feet of cover.The wash ran south, back the way she’d come.If she could get distance between herself and the shooter, she could reach the extraction points Ben had mapped.
But the documents in her pack were the evidence that could bring down a twenty-year conspiracy.And somewhere in that office building were more—the disbursement records she hadn’t finished photographing, the payment authorizations that could connect Devco’s security contractors to specific murders.If she ran now, they’d clean the site before Marshall’s team arrived.
She keyed the radio.“Ben, call it in.Marshall, tribal police, everyone.Tell them we have evidence on site and an armed hostile.”
“Already done.Marshall’s team is moving.Twenty minutes.”
Twenty minutes.The number that kept coming back.Twenty minutes of holding position or running, with a man who shot like a professional closing the distance between them.
