Page 33 of Undertow

16

Wade was cheating. Cara was almost sure of it.

They’d been playing poker for two hours—Texas Hold ’Em, dealer’s choice, using a bag of dried pinto beans Reagan found in the pantry as chips because nobody had thought to pack actual poker chips for a missing person investigation on the Oregon coast. The kitchen table was covered in cards, coffee mugs, and the remains of a gas station run that had produced beef jerky, two bags of Doritos, and a sleeve of Oreos that Reagan was working through with quiet determination.

It was four in the afternoon. They’d been waiting since morning.

Tom’s laptop sat open on the counter behind him, angled so he could see the screen from his chair. Pirelli’s phone was quiet. Had been quiet all day.

Wade pushed a neat stack of beans to the center. “Raise.”

Reagan studied her cards. “You’ve raised every hand for the last forty minutes.”

“Confidence.”

“Bullying.” She tossed in her beans anyway. “Call.”

Tom folded without looking up. His eyes kept drifting to the laptop. His right knee bounced under the table.

“We should be doing something,” he said. Not for the first time.

“Like what?” Cara asked, rearranging her beans into tidy columns.

“Like anything. I don’t know. Talk to some more people. Anything but sit here.”

Cards tight to her chest, Reagan blinked at him. “Did I just hear the King of Data say we should head outside?”

“This waiting is eating me up.” Tom shrugged sheepishly.

“The crash site,” Wade said immediately. “I want to walk the terrain below the guardrail. There’s a drainage pattern I noticed on the map that⁠—”

Reagan held up another Oreo. “Or we surveil the hospital. Shift changes. Visitor logs. Someone at that facility knows something and is dying to tell it.”

Cara shook her head. “We go poking around Pacific Crest again, Graham’s people will know within the hour. We spooked them once. They’ll be watching.” She looked at her cards. Pair of sevens. Not great. Not nothing. “We wait. Tom’s monitoring is our best lead right now. If these guys are as panicked as those texts suggest, they’ll set up a meet. And when they do, we’ll be ready.”

“If,” Tom said.

“When,” Cara said.

Wade flipped the river card. King of diamonds. Cara watched his face for any reaction and got absolutely nothing. The man had been trained somewhere a long time ago to maintain composure under mortar fire. She was not going to read him over a pair of sevens.

She folded.

Reagan eye her over her own cards. “You know what I’ve been thinking about? The fact that you called Gabe this morning to report on the Voss situation and stayed on the phone for eleven minutes.”

Cara’s jaw tightened. “It was a debrief.”

Reagan scoffed. “Tom debriefs Gabe in four. Wade debriefs him in two, because Wade considers adjectives optional. Eleven minutes means either the Voss situation was significantly more complex than you described to us, or⁠—”

“Or you were just talking,” Tom finished, without looking up from the laptop.

“I was providing context.”

“Uh huh.”

Wade pushed more beans forward. “Raise.”

“Wade, you cannot raise during someone else’s emotional crisis,” Reagan said.