Page 82 of Undertow

“Chief Sawyer, I need to clarify something for the report.” She glanced past him at the hallway full of people—Cara leaning against the wall, Wade coming back through the fire exit, Tom on the bench with Reagan’s hand still on his shoulder, Piper sitting cross-legged on the floor next to Elena. “Who are these people? What agency? What jurisdiction authorized this operation?”

Gabe opened his mouth. Where to begin? “Uh…”

He looked at Cara, who took a long, slow breath. “We’re––“

“They’re my friends.” Elena interjected.

The agent eyed the battered, mismatched, exhausted collection of people in the hallway. She wrote something on her clipboard.

“Friends,” she said. “Got it.”

“Thanks,” Gabe murmured.

The woman’s face softened in a grin. “No problem. It’s not like we don’t have about a zillion other loose ends to tidy up.”

“Probably that won’t happen,” he said.

She paused, pen poised over her clipboard. “Agreed.”

He knew the feeling. Unlike on TV, most cases left dangling threads. Ulcer-makers, if you let them grind away at you.

This case would have more than a few. Pirelli’s name was on every dosing log Tom had pulled. A warrant was being drafted—though Gabe had a hunch it would never be served. Pirelli had gone quiet the same week Voss started tightening the operation. The doctor was almost certainly in a landfill, a marsh, or at the bottom of a bay somewhere along the coast. The body wouldn’t turn up unless the prosecutor considered offering Voss, or one of his goons, a plea deal. Which Gabe didn’t think likely. They had Voss dead to rights for murder, and the thugs as accomplices.

Voss would likely have to answer for Julian Whitfield’s death, though. Becky assured him the case had already been referred back to the county medical examiner with a note that made the word reopened unnecessary.

All in all, the best outcome they could hope for. Justice done, if too late to save Elena’s father.

Gabe thought about his own huge, loose ends. He had no idea what came next, but he knew who he wanted beside him while he figured it out.

45

By Friday morning, the rain had stopped for the first time in a week, and the Oregon coast outside Sugar & Salt was doing that thing it did after a long storm — scrubbed clean, colors too bright, the air so sharp it tasted like a decision.

Cara found Gabe on the bakery’s back steps.

He sat facing the water with his elbows on his knees and a mug of coffee going cold beside him, Agent the cat draped across his boots like a fur stole.

From what he’d told her, this was the first time in his life he had no badge, no title, and no desk to report to. He was still technically chief for another few months while the town council found his replacemen.

Cara stood in the doorway with flour on her hands and watched him not drink his coffee, and her chest did the thing it had been doing for months—the tight, complicated thing that was half warmth and half terror and had no business being both.

He was leaving. That was the obvious read.

A man like Gabe didn’t walk away from law enforcement to sit on bakery steps and pet a cat. He’d go back to Sacramento, or D.C., somewhere that made sense for a man like him, and Cara would stay here behind her counter selling scones to tourists, and that would be the right thing, because she was still Carly Reid. Still a felon. Still running. And a man who’d spent his whole life on the right side of the law did not need a woman who’d spent hers on the wrong one.

She could never tell him. He’d have to choose between the law and her, and she would not make him do that. She would not be the reason Gabe Sawyer compromised the thing that had defined him.

“So I guess you’re leaving,” she said, suddenly wanting to get the looming conversation overwith.

Gabe looked up. Agent shifted on the boots without opening his eyes. “Leaving?”

“The job. Haven Cove. All of it.” She struggled to keep her voice light. “You’ve got options. Los Angeles. D.C. Somewhere that needs a man with your résumé.”

Gabe looked at her for a long moment. “I’m not leaving,” he said.

“You’re not?”

“No. I’m just—” He rubbed the back of his neck. The gesture of a man who’d been thinking about this for a long time and still hadn’t found the smooth version. “I’m tired of working inside the lines. I’ve been watching you and the guys for months now. You help people. Actually help them. I file reports about helping them, or request authorization to help them, or wait for a warrant so I can help them next Thursday. You just do it.”