Page 28 of Dozer

Immediately she presses her hands flat against the case like she can force them still through sheer determination. It doesn’t work, not exactly, but the shaking slows to a small trembling.

"That was—" she stops. For Kenzi, that's its own kind of alarming.

I look at her, worried. “You okay?”

"That was an ambush. They knew our route." Her eyes meet mine. "Not a checkpoint. Not bad luck. Somebody handed them our timing, our roads, or both." She swallows hard, the color has drained from her face, but her eyes are clear. "We lost people."

It’s not a question. "We lost Reyes." Saying it out loud doesn't make it easier, I hadn't expected it to.

Her mouth tightens, but she doesn't offer any soft words of condolence, she doesn’t reach for me or say something meant to comfort me that would land wrong in this particular minute. She just nods once, like she understands exactly how much room there is for feelings right this minute.

None. There is no room for emotions right now. Later. Maybe. If I allow myself to feel. But emotions right now could get us all killed and I’m grateful she seems to understand that.

Then she looks down at the case. She sets it carefully on the seat between us instead of letting go of it completely. "Then we better make this count."

I look at her and her paint-flecked boots. A woman merely hours into a job she said yes to before hearing the details, sitting in a gas station parking lot with somebody else's blood not yet dry on the road behind us.

"We make it matter because he died protecting it,” she says.

I look at her for another second. "Yeah." My voice comes out rougher than I intend. "We make it count."

She nods. No jokes or smart ass comments this time. Just understanding. I quickly fill the truck with gas, and she runs inside to grab drinks and use the bathroom. I make a quick call to Hunter and fill him in. I hear the grief in his voice. Reyes was a friend of ours, not only a coworker. He has a wife and family, and I know Hunter will take care of making the notification. But still, it hurts. It’s a weight unlike any other.

Behind us, sirens are starting, distant and getting closer, headed toward a wreck that is no longer any of our business. Ahead of us, D.C. is still four hundred miles away and somewhere in that distance is the person who knew exactly where we'd be.

Someone who knew what we were carrying and what our route and our timing was. And now they know we survived.

I pull out of the gas station and merge back onto the road.

Kenzi reaches for the case.

Neither of us says anything.

We drive.

CHAPTER 6

Kenzi

I’ve run out of things to say somewhere between leaving the last gas station and arriving at this one. That should alarm me more than it does or maybe it alarms me exactly the right amount, and I just don't have the bandwidth left to react to the alarm.

Either way, we sit in the parking lot of a Sheetz that smells like diesel, old coffee, and something fried that has probably been under a heat lamp since the Bush administration. The engine ticks as it cools, and for the first time since I climbed into this vehicle nine hours and one ambush ago, I have absolutely nothing to say.

Nothing.

I always have something to say.

It's, as previously established, my one reliable personality trait. The thing I can count on showing up even when nothing else does. I can always come up with a joke or at the very least, a completely unnecessary fact about malware or cameras or forensic decomposition. I have many years’ worth of stories about Dexter, which is my go-to verbal life raft I throw into every silence before it can get uncomfortable.

There is no life raft for this situation. Reyes is dead. I barely know the man. I only met him briefly when we’d arrived at the county office to retrieve the body. We’d barely exchanged introductions. That's the part that bothers me most, he was a stranger, I shouldn't feel this much pain at his loss.

I knew his name. I knew what he looked like. I knew the way he checked his weapon before we rolled out and the way his voice sounded over the radio when things got bad. That's it.

And then he's gone.

My brain understands that he’s a stranger, but apparently my heart doesn't care. Maybe it’s because I can tell he meant a lot to Dozer. I’m unsure what to do in this situation, so I stare at my hands. They're resting in my lap now, palms down, but I can still see the faint tremor in my fingers.

I hate that. Not because I'm ashamed of being scared. I'm not. Fear is a biological response. It's useful. It's information. It tells the body to prepare for something unpleasant and potentially fatal. It’s fully scientific. What I hate is that my body is still reacting when my brain has already decided the immediate danger is over. My fingers shouldn’t still be shaking at all.