Page 48 of Dozer

"Don't know yet. Stay here."

"Dozer—"

"I said stay here."

She goes quiet. Not because she's scared, but because she's listening. I've learned that difference with her.

I move before she can argue further, low and fast, using the freight cars as cover the way I've used crowds and corridors and every other piece of terrain this job has thrown at me. The yard is a maze of steel and gravel. I prefer terrain I’ve scoped out myself and know. I don’t know this railyard and it’s frustrating how it’s laid out. Twenty feet feels like fifty. Fifty can disappear in a heartbeat.

Another shot cracks. I catch the muzzle flash this time. Then another. Two shooters positioned wrong for coordination, which tells me they aren't a trained team. I doubt they have any military background or formal training, likely local muscle. Hired fast, sent to slow us down rather than finish the job. Slow us down while the trained men catch up. That makes them dangerous in a different way. Trained shooters are predictable, but amateurs with guns are chaos, and chaos gets people hurt.

I close on the first one from an angle he hasn't accounted for and end it fast. The second gets a shot off before I reach him. Heat tears across my left side, sharp enough to steal half a breath, more impact than pain. Then pain catches up. I finish him anyway.

"Clear," I call, and hear Kenzi moving before I've finished the word. I turn and find her crossing the open ground toward me at a dead run despite every instinct that should have kept her exactly where I'd left her.

"You're hit."

"I'm fine."

"You're bleeding through your shirt, that is not the same as fine, that is the opposite of fine, sit down."

"I said I'm⁠—"

"Dozer." There's something in the way she says my name that stops the argument before it starts. Command. She’s not going to take no for an answer. I look at her and realize she's got one hand already out for my arm. I give it to her. She gets a grip just above my elbow, fingers firm around muscle, and pulls me toward a low equipment box like she's done this before and has no interest in negotiating with the man currently leaking blood onto his shirt.

Something about being handled by her should irritate me. It doesn't. I sit. I know she’s worked for the DOD and has been on a lot of scenes in the past. From how she is moving, I expect I’m not the first gunshot wound she’s seen.

"Let me see."

I lift my shirt. She peels it back from the wound with hands that aren’t shaking at all. Her fingertips brush my ribs as she examines the wound. It's barely a touch, but it still feels like more.

"It’s just a graze," she says with an exhale, already digging through her bag for the field kit. "Deep enough to need cleaning, not deep enough to need more than that if we do it right. You're lucky."

"Wasn't luck. Bad shooter."

"Bad shooter, lucky Dozer. Both things can be true." She looks up at me then, one eyebrow raised. I almost smile. Almost.

“We don’t have to do this now. We should move.”

“No.” She gives me the same one word answer I gave her the first morning of the mission and goes back to work.

The antiseptic burns like hell, but I don't react. Her face is inches from my side, concentration hard. A strand of hair has fallen loose near her cheek. I want to reach out and move it for her. I don't. That would be a mistake. There are several reasons why.

"Hold still."

"I am."

"You're tightening your stomach." She corrects.

"I'm breathing."

"You're breathing like you're trying to win an argument with your abdominal muscles."

I look down at her. "That's not a thing." The phrases this woman comes up with. Perhaps she should be a writer instead of a painter.

"It is now."

She presses gauze against the wound, and I feel her palm settle briefly against my side to hold the pressure. She is completely unaware of the damage that small contact is doing to my ability to think about anything except her hand. Or maybe she's aware. Kenzi notices everything.