Page 21 of The Ashes of Summer

Jacob

The station has come apart. Dispatch is fucking drowning. Every phone I can hear is ringing. Half the deputies are standing instead of sitting, cutting between desks with files tucked beneath their arms, conversations colliding before the last one's even finished. Voices pile on top of each other until they blur into one relentless wall of noise. A printer spits another stack of paper onto the floor. Somebody kicks a drawer shut hard enough to rattle every cabinet beside it. Three mugs of coffee sit abandoned on nearby desks, the surface gone cold hours ago.Nobody stops moving.

That's the fucking problem. Busy looks productive. This isn't busy. This is what panic looks like when you dress it up in uniforms and paperwork.

Panic doesn't find missing women and Summer's still out there.

Something slow and ugly builds beneath my skin as I take it all in. Deputies who shouldn't be anywhere near this kind of situation stumble through the chaos, trying to outrun panic instead of taking control.

They don't understand him. They don't understand what he'll do to her. That's the biggest problem.

Black is the oldest man in the department. Thirty years on the job, most of them in the field, back when this county still made him earn every one of them. These days his knees have taken him off the road and put him behind a desk—semi-retired, in theory, running dispatch and handling the paperwork the younger ones don’t have the patience for. In practice he’s the spine this whole station is built on. When Black talks, people listen. So when his voice comes apart like that, every deputy in the room hears it.

"I don't give a fuck. We solve this. We end this." Black's voice cuts through the station hard enough to silence the conversation nearest to him. The calm that usually keeps this place running has vanished, replaced by something raw enough to leave every order edged with frustration.

A handful of heads lift as I step through the doors. The deputies closest to me straighten almost instinctively, conversations faltering as they take one look at my face, but plenty of them don't even notice I've arrived. They're buried too deep in phone calls, reports and half-finished conversations, chasing leads that disappear as quickly as they're found. The room is moving, everyone doing something, everyone convinced the next call, the next witness or the next set of CCTV footage will be the thing that breaks this case open.

It won't.

I don't say a word as I make my way across the room. I don't need to. The anger that's been riding beneath my skin since I lost sight of that helicopter hasn't gone anywhere, but I can’t afford to let rage blur my mission. Right now I need deputies, detectives, search teams, vehicles, weapons—every available resource this county can put in my hands. I need people who can still think with a gun to their head.

And one by one, the noise dies.

Conversations die halfway through sentences as I cross the room. Chairs scrape back. Heads lift. A few deputies instinctively square their shoulders before I even reach them, eyes following me across the station as though they're waiting for someone else to take the weight off them.

They're looking in the wrong place.

By the time I stop in front of the incident board, the station has fallen quiet enough that the fluorescent lights hum above us, filling the silence nobody seems willing to break. The board dominates the wall. Photographs. Maps. Witness statements. Timelines linked together with lengths of red string that weave across the cork in every direction. Somebody's spent hours trying to force order onto it, but all I see is a dozen dead ends stitched together with drawing pins.

My eyes find Moore first.

The mugshot from his arrest sits above everything else, that same faint curve tugging at the corner of his mouth. The smile isn't wide enough to call confident. It never has been. It's quieter than that. Patient. Like he knows something the rest of us don't and has all the time in the world to wait for us to catch up.

My fingers close slowly at my side until my nails bite into my palm.

I picture his face changing with every crack that echoes through the room. Confidence bleeding away beneath widening eyes. His jaw distorting beneath the force of breaking bone. Blood filling his mouth before spilling over his teeth. Skin splitting. Tearing. His screams growing hoarse until they dissolve into nothing more than wet, desperate sounds clawing their way out of his throat.

I'd make sure he stayed conscious for every fucking second of it. I'd make him watch me do it. I'd make him understand that none of it is happening because he crossed me. It's happening because he took her.

I tear my eyes away before the fantasy has a chance to settle any deeper. Moore will have his turn and I will deliver vengeance—for me and for Summer. But standing here considering all the ways I’ll torture him, doesn’t get me any closer to her.

As I trail my glance down the board, more photographs catch my attention.

Donnie Cartwright.

Vince Mansell.

They stare back at me from the board, each photograph clipped neatly into place beneath columns of evidence and interview notes. I don't see suspects. I see fingerprints bruising her skin. I see hands forcing her into that helicopter. I see every bastard who stood close enough to stop it and chose not to.

I roll my shoulders once, slow enough that nobody notices, dragging the anger back down to where it's useful instead of letting it climb into my face.

Later.

Every one of them can wait until later. My attention drops to the photographs beneath them.

Michael.

Elaine.