Page 28 of Travis
And Sera hadn’t come home last night because she’d been here, in my pool, in my guest room. But they didn’t know that. All they knew was that she hadn’t returned.
The most recent intercept, timestamped four hours ago, was a status check.Team in position. Holding. Waiting.
They were there right now. In or around her apartment in Spokane. And she was driving straight back to them because I’d told her to go, and she’d listened.
I picked up my phone. Found her number from the call log. Dialed.
Four rings. Voicemail.Hi, this is Sera. I’m not available right now but leave a message and I’ll get back to you.
I dialed again. Same result. She wasn’t picking up, and I couldn’t blame her for it.
“Maude. Prep the vehicle. Highway route to Spokane, fastest available.”
A beat of silence. “Travis. Spokane is approximately three hundred miles from this location.”
“I’m aware.”
“Your last recorded trip outside this compound was eleven hours ago, from which you returned with rib damage, a jaw contusion, and cortisol levels that still haven’t normalized.”
“Maude. The fucking vehicle.”
“You can barely tape your own ribs. You haven’t slept. And you want to drive five hours into a city to?—”
“To stop them from killing her. Yes. Do it.”
Another pause. Then, quietly: “Route loaded to your mobile unit. I’ll monitor comms.”
I took the stairs two at a time and my ribs punished me for every step. Jacket. Sidearm. I didn’t bother with the vest because there wasn’t time to tape up again and the vest over untaped cracked ribs would do more harm than good. Keys off the hook and out the door.
The hives started again before I reached the garage. I ignored them. I got in the car, pulled out of the compound, and drove.
Montana fell away behind me, and I called her again at the county highway. Four rings. Voicemail. At Missoula, straight to voicemail without ringing. She’d turned her phone off.
I pressed harder on the accelerator. She had an hour head start, but she didn’t drive the way I was driving. Maybe she’d stop for gas. Food. A bathroom. Anything that ate up minutes between her and that apartment door.
I called again outside of Missoula. Straight to voicemail. Again at the state line. Again somewhere past Coeur d’Alene. Each time the same dead silence before the tone, and each time I hung up and gripped the wheel and did the math on how far ahead she was and whether the gap was closing or widening.
Spokane assembled itself around me. Strip malls, traffic lights, lanes multiplying. I barely registered any of it. The only thing in my head was the timestamp on that last intercept.Team in position. Holding. Waiting.
Complete the objective.
I turned onto Sera’s street with my jaw locked and my hands welded to the wheel. Found her building. A mid-rise apartment complex on a residential block. Nothing remarkable from the outside.
I drove past once and scanned the parking lot. No sign of her car.
I let out a breath I’d been holding since Missoula.
Then I read the rest of the scene. A dark sedan parked half a block east with a clear sight line to the building’s main entrance. Two men inside. The driver had his seat reclined back, enough to look relaxed, not enough to lose the mirrors. The passenger’s window was cracked despite the temperature. These weren’t amateurs.
A third man on foot. Northwest corner, leaning against a bus shelter with a phone in his hand. Casual posture, but his weight was forward. Feet set. Ready to move.
Three men. Three positions. Triangulated coverage on the building entrance. Professional. Patient. Exactly the kind of deployment a careful, methodical organization would use for a job that needed to be clean.
I circled the block. Found a spot on the south side with a line on both the building entrance and the parking lot. Pulled in. Killed the engine.
Then I waited. My skin burned under my shirt. My ribs kept time with my heartbeat. The city pressed in from every direction, all sound and movement and uncontrolled variables, and I sat in the middle of it and watched the entrance to Sera Bolland’s apartment building and did not let myself think about anything except the geometry of the three men who were there to kill her.
Twenty-three minutes.
