Page 22 of Crosscurrent

"They won't knock," Skye said.

Nobody argued with that.

Somewhere during all the bodies moving here and there, Agent vanished.

Gabe realized the cat was gone almost twenty minutes later while stretched across Cara’s couch with one arm behind his head, nowhere close to asleep.

The bakery below had gone quiet.

Cara had retreated to her bedroom down the hall. In the room behind him, a woman who didn’t do families had accepted extra blankets from strangers instead of disappearing back into the dark alone.

And downstairs, in the concealed safe behind the inches-thick steel doors securing Wade’s weapons locker, sat a USB drive capable of detonating half the investigation they’d been building toward for months.

Problem column definitely longer now.

At some point, despite himself, Gabe finally fell asleep.

8

By late afternoon, the team was clearly flagging. Cara had insisted they take breaks, walks, naps, anything to get them out of the basement for even half an hour. Gabe had done his best to back her up. He knew only too well the diminished brain power they were all running on twelve plus hours into this new situation. Or case. Or whatever this thing Skye Reeves had dragged them into became.

The morning had been quiet. Tom's perimeter system pinged once at 8:47 AM, set off by a dark sedan doing a slow pass on Marina Street.

Gabe had been at the window in under a second, but the car was already gone. Vega's cruiser had come past twice before ten.

Whether the fixers had spotted her vehicle in the alley, or the chief's uniform, or both, something had made them reconsider the timing. They hadn't gone. They'd just decided to wait for a cleaner window. That was, in its own way, worse.

“That’s not a real nonprofit,” Tom announced. “That’s a money-laundering scheme wearing sensible shoes.”

“You’ve said that about three nonprofits today,” Reagan replied from the whiteboard.

“Hello?” Tom snorted. “Because three nonprofits today deserve prison.”

Wade sat at the conference table reassembling a Glock with the calm concentration of a man solving stress through mechanical precision. Across the room, Skye watched the monitor wall with a legal pad balanced on one knee, her attention tracking every new connection Tom uncovered between the Coastal Heritage Trust and Neptune courier routes.

Cara leaned over Tom’s shoulder studying transaction chains while loose strands of dark hair escaped the knot at the back of her neck.

“Okay,” Tom announced suddenly, “either Coastal Heritage exists exclusively to move Neptune money through elderly people and church roof grants, or I’ve developed late-onset paranoia.”

“Those aren’t mutually exclusive,” Reagan said.

“Thank you for supporting my journey.” Tom clicked to another spreadsheet while Reagan continued marking courier routes across the whiteboard.

By Thursday afternoon, the basement had settled into the strange operational rhythm Sweet & Sawyer seemed to fall into whenever a real case finally caught hold. Coffee cups multiplied. Whiteboards filled. Somebody forgot meals existed for six-hour stretches. Tom drifted into increasingly hostile relationships with databases.

Honestly, Gabe preferred everybody this way.

Focused. Moving.

The team had spent nearly the entire day pulling at the threads Skye brought into the bakery wrapped inside a USB drive and thirty years’ worth of survival instincts. Every hour seemed to uncover another hidden overlap between Neptune logistics and the Coastal Heritage Trust.

Nothing fully actionable yet, but they’d uncovered enough to feel movement underneath the surface.

“Okay,” Tom said again, narrowing his eyes at the monitor. “Either these grant recipients are fake, dead, or laundering money through church restoration projects.”

“Can’t rule out all three,” Wade said.

“That’s the spirit.”