Page 37 of Deadly Force
The silence that follows is immediate and sharp. She doesn’t like being sidelined. I don’t blame her. But that doesn’t mean I’m changing the plan.
“Until when?”
Mateo slides into the back seat beside her, all nonchalance. “Awaiting instructions.”
“Until it’s safe for you to do so,” I say.
She looks ready to argue, so I start the engine before she can open her mouth. “We need breakfast.”
“I guess,” Brooke mutters, eyes shifting toward the window.
I catch Mateo’s gaze in the rearview and grin. “An army marches on its stomach, and we’re running on fumes and bad coffee. No guessing about it.”
Brooke draws breath to argue. I beat her to it.
“We’ll be gone ten minutes. There’s a McDonald’s three minutes from here. You can protest after caffeine.”
She doesn’t argue, which is progress.
She might not feel hungry—grief tends to steal that from you—but she needs food. I snuck a protein bar while she was in the bathroom. Mateo probably ate air and called it discipline.
But if we’re going to find that file—the one Eliza hid before someone made sure she couldn’t talk—we’ll need more than fuel.
We’ll need a green light from above.
Brooke
The drive-thru speaker crackles, spitting Caleb’s clear, polite order back at us. The air in the car thickens with the faint, greasy scent of fried food. I study Caleb’s profile, sharp and unreadable. He’s already thinking three moves ahead, but I need to know the plan, not just wait for it.
He doesn't hand anything back when the food is ready. He simply drops the paper bag onto the passenger seat, already pulling away from the window, his knuckles stark white on the wheel.
A few turns later, he cuts down a side road, tires crunching softly on the gravel, and angles the Pathfinder into a dusty church lot. It's tucked between skeletal desert scrub and a chain-link fence, the kind of forgotten place that offers quiet refuge. The adobe walls glow warm beneath the harsh sun,and a single, unassuming white cross rises above the modest roofline. He shifts into park but doesn't move.
Mateo is out before the engine even settles, boots already crunching gravel in measured steps. He begins to walk the fence line, his silhouette moving with disciplined precision against the soft light. Head turning left, forward, right—a familiar, unsettling pattern. No hesitation, just routine.
Caleb sits for another beat, his eyes flicking from rearview to side mirror to the empty road behind us. I climb out after him, smoothing my hair as I scan the church lot. No one is in sight, but that doesn’t mean no one is watching us.
We stop near the front bumper. Caleb sets the McDonald's bag on the hood, keeping his right hand loose at his side as his eyes continue to sweep the perimeter. Then he bows his head.
"Lord," he murmurs, voice low, grounded. "Thank You for this food. For the chance to find the truth."
His words come steady, not rushed or forced. "Thank You for saving Brooke's life. For Mateo's cover. For everything You're doing in this mess, even if we can't see it yet."
"Amen."
Mateo's distant voice echoes the single word. I add mine, barely above a whisper.
Caleb opens the bag, the scent of hashbrowns momentarily overpowering the desert air, andunwraps a sausage biscuit with egg, handing one to me. His eyes, however, never stop their sweep—parking lot, road, fence line.
"Do you always pray before meals?" I ask.
He grins, that crooked, annoyingly charming tilt to his lips. "Try to. Never know what they put in these things."
Mateo snorts from his patrol. "Cholesterol and the tears of college kids."
I don't laugh, but a small, persistent tremor in my chest eases, just for a moment.
They devour their food with the practiced efficiency of men fueling for a mission, each bite deliberate. I force down a bite, but it turns to lead halfway down. My stomach’s too twisted to care about food, not when we're shadowed by questions no one’s answering.
