He simply pointed toward the back exam room, pulled gloves on, and started cutting the jeans away with a practiced hand. The gash was deep but clean. A jagged tear where the edge of the bumper had torn through skin and muscle just above the knee. You're lucky she wasn't a better driver. Porter muttered as he worked, stitching with quiet efficiency.
Marcus didn't answer. He watched the ceiling. The sterile white light overhead casting long shadows across the walls. It wasn't luck. It was restraint.
She hadn't missed because of mercy. She missed because hate makes people reckless. When it was done, Porter wrapped the leg in gauze and handed over a bottle of antibiotics. "You going to report it?" He asked, voice low.
"I already did," Marcus said, his voice calm, unreadable. "They just don't know it yet." He left the clinic without another word, stepping back into the cooling night air, the pain now anchored tightly around his thigh like a weight he carried on principal. He sat in the car for a long moment, engine running low, his phone glowing in his hand. He scrolled past contacts, clients, old friends, Reggie, until he reached the name he'd saved weeks ago when she first stepped onto his driveway with a badge and a clipboard.
Detective Castillo. He pressed the call button. It rang twice. Castillo, she answered, her tone clipped. All business.
It's Trent, he said. We need to talk. A pause. Then you hurt. Clipped.
He replied. Pickup truck. Deliberate. I've got plates, names, and motive. Where are you?
Half a mile from where they tried to kill me. Another pause. This one heavier. Stay there, she said. I'm coming.
20 minutes later, her unmarked cruiser pulled up beside the sedan beneath a dark stretch of road, headlights washing over the cracked pavement before shutting off. Castillo stepped out alone. No partner, no radio chatter, just a flashlight in one hand, and attention in her shoulders that hadn't been there the first time they met. Marcus stepped out slowly, careful not to favor the leg too much. She took one look and muttered.
"Jesus, it's stable," he said. "I don't mean the leg," she replied. "I mean the fact you're still walking after what they did." She leaned against the hood of her car, flicking her light toward the roadside brush, as if scanning for whatever ghosts he might have left behind. Start talking.
He handed her a folder, simple, thin, but heavy with names, timestamps, photos, plate numbers, and a written account of every movement Doug and Sher Min had made in the past week. She flipped through it silently, eyes narrowing. This is detailed. It's what happens when you're trained to study targets and someone gives you a reason. She paused at a photo.
The truck's tailgate plastered with every angry slogan and sticker, frozen in frame at the gas station. Then another. Sherry screaming into her phone while Doug leaned against a dumpster, battered and slumped. "You sure about the license plate?" She asked.
"I saw it twice. I memorized it the third time." She tucked the file under her arm. Attempted vehicular homicide," she said softly. "I could get a judge to move on this tonight.
Do it," Marcus said. She glanced at him then. Really looked at him. Not just the bloodstained wrap beneath his knee, or the lines of exhaustion carved into his expression, but the way he stood, the absolute stillness of him, the weight of someone who hadn't reacted out of rage, but resolve. You planning to keep chasing them?
I plan to be there when they stop running. She nodded once. No challenge, no lecture, just a shared understanding that this wasn't about revenge anymore. It was about drawing a line. The system kept letting people like Doug and Sherry step over without consequence.
I'll put out a regional APB, she said. If they're anywhere near this county, they won't stay hidden for long. But you know how this goes. If I bring them in, they'll spin a story. They'll play the victim.
They can spin all they want, Marcus said, stepping back toward his car. I've got the truth. And if that's not enough to bury them, I've still got one more lesson to teach. She didn't stop him as he climbed back into the sedan. Didn't ask him to stay back.
Didn't warn him about crossing lines because deep down she knew he wasn't crossing them. He was dragging them into the light. The file was in Castillo's hands. The warrant was in motion. And yet, as Marcus pulled back out onto the road beneath the empty stretch of sky, something settled into his chest like a stone.
The quiet, familiar certainty that the system wouldn't get there in time. Not because Castillo wasn't trying, not because the paperwork wouldn't hold, but because men like Doug and women like Sherry had a lifetime of experience slipping between cracks they'd been told were never meant for them. They didn't think they'd be caught. Not really, because history had taught them the net always broke when it touched their skin. So Marcus drove, not in circles, not without aim, but with purpose.
He wasn't chasing anymore. He was hunting. And every second he let pass was another inch they'd used to vanish. That phone call Sherry had made in the clearing, it had stuck with him. The desperation in her voice, the way she barked the name Roy like it was a lifeline.
The frantic pitch when she screamed, "He's got connections. I told you she hadn't been lying. She hadn't had time to. That call hadn't been a bluff. It had been a reach for cover, for shelter, for whatever safety existed in a world where people like her still believed they were owed sanctuary.
He started with what he knew. Roy, one syllable, but it was enough. He'd heard it twice. Once in the clearing, and once before, months ago, during a routine stop at a gun supply store just outside county lines. Marcus remembered the clerk, a gaunt man with pockm marked skin, who kept photos of deer kills taped behind the counter like holy relics.
He remembered the man bragging about a friend named Roy. Some exform with land out near the river basin. Hundreds of acres, no cell towers, no one looking. The kind of place men like Doug could run to when life in town got too complicated. Marcus pulled over beneath a dead billboard just outside the industrial park and opened the small notepad he kept tucked in the glove box.
In it, a hundred scribbles of license plates, building names, phone numbers, and witness remarks. Halfway down the third page, there it was. Roy C, former boss, now off-rid near Flint Creek. He'd written it after hearing the name tossed around by another regular at the gym, a man who had once worked construction with a crew that included Doug Malin before Doug got booted for starting a fight over a black supervisor being promoted. Marcus tapped the pen once against the notepad, then keyed the address into the jeep.
The route popped up an hour southwest, past the old mill road, then deeper into unincorporated land where law slowed down and fences grew taller. He didn't call Castillo. Not yet. He wasn't going there for a standoff. He was going to confirm a hunch.
And if he was right, if Roy was harboring them, he'd have more than speculation to hand over. He'd have a location, a point of impact, something real and immovable. The drive out of town was quiet, the night air growing heavier as the road narrowed into two-lane stretches lined with tall grass and rusted signs for roadside produce stands long since abandoned. The sedan rolled steady over gravel and broken pavement, and with each mile the sky darkened into something thicker than evening, a blackness only found in places the grid didn't touch. At the edge of Flint Creek, Marcus pulled off onto a dirt path half swallowed by brush.