Part 5 — The River Eats Its Secrets
He lifts his face into the light and the night shrinks to the size of the glass between us.
“Evan?” I say before I can stop the word. Evan Rourke—county EMT, the guy who brings blankets to our holiday pet drive, the one who once bottle-fed a raccoon kit in my break room and laughed like it was summer. Reflective vest. Rain hood. Toolbox.
Officer Sanchez is already moving. “Sir, step back from the door.”
He gives me a look that tries to be familiar. “Doc. Power flickered again? Dispatch said check your panel.” He flashes an ID card with his thumb over part of the photo. “Need a peek.”
Sanchez doesn’t blink. “We verify every badge tonight. Stand right there.”
Blue’s head comes up from her blankets down the hall—ears forward, body still, a low breath that isn’t a growl, just language only dogs speak when something is wrong at a frequency our bones understand.
I hit the intercom. “Evan, who asked you to come?”
“Supervisor,” he says easily. “You know how it is when the grid’s cranky.”
“Name?”
He hesitates a quarter-second, too short for a stranger and too long for a friend. “Zito.”
Sanchez calls it in. Static. Then the utility dispatcher’s voice returns: No field tech named Zito tonight. And Evan Rourke—if he’s on at all—should be across town at a high-school game, not standing in my doorway with a toolbox at midnight.
Sanchez angles her body so she’s between him and the handle. “Sir, you’ll need to wait outside. Do not leave the lot.”
Evan’s mouth does a small, regretful tilt. “Just trying to help, Officer.” He steps backward, hands open, eyes on me the whole time like we’re trading a memory. He turns. The canopy light catches his sleeve; the diagonal reflective stripe wakes up for a heartbeat and looks exactly like the slanted patch in Hale’s printout.
SYD—helmet tucked at his hip—drifts with two bikers to shadow Evan from a distance. They’re not cops. They’re excellent at being citizens.
“Plate?” Sanchez asks without looking away from the glass.
“Got it,” SYD says softly.
By the time I reach Blue, her eyes are bright and fixed on the mop room like someone knocked on a door only she can hear. She whines once, short and sharp.
“What is it, girl?” I ask, as if tonight hasn’t taught me that the dog in this room is the best detective we have. She noses the air, then the baseboard, then the corridor seam like the building is writing to her under the paint.
We follow—harness on, towel braced beneath her belly to guard the incision, Gabe at the IV pole, Sanchez trailing. In the mop room, the floor drain whispers louder than before. The air tastes like nickels and river water. Blue paws once at the grate, gentle, purposeful.
Gabe pries it loose a fraction. I crouch, and a wet tangle slides up with the metal like a reluctant secret being born. Child’s sock. Cartoon planets, almost erased. A hair ribbon knotted around it too tight, the way small hands do things when they’re scared or in a hurry.
We bag it, label it, note the time. No speeches. Work is its own creed.
Blue isn’t done. She noses the back door, looks up at me, and makes a sound I’ve only ever heard when a dog asks a human to trust them more than feels comfortable.
“Two minutes,” I promise the universe. “No heroics.”
The alley is a cold mouth. Rain beads on chain link and runs down the diner’s exhaust pipe in tired threads. Blue moves without bravado, a quiet line straight to the corner where roof runoff dives underground. She sniffs the grate and paws once. Something pale catches under the bars, hovers, and then the water slides it toward us as if the river decided we’d earned a hint.
Gabe lies flat and reaches with tongs. A small sneaker comes up dripping. Sparkles pressed in the sides. Double-knotted laces. A sticker half-peeled on the heel—star, maybe heart. My breath stutters and refuses to restart until it wants to.
Sanchez already has the flier out—the one with the gap-toothed grin and the yellow raincoat. In the corner are detail shots of shoes. Not identical—nothing in life is—but close enough that your body knows before your head will consent.
Back inside, the presumptive test draws its quiet pink line beside the control. Human. We write the time again. We don’t celebrate. We let the room be small enough to hold one fact at a time.
My phone buzzes: an unknown number. A photo loads—taken from the alley, low angle. Chain link in the foreground, our back door’s slice of light in the distance. Ten minutes earlier. No people. Just the feeling of being seen.
A second photo arrives—same frame, current timestamp.
Then a text: You’re looking down. Try the river. Dock 3A. Twenty minutes. Come alone.
I forward it to Hale, to dispatch, to Sanchez. The little wheel spins and becomes the coolest word I know tonight: DELIVERED.
Sanchez’s jaw sets. “We don’t go alone,” she says. “We don’t go at all without the green light.”
The bikers are already shifting their weight like chess pieces that prefer motion. Across the street, a cluster of kayak folks in rain shells appears—night friends who run flood rescues when the river gets moody. Ropes. Headlamps. A thermos bigger than my leg. Community has a shape; tonight it’s waterproof.
“I can walk the short bank behind the clinic,” I tell Sanchez. “Thirty yards. If anything bigger than a tadpole moves, I plant myself and call out.”
She considers. “You get ten minutes and two bodies with you.”
We go—me, SYD, one of the kayak women who introduces herself as Tasha and ties a line around my waist like we’re learning to be prudent in public. The river is a muscle under the dark, rolling heavy, pretending not to. I swing my headlamp wide. The beam skates over a snagged branch, a plastic bottle, the bold eyes of a raccoon who looks offended that we’re late to his party.
Then Tasha says “There,” and her voice hits a register that is all skill. A child’s raincoat, yellow before the river rubbed it to mustard, flutters against a low branch like a flag that ran out of wind. We secure it, bag it, log it. A little sticker on the cuff—matching the heel sticker on the shoe—grins up like it doesn’t understand time.
At the bait shop near the bend, there’s a weatherproof camera perched under the eave. The owner meets us in the door with a towel and a worry line. “Some city guy in a reflective vest came an hour ago,” he says, apologetic like he lent out a tool that came back broken. “Said he needed the card for maintenance training. I let him. Should I not have?”
“He give a name?” SYD asks.
“Marsh,” the man says. “Tom, I think.”
We log that too. Tom Marsh, reflective vest, toolbox. The story keeps circling the same block, looking in the same windows.
Hale calls as I step back into the clinic. “Dock 3A is real,” he says. “Old river warehouses off Redwood. We’re staging without sirens four blocks out. Quiet eyes, no chatter on common channels.” He pauses. “Maya? Don’t move Blue. Whoever’s fishing for her doesn’t need bait.”
I look at Blue asleep under warm towels, the IV dripping a neat metronome into the line. “We’re locked. Animal Control’s sealed her kennel. Bikers on the doors. Drains checked.”
“Good,” he says. “We’ll be ghosts.”
He hangs up and five seconds later, my phone vibrates again—unknown number with a live link. Against training and sense, I tap.
A feed opens to a dim concrete space. No faces. Just a rolling door at the far end, half-open to the river’s breath, and rows of plastic crates. The camera pans—slow, deliberate. In the corner, a small shape on a cot under a thermal blanket. A purple backpack with a worn patch sits on the floor. A soft sound—half sob, half hiccup—skitters up my spine and nests there.
The camera tilts again. Off to the side, another cot. Empty, but with the warm dent that says someone was here not long ago. A second blanket folded too neatly. Two cartons labeled MEDICAL. A portable oxygen tank. The time stamp in the corner clicks one minute forward, like the feed is live and not a ghost story.
My fingers go cold. “Sanchez,” I say, and she is already at my shoulder. Gabe stands behind her, face blue in the screen light. The bikers lean in the doorway, suddenly very still.
“Send it,” Sanchez says. I do. Dispatch. Hale. Every right inbox. The little wheel twirls and hands me DELIVERED again, like a prayer bead.
A new message appears on my phone—not in the feed, but over it. Fifteen minutes. Alone. Dog for girl. Dock 3A. Then, as if manners matter: No cops.
Blue lifts her head, blinks, and looks toward the back hall. A sound like a small idea moving through a big body comes from somewhere inside the building—metal gently ticking, the way ducts talk when the temperature changes, except the generator has been steady for an hour.
I mute my phone and text Hale: Live feed shows two cots, one occupied. Medical supplies. O2 tank. I add: “Tom Marsh” at bait shop pulled SD card. Evan Rourke tried to get in here.
Three dots. Then: Copy. Eyes on 3A now. Hold your doors, Maya.
Holding doors turns out to be an action verb. We check every latch. Sanchez stations herself at the front with a second unit. SYD and two riders take the alley, the chain-link, the roof runoff. Tasha coils her rope like a sentence that knows its grammar. Gabe adjusts Blue’s fluids, checks her temperature, whispers something about pancakes like he’s talking to a kid having a nightmare.
The live feed shifts. The rolling door at the far end shudders and rises another foot. River air pushes in—cold, damp, indifferent. Footsteps slap concrete, then stop. A hand enters the frame—gloved, reflective tape on the sleeve—and sets down a plastic tote.
The camera pans to the tote lid. Three letters spray-painted sloppy: 3A.
The feed tilts up again and lands, for one heartbeat only, on the corner of a face in the bad light. Enough jaw to believe I’ve seen it. Not enough to swear in court. Scar along the line. Denim over reflective. The image stutters and goes black like someone pulled a plug or a nerve.
I stare at my phone and see my reflection looking back—scrubs, damp hair, the kind of eyes people get when they’ve used up their gas tank and keep driving anyway because the exit they need is one more mile.
A text arrives, bare and smug: Tick tock.
Another text, this one from Hale, rides in on top of it: We’re inside the outer bay. Door to 3A is rigged—trip wire. Hold your—
His message chops off mid-word. Not Delivered hangs there like a dare.
At the same instant, somewhere behind the kennel hall, a roll-up door I forgot we even had makes a sound I never want to hear in my own building again: a metal rattling ascent, slow, deliberate, patient.
Blue is on her feet before I am. Her body points like a compass.
And from my speaker—because the live feed has decided to find its voice again—comes the soft, unmistakable sound of a child saying into the dark, “Is someone there?”
Part 6 — The Trap at 3A
The roll-up door groans like it woke up in the wrong building.
“Positions,” Sanchez says, already moving. Her hand lifts, palm flat, and the bikers spread into the alley and the hall with the quiet competence of people who’ve learned how to help without stepping on the wrong toes.
“Blue, stay,” I whisper, easing her kennel door shut and clipping the Animal Control seal back into place. She stands anyway, steadying herself with her tail, eyes locked on the corridor where the door is rising one rib at a time.
Gabe kills the overheads in the treatment room so we can see what’s outside. Rain strobes in the gap under the door. A toolbox slides in first—pushed by someone on the other side—metal skidding on wet concrete.
“Do not touch that,” Sanchez says. “Could be nothing, could be a camera, could be a jammer.”
The door climbs another foot. A shape fills the gap—height and jacket and that diagonal flash of reflective. He doesn’t step in. He waits, like patience is a habit.
“Sir, this is a secured scene,” Sanchez calls. “Back away from the door and show your hands.”
He laughs softly, like we’re neighbors arguing about sprinklers. “Relax. Just picking up something I dropped.” The voice is lower than the one in the alley; the same cigarette-stained warmth hangs behind it.
SYD ghosts into the alley’s blind spot and mirrors the silhouette’s angle. Tasha plants her boots, rope coiled ready. Gabe eases one step toward Blue and sets his palm on the kennel mesh the way you settle a friend.
The figure on the other side of the door slides the toolbox another six inches toward us with his shoe. Light glints off a small black puck on its lid—no markings, a smooth disk like a hockey puck cut in half.
“Signal jammer,” Gabe murmurs. “Maybe cellular, maybe short-range cams.”
“Copy,” Sanchez says under her breath. Into her mic: “Unit two, hold the front. No one comes in hot.”
I ease closer to the toolbox, staying behind the far side of the counter. The puck’s LED blinks—slow, steady. I see my reflection in the metal lid: tired, damp, stubborn.
On the live feed still playing on my phone, the dim room at Dock 3A shivers as if someone bumped the camera. The rolling bay there ratchets up another foot. A small figure shifts under a blanket. The sound is faint but clear: the small, hiccuping breath of a child trying not to cry.
“Is someone there?” she whispers again.
My chest tightens. I send the feed to Hale a second time, to Dispatch a third. The send wheel spins and lands: DELIVERED.
Sanchez angles for the switch housing and slaps the stop on our door. The motor’s grind cuts off mid-groan. The gap holds at twenty inches, enough for a conversation, too little for a person.
“Back up,” she calls. “Hands on your head.”
“Sure,” the figure says, agreeable as weather. His hands rise into view—palms outward, fingers spread. Rain threads off his sleeves. The diagonal reflective stripe across his chest catches the light and throws it back in a thin, tilted band.
“Name,” Sanchez says.
“Tom Marsh,” he answers, easy.
“Funny,” SYD says from the alley, conversational in a way that sits on top of steel. “That’s the name you used at the bait shop when you took the camera card.”
The hands don’t move. The pause is so short you could miss it. “Lots of Toms in a town like this.”
Sanchez points at the toolbox with her chin. “Kick it in slow.”
He does, nudging it with the toe of his boot until it clears the jamb. She drags it with the end of a mop handle like we’re playing the world’s least fun game of hockey. When it’s within reach, she pops the lid with the mop tip. Inside: zip ties, cheap gloves, a coil of fishing line, a small spray bottle labeled Citrus Solvent, and a phone. The phone lights as if it’s been waiting for attention. An inbound call blazes on the screen: UNKNOWN.
Sanchez hits accept on speaker and drops the phone in a clean tray. The line clicks; no voice at first. Just river air hissing across an open space.
Then a man, filtered and thin: “Trade. Dog for girl. Ten minutes. Dock 3A.”
“We don’t trade lives,” Sanchez says, calm as a drill sergeant teaching kindergartners to cross the street. “Bring the child to any well-lit public location and walk away.”
A beat. Then a slow clap of a reply we can’t hear but can feel. The line clicks dead.
Gabe points to the side wall. A dot of red winks there, blinking steady. He plucks something no bigger than a vitamin from the underside of the counter with a strip of tape—micro camera, battery the size of a bean. He holds it up. “They’ve been watching us.”
I think of Blue at the drain earlier, the way she pawed the grate like a librarian telling me to check the right shelf. I check the mop room again. Under the lip of the floor drain, glued hard where the grate would hide it, a second micro cam stares up with a spider-eye lens. We cover it with a specimen cup and tape it down.
Outside, the rain shifts to the steady, soaking kind that towns learn to live with. The crowd across the street has grown—neighbors in ponchos, kids under big coats, the diner owner with a vat of coffee and a look that could nail a storm to a wall. Phones glow like fireflies. Comments on my screen wobble toward a new center: #BlueIsAWitness.
Caleb drifts at the edge of the canopy with his hood up, broadcasting and shaking. He watches our door with an intensity that wants to be grief and lands somewhere too intent. When he catches me looking, he lifts his hands and backs away two steps, like he wants credit for good behavior.
The live feed from Dock 3A jerks again. The camera pans across plastic crates to a portable oxygen tank and a tote marked MEDICAL. A gloved hand sets down a paper cup with a straw. The child’s blanket moves. A cough—tiny, ragged—finds my ear.
Hale’s text arrives in a whisper: Inside perimeter. Door to 3A rigged with a noisemaker and smoke. We’re disabling. Hold your doors.
“Copy,” I text back. Clinic breached attempt. Toolbox with jammer. Micro cams found.
Three dots. Then: Understood. Another line starts: If we go dark— It vanishes mid-word. Not Delivered.
At the same instant, a muffled thump rolls in from miles away, the kind of echo that happens when a big space inhales too hard and remembers to exhale.
“Smoke?” Gabe asks.
“Could be,” Sanchez says, eyes on the door gap.
Blue lets out a sound so low it lives in the floorboards. Not pain. Focus. She leans forward, nose lifted—not toward the roll-up, but toward the far corner where a service corridor runs behind radiology and ends at a steel door I have opened maybe four times in five years.
Tasha gestures with the coil of rope. “Service egress?”
“Old loading bay,” I say. “We never use it.”
“Then someone else does,” Sanchez says. “Unit three, swing to the south wall.”
We hustle the short corridor. The old steel door has been cleaned recently—just enough to make the dirt look intentional. The undercut is wet. I touch the handle. Cold. I lean. It gives a whisper, then sticks against something on the outside.
“Block,” SYD says, already heading around.
We hold there, a small knot of people in a hall that suddenly feels very long. Blue watches the seam, tail still, ears forward, center of gravity low the way dogs get when they’re reading a sentence to the end.
My phone buzzes—an unknown number again. A call this time, not a text. Against everything good sense has taught me, I answer on speaker. “This is Dr. Tran.”
A small voice fills the hall, as fragile and brave as a match in wind. “Is Blue there?”
My throat closes and then remembers its job. “Hi, Ava,” I say, and the name is a promise I hear myself making. “Blue is here.”
A hitching breath, then: “I heard a dog. It sounded like her. Are you coming?”
Sanchez holds up a finger—careful, careful—so I don’t rush the next question. “Can you tell me anything about where you are? What you smell? What you hear?”
A pause. “It smells like oranges. My throat feels funny. There’s a boat horn sometimes. And a bell that goes ding when the waves hit. The man said we have to be quiet.”
Citrus solvent. River. Bell buoy. My brain draws lines I wish I didn’t know how to draw.
“We’re coming,” I say. “Can you stay where you are?”
Before she can answer, a deeper voice cuts in, friendly like a commercial for something you shouldn’t buy. “That’s enough, sweetheart.” The line clicks. The screen says CALL ENDED.
I listen to the echo of her words in my chest. One: oranges. Two: horn. Three: bell. Four: quiet.
On cue, outside, a faint ding floats up the alley—not loud, but present, like the river cleared its throat. Tasha’s eyes flick toward the bend. “Old ferry slip,” she says. “Only place that still has a working bell buoy inside town limits.”
Sanchez keys her radio. “Dispatch, mark probable at ferry slip near Redwood. Request quiet units, no sirens, east approach. Put out a be-on-the-lookout for County EMS jacket, diagonal stripe, alias Tom Marsh, possible accomplice Evan Rourke. Repeat: do not engage alone.”
The old steel door shivers. Outside, SYD’s voice barks something short; boots thud; then the radio pops as Unit Three reports, “South wall secured. Fresh scrape marks on the sill. Someone tried to wedge it.”
Sanchez breathes out. “Good eyes.”
Blue sits, the canine version of a full stop. I kneel, palm on her shoulder. “You’re doing so well,” I tell her. She leans into my hand, that small surrender dogs give when they believe you’ll be the steady thing.
The phone in the toolbox buzzes again with a new text. Five minutes. 3A. Dog for girl. A second later: No cops or we move her to the drains.
Gabe looks at me, and we don’t have to say the hard part aloud: There are a hundred drains in this town and they all end in a river that eats secrets.
“We’re not trading,” Sanchez says, not unkind. “But we’re not standing still.”
She points: “Doc, you stay with Blue. Gabe, with Doc. Angels, hold this building airtight. Tasha, you and I will mark the south route for PD. No lights until the last block; no radios on common. We move like we belong to the rain.”
In the treatment room, I check Blue’s incision again—dry, clean, her temperature a steady line. “You saved us twice tonight,” I tell her. “That’s enough heroics for one lifetime.”
The live feed twitches—one last pan across the concrete bay—and catches, for a fraction, a shoulder in a reflective vest moving past a column. The camera tries to find focus and hiccups on a name patch under the diagonal stripe. It lands just long enough to make the letters clear and then goes black like a bad idea reconsidered.
ROURKE.
The clinic seems to tilt under my feet. I look through the glass toward the front, where the rain combs the parking lot and the canopy hums, and for a second I see Evan’s easy grin from a summer long gone.
The roll-up door in the kennel hall gnashes another few inches up on its chain, like someone found another switch.
And from the live feed’s black screen, before it dies fully, a voice we’ve all learned too well says one last thing, soft and almost cheerful:
“Doc, let’s not make this complicated.”
The phone goes dark. The steel door trembles again.
Blue stands, stitches and all, and points her whole being toward the sound.