-Travis. You never put a hand on me. I’ll say that. On the record. You walked in with them and you watched and you didn’t touch me. That’s a different charge than what these three are looking at. If you walk over to that wall phone right now and call the base police yourself, it’s different again.

-Don’t listen to her.

-Cole. You hesitated. Twice. I heard you. Everybody heard you. That matters.

-Shut up!

Garrett kicked me in the ribs. One of the cracked ones gave fully. The white came back.

I breathed through it.

-Marcus. Your blood is on this floor. Your DNA. You can’t walk that back. But you can decide whether you’re the guy who called for help or the guy who ran.

-Stop talking!

Garrett was coming apart. He grabbed a steel pry bar off the inspection table. The kind we used to open shipping crates. Three feet of hardened steel.

He lifted it over my head.

-You don’t get to talk anymore.

I looked up at him. I didn’t close my eyes. If it was going to come, I was going to watch it come. That’s the one thing they can never take from you.

-Garrett. If you do that, there’s no version of tomorrow where you’re not in a cell for the rest of your life. Assault is one thing. A body is another. Right now you can still choose.

-Shut your mouth.

-Put it down.

A new voice.

From the far end of the aisle. Flat. Hard. Absolutely certain.

Agent Dana Reyes stood in the gap between the shelving with a pistol in a two-handed grip, aimed at the center of Garrett’s chest. Behind her were two men in NCIS windbreakers, weapons up. Behind them, the blue-and-red strobe of base police lights washed through the open loading door.

-NCIS. Drop the bar and get on the ground. All of you. Now.

Travis dropped to his knees with his hands already behind his head. He’d clearly been rehearsing it.

Cole put his hands up and backed against the shelf and slid down it.

Marcus just sat down where he stood, blood still pouring down his chin.

Garrett didn’t move.

He stood over me with the pry bar still raised, his chest heaving, his eyes doing the thing I’d seen in men at the very end of their options. Calculating a way out that didn’t exist.

-Voss.

Reyes took a step closer. Her aim didn’t waver a millimeter.

-There are four federal agents and six base police officers in this building. There is a woman with two broken legs on the floor in front of you. Every second you hold that bar is a second a judge is going to hear about. Put. It. Down.

The pry bar trembled in his hands.

I looked up at him from the floor.

-It’s over, Garrett. It was over eleven minutes ago. You just didn’t know it yet.

The bar came down.

Not on me.

It hit the concrete beside my head with a clang that rang through the whole depot. Then Garrett Voss put his hands on top of his head and got down on his knees, and an NCIS agent put him face-first on the floor of the building he’d tried to turn into a crime scene.

Reyes holstered her weapon and dropped to a knee beside me. She looked at my legs. Her jaw tightened.

-Commander. Rebecca. Stay still. Medics are thirty seconds out.

-Both tib-fibs. Left’s displaced. Three ribs. I’m not going into shock, my pressure’s fine, I’m tracking everything.

A ghost of a smile crossed her face.

-Of course you are.

-Reyes.

-Yeah.

-Did it land? The upload.

-It landed at 2214 and nineteen seconds. Hash verified. I was reading it when your text came in. We were already moving before you hit send on the second one.

I let my head rest back against the concrete.

-Then it was worth it.

-You could have waited for us. You knew we were outside.

-I didn’t know they’d come tonight. And if I’d waited, they’d have erased the fourth entry. The preservation order had to go in while I was standing at the terminal.

She shook her head slowly.

-You broke this whole case open in eleven minutes with two broken legs.

-The legs came after. Let’s keep the timeline straight. It’ll matter in court.

She laughed. It was a short, disbelieving sound. Then the medics came through the loading door with a gurney and a trauma bag, and the next part of the night began.

The medics were good. Two of them, Navy corpsmen, young and fast and calm. They splinted both legs in the fluorescent buzz of the depot while Reyes held my hand, which I did not ask her to do and did not tell her to stop.