Chapter 33

Pacey

 

 

The wait was going to kill me, I thought as I finished another cup of coffee. I’d lost count of how many I’d had, but I went to the coffee machine and poured another anyway. Tugger was sitting at my kitchen table, shoveling eggs into his mouth.

We’d called for backup, after it became clear that we were in for a wait as it was so the others were on standby. We’d told them we’d keep them up to date with information as soon as we got it, but we didn’t have anything yet.

I couldn’t eat. I still couldn’t think straight, and I was on edge as never before. I was roaring to go, but I didn’t know where I was going yet.

Tugger’s idea had turned out to be a good one, the best, actually, but I was fucking impatient, and if we didn’t hear something soon, I was going out guns blazing. I know where I’d go or what the guns would be pointed at, but I was struggling to maintain control.

How the fuck had I gotten here again?

I rubbed my face a couple of times, frustrated to the edges of my sanity. Blunt stubble dug into my palms, and I wished that it would actually hurt. Anything to distract me from the firestorm raging in my body.

With each hour that passed, I was getting more antsy, more impatient. Tugger, on the other hand, seemed to become calmer, balancing me out perfectly. He calmly sat at the table, watching me carefully between glances at his phone, which was lying silent as a fucking cemetery next to his forearm.

After leaving Scott’s the night before, Tugger laid out his plan for me, and as messed up in the head as I was, I’d agreed with him that it was the most effective thing we could do.

“Do you remember that Jones guy we met on our second, maybe third tour?” he’d asked me, his eyes deadly serious in the muted light of the dash.

Had my brain been functioning normally at the time, I would’ve put it together immediately, but I didn’t. I was running in far from optimal condition. “Sure, why?”

Tugger’s brow furrowed, clearly realizing how far gone I was, speaking softly when he all but spelled it out for me. “He’s in intelligence, Pacey.”

Of course. Fuck. I’d slammed my fist to my forehead. “Do you know how to get ahold of him? Or if he’s even still there?”

“We kept in touch,” he’d said, releasing a low sigh. “I ran into him again during my last tour, and he mentioned he was coming home, too. We talked for a bit and exchanged contact info, wanting to get together sometime. That never happened, but we still talk from time to time. Last time was a couple of weeks ago; he’s still there.”

Thank God. “Let’s call him, then.”

Tugger nodded and pulled out his phone, putting it on speaker after he hit Jones’s number. Four rings later, Jones answered, sounding surprised to hear from Tugger. “Johnson, to what do I owe the honor?”

It was the middle of the night, but Jones was alert, maybe even a touch worried. Tugger glanced at me. “I’m with Nelson. We need your help.”

“Hey, Nelson, long time, brother. What do you need?”

“Jones,” I’d said, my blood singing with impatience and the need to fucking hit something. “We need everything you can get on a man called Jeremiah Anton. Current location is Stone Mountain, Georgia. He’s a local drug dealer, but that’s all we’ve got.”

Jones didn’t ask any questions. “It could take me a couple of hours, but I’ll call you as soon as I’ve got something.”

“Thanks, Jones,” Tugger said, and I echoed it.

“No problem, boys.” He clicked off without saying goodbye.

We’d driven back to my place to settle in for the wait. That was five hours ago, and we still hadn’t heard anything. Tugger crashed and managed a few hours’ sleep; I hadn’t gotten a wink. No surprise there. I hadn’t even tried. I’d guarded Tugger’s phone like my life depended on it, because Juliana’s might, which meant that mine did too, in a way.

I drove myself crazy by letting a highlight reel of my memories of Juliana play in my mind. Guilt ate at me, hot and heavy, because I hadn’t been there to protect her. Logically, I knew that it was senseless and that there was no way that I could have been, since we weren’t exactly living together or anything, but logic wasn’t winning in the war against guilt.

Tugger’s phone finally buzzed against the wooden table, the sound filling the quiet kitchen. I was next to him in a flash, and he slid his thumb along the green line at the same time. “Jones?”

“It’s me. I’ve got your guy.” He was all business. “I’m not even going to ask how you boys managed to get involved with this little prick. Your email still the same as it was, Tug?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” There was a second of silence, and then Jones was back. “I’ve just sent over everything I found, but let me give you a rundown. Jeremiah Wilbur Anton. Small-time supplier, but he’s making a tidy sum of money doing it. He’s been caught on a number of petty offenses, but he’s only done a couple of months on the inside. He owns a couple of properties in your area, three in his own name and a relatively small farm that he inherited from his grandfather.”

“Thanks, Jones, I owe you. Hugely,” I told him, already starting to head to the garage to grab the gear I’d packed a few hours ago. The routine of choosing my weapons and equipment was as familiar to me as breathing. The process of carefully arranging everything into a couple of big black bags and mentally ticking off whether I had everything that I could need, that and the routine were possibly the only things that kept me from going off the rails in the middle of the night.

“You don’t owe me anything,” I heard Jones say as I turned the corner out of my kitchen, but my focus was on getting to the garage and my gear. I grabbed the bag and loaded them onto Tugger’s truck, parked next to mine in the two-car space.

Tugger was there a few minutes later, carrying a stack of freshly printed paper. The sheets were still warm when he spread them out on the hood of his car. Pointing to the list of properties Anton owned, I saw that Jones had sent a summary of the property details under each address.

“That’s too small, too crowded of an area,” I told Tugger as I jabbed my finger at the apartment listed at the top of the page.

“Agreed,” he said and crossed it off with a black pen. “Where’s that one?”

“Industrial part of town,” I replied, looking down at the second property on the list that Tugger’s finger was on. “Bracket it; it’s a possibility.”

He nodded and placed two brackets around the property’s address. Our eyes dropped to the next one. “That’s a residential area, I think.”

“Yeah, it’s the next one over from the Brooks property,” he said. “I don’t think it’s likely to be that one; the houses are big, but they’re not that big. If someone yells there at night, I’m pretty sure the neighbors would hear it.”

I agreed, but I didn’t add what I was thinking. That’s if she could scream: if they hadn’t drugged her, or worse, but I couldn’t think like that. “That leaves the inherited farm.”

“I think that’s a decent guess for first prize. It’s isolated enough, and the town records would probably still have it in his family’s name, not his necessarily.”

“True. We gotta pass almost right by the warehouse address in the industrial area to get out that side of town. Think we should circle the property there on the way out to the farm?”

He nodded slowly. “Yeah. Let’s go.”

Tugger didn’t ask about weapons, didn’t check the bags. He trusted me, same as I trusted him. He hit the button on the clicker he had to get into my house, and the heavy garage door started lifting behind us.

The traffic was light for it being so early on a weekday morning, and Tugger gunned his truck to the south as I programmed the address of first the warehouse and then the farm into the GPS on my phone. The disembodied voice of the all-knowing lady who lived in my phone told us that our estimated time of arrival was 10 minutes.

Tugger got us there in six. We circled the warehouse slowly, but there were no signs of life. “Wanna check for heat signatures anyway?”

“Sure,” I said, reaching for the thermal imaging monoculars I’d packed. It was a couple years old already, but it still worked like a charm.

Lifting the shuttered eyepiece of the viewfinder to my eye, I raised the imager toward the warehouse. It was empty from what I could see. There were also no cars parked in the parking lot out front, and there didn’t seem to be a way to drive around the building.

“I think it’s safe to say he’s not here,” I told Tugger.

He had his monocular to his eye as well, and he nodded. “Let’s get to the farm.”

We hightailed it out of there, following the directions provided by my GPS. Tugger shaved off a fair number of minutes again, slowing on the gravel road when we were supposedly a couple hundred yards away.

“By foot from here?” Tugger asked.

“Yeah. Ready when you are.”

Taking only the monoculars with us, we parked Tugger’s truck behind an embankment and covered the rest of the distance fast, but keeping out of sight. We were only doing recon now. If we found Anton, and hopefully Juliana with him, we’d go back to the truck to get our weapons and to discuss our strategy once we’d seen what we were dealing with.

The farmhouse was secluded, alright. It sat in the midst of a copse of trees, set back from the gravel road.

There were six cars parked outside and a porch that seemed to wrap around the old, two-story building. There were no balconies on the second story, but windows dotted the walls. It looked like each room had at least one.

The front door had a screen hanging at an angle in front of it and wasn’t all the way shut. Getting in wouldn’t be a problem. Not at all.

Tugger was conducting his own quiet assessment; his eyes also narrowed as he came to his conclusions. We were taking cover behind some of the trees around the house, but we were both creeping closer, staying covered.

We neared the house and ran, bent at the waist, to drop behind one of the cars. We hadn’t spoken a word, but we moved in unison and raised the monoculars to our eyes. My pulse was thrumming in my neck when I counted seven heat signatures.

But there are only six cars.

It didn’t necessarily mean that the seventh heat signature belonged to Juliana, but my gut told me that it did. And my gut had never steered me wrong.

I made a rolling motion with my hand, and Tugger nodded. Let’s get this show on the road.

A couple of minutes later, we were back at the truck, locking and loading. And fuck if it didn’t feel good. I was finally doing something to actively get my girl back, and the knowledge allowed my mind, fucked as it had been since I found out she’d been taken, to focus completely. I relaxed into the familiar feeling of laser-like focus and supreme control.

It was a mode my body slipped into on autopilot before a mission, and it felt fucking great to be there again, more so since this mission was to get back what was mine. Fuck anyone who tried to stand in my way.

If she was in there, I wasn’t leaving without her. I allowed all outside thoughts and worries to fall away, clearing my mind and preparing for the mission ahead. I could see Tugger doing the exact same thing. 

“Strategy?” Tugger asked.

“I’ll take point,” I said.

He nodded, “In through the front?”

“Yeah, doesn’t look like they’re expecting company. We have all the surprise we’re gonna need already.”

“Agreed.”

“Flash bangs, anyway?”

“Why not?” He shrugged and flashed me a grin. He missed this shit too, I could see it in his eyes.

“Ready?”

“Born ready,” Tugger said, with a cocky smirk playing on his lips. “Let’s not kill anyone unnecessarily, okay?”

I rolled my eyes. “If she’s in there, none of their deaths would be unnecessary as far as I’m concerned. They took her from me.”

Tugger’s grin kicked up another notch. “Caveman much?”

I flipped him off. “Do you disagree?”

He shook his head. “Not for a second. Have you let the others know where we are?”

Nodding, I pulled my phone out of my pocket and showed him the message I’d sent earlier. “You know it. They’re en route now. You want to wait for them?”

I prayed that he said no. It was smarter to wait for backup, I knew it, but I was also itching to get to Juliana. She’d been alone with those creeps for too long as it was. Thankfully, Tugger agreed.

“Nah. Tell them we’re going in ahead of them. Let’s go get your girl. I can’t wait to meet her.”

“Let’s go get her then,” I said. It was time to go in, and I was ready to kick some serious fucking ass.