Chapter Thirty-Two – Carter

 

“It’s them,” Tabitha confirmed over Lucy’s phone as I stood in the lobby of the Denny’s, peering out at the parking lot. I’d already called Bunk, given him my location, and he swore he was on his way. That was thirty minutes ago, though. “Draco is definitely owned by someone out of Macao.”

“Good. That’s all I needed.”

“Wait! Carter—”

“Thanks, Tabitha.”

“Don’t you need some fucking backup, or something? Can’t you just wait?”

“Do you think I can fucking wait?” I growled, my voice rising loudly enough that the booth I was standing near stopped what it was doing, their forks and knives ceasing their noise.

“Carter—”

As she spoke, though, I saw a late-model silver Camry pull around and flash its lights in my direction. “My ride’s here. Gotta go.”

“Carter, we’re chartering—”

Too late. I’d already hung up as I went running out of the lobby.

“Draco Construction,” were the first words out of my mouth as I piled into the passenger seat of Bunk’s car, but only after I’d stuffed my duffel away in the trunk. “Drive.”

Bunk just stared at me, open-mouthed, for a moment, like he could barely comprehend my words.

I’d ducked inside the chain restaurant and gone straight into the bathroom, scrubbed as much of the blood off my face as possible, and brushed any of the remaining glass from my hair and beard. I didn’t exactly look presentable, but I also didn’t look stark raving mad. As far as I was concerned, that was a win-win.

“Do you need the address?” I asked. “Because Lucy’s phone’s almost dead, or else I’d look it up for you.”

He shook his head, which must have helped to jar something loose inside him, because he blinked a few times before going to get his phone from his pocket. “Yeah, hold on,” he said as he bent his head over his phone and started to fiddle with the screen. “Damn smart phones. Wish mine was still dumb as a brick, sometimes. Can’t hardly figure this shit out, have to have my son fiddle with it for me all the time.”

I gritted my teeth as I watched him try to navigate the device, my frustration building and building. Something inside me, the bear maybe, wanted to just slam him unconscious, take his phone, and shove him out of the car. Every second he wasted here, messing with his damn phone, was another second Lucy and Amber were captive. I forced down that killer instinct, though, and shoved it as far into the depths of my being as I could.

There was a time and place for that kind of thing, but now wasn’t it.

Besides, his hands were shaking, the blunted tips of his fingers wobbling ever so slightly.

Instead of attacking him, I held my hand out in his direction, palm up. “Need some help?”

He looked at me, shook his head at first. Finally, he relented, slapping the device into my hand. “Can you at least tell me what’s going on?” he asked as I began to search for the address.

“Some men took Lucy and Amber. Bad men that I’m going to kill. You still want to know what this is about? Because if I tell you any more, you’re going to be on the hook right alongside me if anything happens.” I paused as the address came up, handed the phone back to him. “You said earlier you’ve got a son. How old is he?”

“Fourteen.”

“Wife?”

He nodded. “Yeah. Married damn near twenty years.”

I sighed as I leaned forward, looked out the window. Overhead, the skies looked like they were about to open up and dump a whole blanket of snow over the region. The smell of it hung in the air, too. The smell of burgeoning impatience, like Old Man Winter was just rubbing his hands together in anticipation.

“Weatherman says the snow came early,” Bunk said, leaning forward right alongside me, our eyes upturned to the sky, together. “Thought it would be tomorrow or the next day.”

The temperature had dropped right alongside the clouds rolling in. There was no way this town wouldn’t be covered in a white blanket by nighttime.

“Look, the more I tell you,” I said, starting over, “the more danger you’re in. The more complications you open yourself up to. You want your wife and son to be dragged through that with you? I work in security and legal matters. I’ve seen it happen.”

“So, what do you need, then?”

“Just a ride. To that address. You drop me off somewhat nearby, I’ll find my way there. That’s all.”

“Said you’re going to kill those men?”

I didn’t reply, just settled back into my seat, pulled my safety belt around, and buckled myself in.

He reached up, adjusted his glasses, and pushed them back from where they sat perched on his nose. “Okay, then.” He turned the keys in the ignition, starting up the car. “Let’s get you where the fuck you need to go, before this snow starts coming down.”

We drove in silence for the next five miles, my mind focused on the task ahead. Three shifters, armed to the teeth, and well-trained. I was going to have a hell of a time getting in there, taking all of them out, and still making sure Lucy and Amber didn’t manage to catch a bullet from either side.

What other choice did I have, though?

Fat flakes of snow drifted down from the sky likes wads of cotton, or pieces of the clouds themselves, as we pulled up thirty minutes later a couple blocks from the address listed for Draco Construction. It began to settle on the ground, melting at first on the broken sidewalks and pot-holed road, but soon piling up as we sat there in Bunk’s Camry, the engine still purring along. Warehouses and shipping buildings lined both sides of the street. Rusted, old, the concrete seemingly as ancient as the pyramids.

“This it?” Bunk asked after we’d been there for about a minute, both silent.

“Think so,” I said, uncertainty nagging at the back of my mind. The place looked deserted, but functional. Like the people inside had just called it a day. A work truck was parked out front, but not any employee vehicles.

Were they even here? I couldn’t tell just by looking in from the outside, like this. I was going to have to go inside and check it out.

If they weren’t, though?

I was shit out of luck.

Bunk licked his dry lips, coughed a little. “Lemme ask you something, Carter?”

I shrugged. “Depends.”

“You ex-military?”

I nodded. “Sure am.”

“Figured.” He paused, shifted in his seat a little, put his elbow on the armrest and leaned against it. “Worked with my share of hotshot veterans when I was in the fire department, before I did this whole desk job thing. Could always tell from the way they carried themselves, like they’d forgotten to do anything first thing in the morning but their damn pushups.”

“Well, I forgot mine this morning, if it makes any difference.”

He cracked the beginnings of a smile. “A lot of them were solid guys, made good firefighters in the end after we broke ’em in, taught them the ropes.” He shifted his attention back out the front window. “Except this one probie, Jacobs. Kevin Jacobs.”

I didn’t say anything.

He continued anyways. “Jacobs thought that because he’d been shot at, he could somehow live through a fire. That since he’d survived a roadside bomb, that he was fireproof. That he was somehow ten feet tall and made of asbestos. That he shat lightning bolts and pissed battery acid.”

“What happened to him?”

“Died in an apartment fire about ten years ago,” he replied after a moment, his hands moving in the Christian sign of the cross over his chest. “Whole building was up, chief made the general call to pull everyone. The right call.”

“Jacobs didn’t listen, did he?”

“Thought there was a dog or some shit in there. Which, you know, I applaud him for. Family dog’s important to a lot of folks. But everyone else told him to leave, and he still wouldn’t listen.”

“Because he thought he was fireproof?”

“Because he thought he was fucking fireproof.” He turned to look at me, the seat creaking a little at the shift in weight. Outside, the snow continued to come down, now more heavily than just a few minutes before. “You got Lucy and this girl Amber trapped in there, you really think you can bring ’em out? Or you just being a cocky-ass probie, here?”

“What do you think?”

“What do I think? You can’t figure out what I think from my story, we got bigger problems than this.”

“Well, I’m not Kevin Jacobs,” I said. “I know my limits, and I know what I can live through.”

He nodded towards Draco Construction, its fenced-in compound. “What about the two girls in there, though?”

I turned slowly to him, looked him right in the eye. “I served my country, in ways you can’t even imagine. Had more friends fall than you could ever count. And, when I was done with the SEALs, I moved on, and worked for other people, did more of the same. But Lucy Skinner, Bunk? I love that woman. And she loves Amber. I’m going to pull them out of there if it’s the last thing I do. We’re not talking about the fucking family dog here, we’re talking about innocent women. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit out here and just wait for something to happen.”

His jaw clenched as tightly as a steel trap, he nodded along with every word. “Just making sure, is all.”

“Yeah,” I said, my hand going to the inside handle. I opened it up and went to get out of the car as Bunk popped the trunk, so I could get my duffel.

“Hey, Carter,” Bunk said just before I closed the door.

I leaned down inside the car, the wind picking up again, nipping at my already reddening ears. “I’m listening.”

“Good luck in there, right?”

I nodded. “Luck’s got nothing to do with it. Appreciate the sentiment, though.”

“Just don’t do anything stupid, that’s all.” He paused, shook his head. “What am I saying? Just…get the girls out safe.”

“Will do.” I shut the door and went back to the trunk, lifted the lid and began to dig through my duffel bag. I pulled out the sawed off shotgun loaded with rock salt shells, and tucked it up under my coat, my armpit clamping down around the barrel. The chopped-down stock still protruded from the front of my black wool coat, but someone driving by wouldn’t see it. And that’s what I needed. Immediate concealability.

I stuffed as many extra shells as I could fit into the pockets of my coat and Lucy’s ex’s too-tight jeans, about a dozen in all. I zipped the bag back up, before taking it from the trunk and slamming the lid back down. I knocked twice on the top of it, and headed up the sidewalk towards the construction company, my hand going down to the pistol on my hip. Touched its cool, reassuring steel.

Behind me, the electric motor of the Camry’s automatic windows whirred.

I stopped, turned back to Bunk as he stuck his head out the window. “What?”

“Hey, when you get Skinner out, you tell her I’m an asshole. Okay?”

I nodded, smiling a little despite the fact that I was about to walk into a shooting fight. Despite the fact that I was about to put my life on the line for a woman I barely knew, but knew I loved. “Yeah,” I said, as the fat flakes whirred around in the air in front of me, clouding my vision, “I’ll tell her.”

“And tell her she’s got a job still, if she wants it.”

“I will. Thanks for the ride, Bunk.”

“No problem.”

I turned around as, behind me, he put the four-door in drive and did a U-turn, headed back the way we’d come. I didn’t look back over my shoulder. Didn’t pause. I just kept walking, the weight of the shotgun in my hand a reassuring certainty in this confusing world.

First, Col. Harrington had disappeared. Now Kris Cole was off with a man I thought she’d disliked from the get-go, and we were receiving tips from strange British women. Throw on top of that the reemergence of a previously extinct animal, and my falling in love with the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen? A woman who could tell me to shove it? Who could figure out cases faster than I could?

I needed some damned certainty right now.

I needed something that wasn’t confusing.

And a shotgun seemed to fit the bill.

I paused as I approached the edge of the eight-foot-tall chain link fence surrounding Draco Construction. A trio of barbed wire strings topped the whole thing, the spiked and spined strands angled out over the sidewalk for security. I glanced up as I kept walking, trying to calculate my chances of getting over them in one piece.

I’d make it, but my clothes wouldn’t. And, in the late afternoon like this, with the occasional car still cruising by, I would definitely draw suspicion.

My feet kept drawing me through the light snowfall, though, Lucy’s father’s boots crunching with every step as I kept following the line of chain fencing. The gate was up ahead, and I still had the automatic lockpick in the bag slung over my shoulder. Worst case scenario, I could use that.

I stopped at the gate, looked down at the drive. No tire tracks. That didn’t mean anything, though, since the snow had only recently started falling. Even if the truck had gotten here within the last hour, it likely wouldn’t have left behind any signs of its passing. I turned my gaze to the building, with all its lights off. With no sign of habitation. I bit the inside of my mouth, chewing hard till I tasted blood.

The fence was locked, too. The chain was there, looped loosely around the bars.

I picked it up, the square of steel compact and heavy in my hand. I glanced back to the building again, let the chain drop back down into place. The chain was locked up so poorly, I could easily push the gate forward, make a big enough gap that even a man my size could fit through. Whoever had locked up here last didn’t give a damn if anyone came in after them. Like they were just tenants, or visitors.

“Now or never, Carter,” I said, my eyes darting from window to window.

No signs of life. What if they weren’t here, after all? What if they’d used this as a base, but had the sense to move on to another location? What then?

Even if they weren’t here, though, maybe they’d left some kind of clue behind. Some kind of indication of where they’d taken Lucy and Amber.

“Now.” I shoved the gate forward, made a gap wide enough for me to slip through, and dropped to my haunches. I slipped my bag off my shoulder and dropped it into the snow and gravel, my eyes still poring over each window.

Still nothing.

I drew the shotgun out from my coat and laid the shortened stub of a long-arm across my thighs. I took a deep breath, then, still crouched low, made my way as fast as I could across the lot.

I stopped next to the front entrance, bracing myself against the wall with the shotgun down low.

My breath roared in my ears, competing with my ability to hear inside. I swallowed hard, picturing Lucy bloody and beaten into submission. Miserable. In pain.

I cocked my head to the side, put my ear against the wall.

Nothing. Nothing on the other side at all.

Wait, what was that?

Shallow, rapid breaths from somewhere within the building. Fast, nervous, anxious. I could practically smell the adrenaline rolling off of them.

This was it. It was now or never.