Chapter 28
Grayson and Marcus had just arrived at an abandoned warehouse where the fugitive was supposed to be holed up. Graffiti covered the outside of the metal building, windows were broken, the front door was chained, but people could get in through one of the windows.
"I'm going around the backside of the abandoned factory to make sure he doesn't get out that way if he's in there," Marcus said.
"All right. Let me know when you're in place, and I'll try to get in the front way."
Marcus headed through the parking lot that was covered in grass and weeds. Signs were posted all over telling people not to trespass, that it was condemned and off-limits.
A misty rain began to fall, and then the sky turned darker and darker. A bolt of lightning struck the ground about three miles away, branching off in multiple directions on the way down, lighting up the dark sky.
Grayson didn’t wait for his brother to tell him he was in place. They both needed out of this weather, either in his SUV or his brother’s. They could get electrocuted outside the metal building.
He quickly texted his brother: Return to your vehicle or mine. The inside of the metal warehouse should act as a Faraday cage. But outside, it would be dangerous.
Another fork of lightning struck even closer by.
Marcus texted him: I’m at the back of the building. Coming around.
Grayson rushed to his SUV, climbed inside, grabbed a towel from a bag, and began drying off.
His brother, soaking wet, raced around the building and entered Grayson’s SUV. “You got another towel?”
Grayson pointed to his bag. Marcus pulled a towel out of the bag and dried himself off.
“I hope he doesn’t get electrocuted in there,” Marcus said.
“Only if lightning hits the building and he’s touching it.”
The lightning lacerated the darkness in a jagged dance, striking the ground, one bolt striking a nearby tree with a crack.
The tree lit up with fire for a moment, then smoke smoldered under the weight of the rain.
Sheets of lightning flashed repetitively as if a paranormal entity was turning it on and off in split seconds.
The rain was coming down so hard that it was difficult to see out the windshield.
And they were fogging the car with their breath.
Each bolt came down with a force that seemed intent on splitting the world in half.
Marcus ran the towel over his hair. “If our guy gets spooked, we might not even see him leave. Visibility’s shit. I hope we don’t lose our fugitive, should he leave the warehouse and run off.”
“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.” Grayson reached forward, started the engine, and cranked the windshield wipers up to full.
They thudded back and forth, barely making a dent in the deluge, but it felt better to be doing something, anything, even if the world outside remained a gray, vibrating abstraction.
He turned the fan on high to defog the windows.
Then they saw a man running through the warehouse's front door. He hesitated in the pouring rain and looked from Grayson’s SUV to Marcus’s.
“He’s going to go for my vehicle,” Marcus said.
The sheets of lightning were still lighting up the dark sky, but the bolts of lightning were further off.
Grayson and Marcus both jumped out of the SUV and headed for the fugitive.
The guy was soaking wet. So were Grayson and Marcus in short order. They tackled him to the ground, flipped him over, and zip-tied his hands.
Grayson removed a knife and gun from the guy’s belt, and Marcus pulled a knife from his boot.
“I’ll take him to jail,” Marcus said. They hauled the fugitive into Marcus’s SUV. “Are you going home to pack some of your things, shower, and change before you return to Kalispell?”
“Yeah.”
“We’ll assist you with packing when you want us to help you move the bulk of your things too. Just let us know when you need us,” Marcus said.
“That would be great.”
Then they gave each other wet hugs and went their separate ways, with Marcus heading for the jailhouse and Grayson returning home.
He texted Kendra, but she didn’t respond right away, and he figured she was busy with her case, and he didn’t want to take her attention off it.
He arrived home and looked through his personal items, trying to decide what to take for his first trip. He hadn’t expected to find a grizzly shifter to mate! He would move his clothes, but first he had to take a shower, put on dry ones, and check with Kendra again to make sure she was truly fine.
Kendra and Ivan saw Collier pull his gun from his shorts and begin firing at them, the windshield taking the brunt of the bullets, shattering it, and they both ducked.
Thunderstorms had rolled in, and lightning was flashing across the sky, spears of light stabbing the ground off in the distance, thunder following shortly thereafter.
She tried to back out of the driveway, but Collier shot out her front tires, which pissed her off. They were practically new.
“I’m taking him down as a bear,” Ivan said.
“You’ll get shot.”
“We don’t have any choice. He’s advancing on the car, and we don’t have any weapons.” Ivan glanced at her. “Take off your taser, unless you have a raincoat you can wear over it. But then you wouldn’t be able to use it anyway.”
“Oh, yeah, I’ve heard of a police officer getting his wet, and he was fortunate not to get shocked badly because of the leather case around it, though he got a jolt from it.” She removed her clothes. “You’re right. We don’t have a choice.”
She opened her vehicle door, and so did Ivan. They got out of her vehicle, staying low, and shifted. Then they ran at the speed of 35 miles per hour, and the fugitive didn’t have a chance to shoot at them, his face panicked, his eyes huge. He turned and ran back to the fence.
Kendra struck him in the back with her powerful paw, and he went down with a thud.
Both she and Ivan checked him to make sure he was alive, and then Kendra stood over the fugitive, and Ivan returned to the car, shifted, dressed, and got handcuffs.
He found the gun and a knife on the fugitive and removed them.
The rain was still pouring down on top of them. “I’ve got this,” Ivan said to Kendra.
She grunted. Even though shifting around humans wasn’t anything they were supposed to do, they hadn’t had any choice. She returned to the car and shifted, then climbed in and dressed.
Then she rejoined Ivan, pulled Collier off the ground, and hauled him to the back seat of her car, and seat belted him in.
Both she and Ivan had rain jackets, but they couldn’t put them on while they were removing clothes and shifting, so they were very wet. So was their fugitive.
Collier began to stir.
"What did you do to the officers in the house?" Kendra asked.
Collier wouldn't speak.
She pulled towels out of a bag, handed one to Ivan, and they both dried off.
“What about me?” the fugitive asked from the back seat.
“What about you? You were trying to kill us,” Ivan said. “And would have if we hadn’t gotten lucky when a couple of bears came for you.”
“You’re just lucky we saved you from them.” Kendra called her car insurance for help with the car tires.
“I’m calling this in to George,” Ivan said, “to let him know we got our perp and that he shot out our tires.”
“Roadside assistance is coming,” Kendra said, pulling her rain jacket on and zipping it shut.
"You're not going inside, are you?" Ivan asked.
"I have to check on the men. You need to stay with the fugitive."
"Why don't I go in?"
"I have medical training. Do you?" she asked.
"No. I guess it’s something I need to get some training on."
Kendra pulled the hood of her rain jacket over her head, braced herself, and grabbed her first-aid kit from the passenger side floor.
Sheets of water battered the SUV until the metal roof shivered.
She hesitated just long enough to take a few steadying breaths, then yanked open the door and sprinted into the tempest.
Water sluiced into her hiking boots on the first step, and the wind snatched the rain jacket, nearly yanking the hood off her head.
Lightning split the sky, illuminating the lot in an X-ray flash: the fence, the heaps of debris, the sagging trailer like a beached ship, and next to it, the small house where the officers were trapped.
The gate was chained shut, but the debris blocked it anyway.
She checked the broken door and called out to the officers. Neither answered her. The entry was so blocked with furniture that she assumed Collier had moved the furniture there after they entered the house.
She left the cluttered porch, which creaked with her weight, and she was afraid she would fall through one of the boards at any moment.
Rain had softened the ground, and the fence posts leaned like drunken soldiers, forgetting how to stand at attention.
She pushed a bush aside, climbed the chain-link fence by jamming her boots into the diamond mesh.
Her fingers slipped on the wet metal, but she made it over, landing in an ankle-deep slurry of leaves and plastic water bottles.
She pushed through the junkyard maze, all the while clutching the heavy first-aid kit. The ground rose and fell in unpredictable waves, as if all the garbage was floating in a swamp, as the rain continued to pour down on her.
Rain funneled down from the eaves and pooled at her feet. She slipped, caught herself on the edge of a battered metal cabinet, and cursed.
The back of the house loomed up ahead, collapsed porch and all, and the door was just visible behind a screen of brambles and broken window screens woven together with twine.
She elbowed through the brush and found the patch of earth that had been trampled into mud by desperate feet.
Someone had hacked away at the branches, leaving splintered stumps and a path just wide enough for her to duck through.
Her rain jacket caught on a nail at the shoulder.
She hardly felt it as she tore it loose. She was running on pure adrenaline now.