Chapter 28 #2
“Every database I could access. Every drug location I could find. Every raid was a chance to walk through a room and see if she was in it.”
He held my gaze, and what I saw there wasn’t guilt. It was the hard defiance of a man who would accept the consequences and do it all again tomorrow.
“When they left me off the second raid, I almost lost it,” he continued. “Not because of my ego. Because that was another room I couldn’t check.”
I pulled the room’s only chair away from the wall and sat down.
Briggson’s shoulders came down a fraction. He turned to check on Mia, and the look that crossed his face was nothing I’d ever seen from him at the station. Something soft and raw that he was holding together by sheer force of will.
He sat on the edge of the bed beside her. She leaned into him, her head against his shoulder, and he put his arm around her. The gesture was careful, as if she might break.
I let the full weight of what he’d just told me settle against everything I’d believed about this man for weeks.
The night he’d stormed into the station after the second raid, gotten in Vance’s face, demanded to know who’d been in the cabin. I’d watched that and calculated whether it was a territorial cop or a compromised one.
Neither. He’d been frantic to know if his niece had been inside, and nobody in the room had understood the question he was actually asking.
The hostility toward Donovan and me from day one.
Not resentment of outsiders. Fear that outside investigators would restrict his access to operations, to the drug locations he was systematically working through, to the only tool he had for finding a girl who’d vanished into a world that would chew her up and not bother spitting her out.
Even Jace’s financial deep dive had told a story I’d read wrong. Clean bank statements, no unexplained deposits, a charity record that outpaced everyone else in the department. A man who gave away money because he knew what it was like to watch someone you loved have nothing.
He wasn’t dirty. He was desperate. And there was a world of difference between the two.
I looked at Mia. She was watching me with more awareness now, her eyes tracking my face, my hands.
Briggson turned back to Mia. “Have you eaten?” He nodded toward the fast-food bag on the dresser. “You need to eat something.”
“I tried.” She shook her head. “My stomach won’t stop.”
“Okay. That’s okay. We’ll get you something else later. Something easier for your system.” He smoothed the tangled hair back from her face. “You’re safe now. You hear me? You’re safe.”
She cried first. Messy, heaving sobs that she tried to muffle against Briggson’s shoulder.
She said she’d messed up. She said her mom was never going to forgive her.
Briggson held her and told her that wasn’t true, that her mom had been searching for her every single day, that nobody was angry. She cried harder when he said that.
Then the rest came. She talked to Briggson, not to me, her eyes on his face like he was the only solid thing in the room.
Four months of it poured out in pieces. Staying with people she barely knew, moving every few days, getting pulled deeper into the orbit of people who dealt Drift and used Drift and disappeared when the heat came.
Doing things to get Drift she obviously was ashamed to mention.
Her voice went flat, and her eyes dropped to the floor. She couldn’t bring herself to say the specifics out loud, but Briggson and I both knew what she meant.
I had to give the other man credit. He didn’t push through those silences.
He just held her and waited for the words to come back.
Although even when they did, half of what she said ran together—names that might have been first names or nicknames or nothing at all, places described by furniture or random odd details rather than by address.
When the words finally slowed, Briggson pulled back enough to look at her face. “Does anyone know you’re here? Is anyone looking for you? Do you owe anybody money who might come for you?”
Mia shook her head. Then nodded. Then shook it again.
“I don’t…no. I just left. Because they were…
” She trailed off, her fingers working the hoodie strings.
“Everyone was being weird. Packing. Moving stuff. Everybody was yelling about something, and then everyone started…” She lost the thread, staring at the wall behind me.
“They were scared. I could tell because they kept talking like I wasn’t even there. Like it didn’t matter what I heard.”
“Scared of what?” Briggson kept his voice soft.
“Something big. I kept hearing…” She rubbed her eyes hard with the heels of her hands. “A move. A big move. People kept saying it. Everybody was freaking out. That was freaking me out.”
She rubbed her eyes.
“I didn’t want to be there anymore. It was scary. Everybody was yelling, running around. Packing stuff up. Said it was going tonight. The green door. Midnight. The green door. It was scary.” Her voice had dropped to almost nothing. “So I walked here. I think. I don’t remember all of it.”
Briggson glanced at me. I’d caught it too. Buried under all the rambling, had she just said what we thought she had?
“Mia,” Briggson said. “This is important. Are you saying they were packing up the drugs?”
She nodded way too enthusiastically. “Yes. It had to go tonight. Midnight. Everything goes to the green door.”
“What green door?” I asked. “Do you know?” Was the syndicate doing a big move-out of their product?
She blinked at me. Slow, unfocused. “A warehouse. The one with the green door. Off the…” She waved vaguely. “The old highway. The one that goes past the gas station that’s closed.”
Briggson nodded. Evidently, that was a real location.
“Tonight, honey?” Briggson asked. “You think they’re moving everything tonight at midnight?”
“That’s what they said. They weren’t talking to me. They told me I either had to blow them or get out. So I got out. But that’s what they said.”
Holy shit. We had both a time and a location. Because the dealers had seen a young girl as nothing more than furniture and felt free to talk around her.
Pure shit luck that her uncle happened to be a cop.
She was quiet for a moment, picking at the chewed strings of her hoodie. “They’re scared of the big guy. They do whatever he says. They shut up when he walks in the room. He kills people. Everybody knows it.”
“Have you seen the big guy?” Briggson asked.
She nodded. “He’s not a dealer. He’s the one in charge. I try to hide when he comes in.”
We waited for her to say more, but she set the cup of water on the nightstand and pulled her knees up to her chest. As quickly as the word vomit had started, it ended.
I grabbed Briggson and pulled him to the side. “Do you know what green warehouse door she’s talking about?”
“Yeah. It’s an abandoned place just outside of town off Route 32. Scheduled to be torn down next month.”
“Okay. You need to get her to the station once she’s coherent. Show her pictures of Jonathan Porter. If she can ID him as the syndicate leader…”
It wouldn’t be pretty. Mia definitely wasn’t a credible witness. But it was a start.
He nodded. “Agreed. But that’s secondary to whatever is happening tonight at that warehouse. If any of what she’s saying is correct…”
“It’s our first real break.” I looked over at Mia, who was still staring out at nothing. “Have her look at the photos, then get her home. Get her situated. Make sure she’s okay. I’ll call Chief Rawlings and get things rolling on this intel.”
“Thanks, Garrison. I owe you one. More than one.”
I nodded and stepped outside into the parking lot. Rawlings answered on the second ring.
“Garrison. Heard Jolly didn’t find anything useful at the OD scene this morning.”
“No, but I’ve got something better. Briggson and I found a witness, a user, who’s been inside the drug operation.
She’s tweaking, but somewhat coherent. She overheard something.
Evidently, the syndicate is moving product through a warehouse tonight at midnight.
Warehouse with a green door? Briggson says it’s off Route 32. ”
A pause. “Yeah, I know the place. You think this witness is telling the truth?”
“Yes. Definitely enough to justify a response.”
“Agreed.” His voice was more focused. Decisive. He understood what this meant too. “I’ll get Vance on it. We’ll put a team together and coordinate the approach.”
“Chief, I want in. Jolly and I want to be part of the operation.”
“Done. Report to the staging point when Vance sends coordinates.”
I ended the call and stood in the parking lot for a moment. Relief settled into my chest alongside something harder, the sharp-edged clarity that came when you knew you finally had a way of doing something that made a difference.
Briggson walked Mia out. I watched them cross the lot to his car, watched him open the passenger door and help her in, watched the overhead light catch her face for a second before the door closed. She looked like a kid. She looked like someone’s daughter. Someone’s niece.
Loved.
It was going to be a long road for her, but at least she was now on it.
The car pulled out of the lot and turned north. I watched until the taillights disappeared.
I walked back to my truck and opened the door. Jolly was on his feet immediately, tail going, pressing his nose into my hand. I let him out so he could walk around and do his business.
“We’re working tonight, buddy.”
Shit. I’d forgotten to call Kayla. It had been hours. I ran my hand through my hair and called. She had every right to be pissed already. Finding out I wasn’t going to be able to do anything tonight either was not going to help.
She picked up on the second ring. “Something happened, didn’t it?”
“I’m so sorry I couldn’t call before now. We have a situation with the department. It’s a big deal. Can I get a rain check for our date?” Fuck, this sounded like every lame excuse every lame guy had ever made. “Kayla, truly, I’m so sorry. I wouldn’t cancel if I didn’t—”
“Ben.” She cut me off. “It’s okay. I do understand. Just like you would understand if I had something I needed to do with William and had to cancel. But I will definitely hold you to making it up to me. More specifically, a repeat of that thing you did with your tongue.”
I swallowed hard, praying my voice wouldn’t creak as I spoke. “That will happen, regardless.”
I love you. It was right there on the tip of my tongue, but I swallowed it back. This wasn’t the time.
She laughed softly. “Be safe. Call me when you can.”
We hung up, and I got Jolly back into the truck.
Rawlings would coordinate with Vance. The team would assemble. Jolly and I would be there when the doors went in.
And the people who had built a distribution network in this town, who had killed Ashley Moran and multiple others with their designer poison, who had operated with impunity because they’d always been one step ahead of the law, would find out what it felt like when the law finally caught up.
Jonathan Porter and whoever worked for him were going down tonight.
I started the engine. Jolly settled in, his chin on the console, his tail thumping once against the seat.
“Almost there, boy.”
For the first time in weeks, I believed it. The good guys had finally caught a break.