Chapter 30 #2
“Figures. Meant a lot of last-minute changes on my part. Unfortunately, last-minute changes are a big fucking headache. That’s why I needed you both here. A distraction.”
“You shoot us and explain two bodies on a mountain road?”
“No. That would cause way too many questions.” He moved back to the car, set the weapon on the hood within easy reach, and unzipped the pouch, laying it open beside the gun. He pulled out two syringes, preloaded, capped.
“Sedative. Fast-acting. You’ll be out in under a minute.” He set both syringes on the pavement, then straightened and picked the weapon back up in one smooth motion.
“Once that’s in your system, the truck goes through the guardrail.” He nodded toward the void behind me. “It’ll look like an accident. Dark night. Mountain roads. Happens all the time in Colorado.”
I looked at the drop. A hundred feet of nothing, then rock, then the creek. The sedative would metabolize before anyone found the wreckage. No toxicology flags. No crime scene. Just a tragic accident on a mountain road and a county coroner who’d have no reason to look deeper.
“The whole department is still moving on that warehouse.”
He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. Nothing there.
Actually, finding out it was a junkie who gave you the intel is something I can work with.
They’re not the most reliable sources of information, sadly.
And when that person ODs in the next few days, I’m sure no one will think much about it.
My last parting gift before restarting my operation in a different town. ”
Fucking son of a bitch.
Vance nodded toward the syringes on the ground between us. “Pick them up.”
Neither Kayla nor I moved.
“Pick them up.” His voice didn’t change, but his eyes shifted to Kayla. “Or I make a few calls and find out where little William is—and make sure he suffers horribly.”
Kayla made a sound. Small, involuntary, like something had been cut inside her.
Every muscle in my body locked down against what it wanted to do. My hands went rigid on the guardrail, and my vision narrowed to the weapon in his hand, because the only thing standing between that threat and a six-year-old asleep with his buddy was the fact that Vance still needed us cooperative.
“I’d rather not. I’d rather the kid and the dog have each other after tonight. Right? He and Jolly love each other. That’s why he went wandering in the woods that day—to find Jolly. They’ll have each other to get through the grief.”
He said it the way you’d describe a severance package. Reasonable. Generous, even. “But that outcome depends entirely on what happens here in the next sixty seconds.”
Kayla’s jaw tightened. I saw it but Vance didn’t, because he’d stopped seeing her as anything but a tool to get me to follow his orders.
And then he dared to threaten the thing she held most precious in the world: her son.
Whatever she did, I had to be ready.
I pushed off the guardrail. Took a step toward the syringes. Slow. Buying one more second, then another, because seconds were the only currency I had left.
Vance’s focus narrowed. His eyes tracked my hands as I crouched toward the asphalt. The gun followed, the barrel tilting downward with my movement, his attention contracting to the immediate task of making sure I picked up the syringes and didn’t try anything with them.
Kayla moved.
She didn’t hesitate. Didn’t scream. She leaped, diving for his gun arm, wrenching it sideways with everything she had.
Not trained. Not graceful. Just a mother who’d heard a man threaten her son—something I knew she was never going to allow again while she had breath in her body.
I was already sprinting for them. Three strides from the guardrail, closing fast, focused on the weapon.
Vance twisted his arm free and shoved Kayla back. She came at him again. Got a hand on the barrel this time and tried to yank it away.
He hit her. A punch to the face, hard enough that her head snapped sideways and her knees buckled. She went down to the pavement, and I was two steps away when Vance swung the gun toward me.
I pulled up hard. Point-blank range. No angle. He shot now, I died. There was no way around that.
I didn’t care. I was going to leap anyway.
But he reached down and grabbed Kayla, hauling her up by the back of her jacket before I could move. He got his arm around her throat and pulled her against his chest, the weapon pressed to her temple. She clawed at his forearm, eyes wide.
He was cutting off her air.
“Back up, Ben.”
“Let her go.”
He squeezed his arm tighter across her neck. “I don’t think so. Once she passes out, this will be easier. Although, now I think poor William will indeed suffer when I’m done here.”
He kept his eyes on me as Kayla’s struggles grew more frantic.
“Don’t worry,” he said against her ear. “It’ll be over soon.”
I was out of time. Kayla’s hands were slowing against his forearm. Her eyes were losing focus.
One option left. The kind with math that didn’t work out for me.
If I charged him, he’d have to choose. Shoot me or hold her. He couldn’t do both. And if he swung the weapon toward me—even for a second—his arm would come off her throat. She’d have air. She’d have a chance.
I shifted my weight forward. Planted my back foot.
Then something moved at the edge of my vision.
A shape in the tree line. Low, fast, dark against dark. My brain tried to process it and failed because the shape didn’t belong here. There was no reason for anything to be coming out of those trees at that speed, at this hour, on this mountain road where no one knew we were.
But I knew that gait anywhere.
I knew that stride the way I knew my own heartbeat. I’d watched it cross training fields and desert compounds and midnight streets in a dozen countries. I’d felt it through a leash ten thousand times.
It wasn’t possible. Jolly was at home. In my house in town, miles from here, asleep on his bed.
But the dog coming out of the darkness wasn’t interested in what was possible. He was already at full speed, already committed, every year of training and every mile of trust compressed into a single trajectory aimed at the man holding the weapon.
Vance never saw Jolly coming.
The impact took him off his feet. Jolly hit at the shoulder and drove through, and the force of it tore Vance’s arm from Kayla’s throat and sent them both sideways in different directions.
Kayla hit the asphalt on her hands and knees. I heard her suck air, a raw, gasping sound, her body pulling in what Vance had been crushing out of her. She crawled away from the tangle of man and dog, coughing, one hand at her throat.
Jolly’s jaws locked on to the forearm with the full-bite engagement I’d felt through a sleeve a hundred times.
Except there was no sleeve. The gun went off.
A single crack that echoed off the mountains and died.
Then the weapon skittered across the asphalt, and Vance was on the ground with Jolly on top of him, teeth set deep, head working side to side, that low, sustained growl coming from somewhere primal in his chest.
“Don’t struggle, asshole.” I grabbed the gun. “You’ve been to the training. The more you struggle, the more he’s going to fuck you up.”
I wasn’t even close to calling Jolly off.
Vance was screaming, high and ragged, his back arched off the asphalt while Jolly held the arm and worked it. Vance’s free hand clawed at the dog’s head, trying to pry the jaws loose, which only made Jolly reset deeper.
Almost like the K9 had heard him threaten his best friend William.
Briggson came running out of the trees where Jolly had come from, weapon drawn.
Briggson.
That had not been on my bingo card for tonight either.
“Garrison! Garrison! Are you okay?” Briggson yelled as he ran.
“Yeah. But I need your cuffs.” Explanations would have to come later.
I caught Vance’s free hand and slammed it against the pavement. Pinned it there with both of mine while I dropped my weight across his chest. He bucked under me, still screaming, his legs kicking against nothing, but between Jolly’s grip on one arm and my body on the other, he had nowhere to go.
“Roll him.” Briggson had the cuffs in hand. He grabbed Vance’s shoulder, and together, we forced him onto his stomach. Jolly adjusted without releasing, shifting his grip as Vance’s body turned, and Briggson wrenched both wrists together behind his back.
Steel clicked. Vance’s body went still. The screaming dropped to a low, guttural moan, his face pressed against the asphalt, his breath coming in shallow bursts.
“Aus.” It was the hardest release command I’d ever given. As far as I was concerned, Jolly could chew on this piece of shit until he was nothing but bones.
Jolly released. Immediately. Clean. He backed off and sat, his whole body loose, tail going, mouth open in that perpetual grin that nothing had ever managed to take from him.
I looked for Kayla. She was leaning against the tire, her hand pressed to her throat. Her breath was ragged and ugly, but she was breathing. She nodded once. Small. Shaking. But a nod.
I turned back to Jolly. “Good boy.” My voice broke on the second word. I put my hand on his head and held it there, and his tail swept the ground behind him. “That’s my good boy.”
Briggson hauled Vance to his feet and leaned him over the trunk, keeping his hand on the back of his head.
“How the hell did you get here? And why is Jolly with you?”
“Mia identified Vance. She saw his photo at the station and told me he was the big guy she’d been referring to.” He said it flat, compressed, stripped to the essentials.
“Thank God.”
“Duty sergeant said you’d left the station.
Vance conveniently was nowhere around the station either.
I tried calling you. No answer. Went to your house.
No vehicle, no you, but Jolly was there.
Where the fuck would you be on the night of our biggest raid.
” He paused. “Decided to run Vance’s department vehicle through the GPS system.
Got the location ping. Grabbed Jolly and drove. ”
“Jesus.”
“I didn’t want to come roaring in, in case the situation was…well, exactly what the situation ended up being.”
I nodded. “You pulling up would’ve ended in bullets flying. No doubt directly into our skulls.”
“Yeah. So I waited, saw my window, and was glad as shit I’d practiced sending Jolly in the drills.”
The guy who’d questioned K9 deployment from day one. Who’d badmouthed every decision Donovan and I had made. Who’d crossed his arms in every briefing and made it his personal mission to be the most difficult human being in any room he occupied.
He’d loaded my dog into his car, driven to save me, positioned himself in the trees, and waited for the window.
The most important send of Jolly’s career hadn’t even come from me.
“Briggson.”
“Yeah.”
“Thank you.”
Something crossed his face. Brief, unguarded, gone before it had time to settle. He gave a single nod and dragged Vance off the car. “I’m going to put him in my cruiser and call for backup.”
Vance was still whimpering as Briggson dragged him along. Good.
I crossed over to Kayla.
She had made her way to her feet but was still leaning heavily on the hood of Vance’s sedan, her arms pulled tight across her chest, shaking with tremors that came after the danger passed and the nervous system caught up.
I stopped in front of her. She looked up at me, and her expression broke open. Not collapsing, not falling apart. Just releasing everything she’d held behind her teeth since Vance had kidnapped her.
Her hands came up and fisted in my jacket, and she pressed her face into the hollow of my throat. The same spot she fit against when we lay in her bed after William was asleep. The same spot that had become hers without either of us deciding it.
I held on. Both arms. My chin against the top of her head. She held me back. Just as tight. Just as hard.
We stood like that while Briggson drove up from wherever he’d parked his vehicle. His voice carried across the pull-off, calling in units, reading off the location, requesting backup for a warehouse operation that was about to become the biggest drug bust in Summit Falls history.
The night wasn’t over. There was still a shipment to intercept and a syndicate to dismantle.
But the man at the center of it was in handcuffs in the back of Briggson’s vehicle. And the woman in my arms was alive and shaking and whole.
Jolly trotted over and pressed himself against our legs. Not pushing us from each other, just wanting to be part of the love. Patient, warm, present. His tail thumped a slow, steady rhythm against the pavement.
I held Kayla. She held me.
The dog held us both.