Chapter 8 #2
My mind raced over the options. We weren’t following the intruder into the building—not when we didn’t know who they were or what they wanted.
We were there to gather information, not get shot by someone breaking into the state’s evidence storage.
On the other hand, the building was now open, and we were so close—it was hard to walk away with such easy access to what we wanted.
I was armed, but Sylvie wasn’t. And regardless, the last thing we needed to do was either get ourselves shot by the intruder when we surprised them in the dark, or start a gunfight in the middle of a break-in while trying to steal evidence.
Since we didn’t know where the intruder was in the building or what they were after, we were better off staying put, concealed in the dark.
Less than two minutes later, the dark figure left through the same door, closing it loosely behind him.
My gut said the intruder was male. They could be a tallish woman with broad shoulders, but I was betting not.
He disappeared into the shadows again, and very shortly after, I heard an engine turn over.
“Let’s go,” Sylvie said.
My hand shot out and grabbed her arm. “Go where?”
“He left the door open, Eli. We’re not going to try to get in?”
I wanted to argue, but if Sylvie hadn’t been standing next to me, I would have already been over the fence. “I don’t suppose you’d get back in the car?”
“Not a chance.” She tugged her hood farther over her face and waited.
“All right, fine.” I pulled my own hood down tighter and rested my hand on the weapon at my side. “Do exactly as I say. If you get hurt, I’m going to fucking kill you, got it?”
She said simply, “I’m not an idiot.”
I wasn’t sure I agreed, but time was running out.
“Do you think there’s a silent alarm?” she asked quietly as we moved to the shadows at the side of the alley, approaching the fence from the same angle the intruder had left, hoping to find a gap in the chain-link.
“Could be,” I said. “Which is another reason you might want to stay in the car.”
“Too late,” she said.
We neared the corner where the intruder had disappeared and found the door—and the fence—hanging open.
“Well, that was easy,” I said under my breath.
Sylvie stayed tight to my side as we crossed the small parking lot and approached the open door to the building.
If there was an alarm that had been triggered, it was indeed silent, because the building was dark, empty, and cold, with no signs of life aside from the hum of a furnace working sluggishly somewhere.
The side door led into a hall with linoleum floors and yellowed paint. At the end of the hall was a door—unlocked and open several inches. Beyond that: shelves and shelves and shelves of neatly labeled boxes.
“Fuck, we don’t have time for this,” I said.
“We can at least figure out where it might be. For whoever comes later,” Sylvie said.
“That’s the plan,” I agreed, and snapped pictures of the layout.
Emmett and Maddox had given me a case number for the evidence.
I pulled it up on my phone and showed it to Sylvie.
“This is what we’re looking for.” With that long string of numbers in our minds, the labels on the ends of the aisles made more sense.
Moving quickly, we searched up and down, up and down.
“We need to split up,” she said.
“Sylvie, I’ve seen that movie. We’re not splitting up.”
“We’ll still be in sight of each other, Eli, but you go that way”—she pointed to another section of shelving—“I’ll finish this line. If we have the case number, we should be able to find it and get out of here in a few minutes.”
“Fine,” I agreed. If I’d been with anyone else on my team, it was the first thing we would have done.
But this wasn’t Ryder or Shade. This was Sylvie.
Even as the thoughts landed, I pushed them away.
It didn’t matter. She was right—we had a job to do and limited time to do it.
“You take those aisles, I’ll take these. Move fast.”
She did, and we went in two directions. I spent a second watching her slide down the aisle, head rising and lowering as she scanned numbers, and then I moved to do the same on the other side of the room.
Nothing, and more nothing. I was way off. The case numbers appeared to be in consecutive order. Ours started with a nine. These were threes. Not even close. I hoped Sylvie was having better luck as I scanned dark aisle after dark aisle, moving faster, looking for anything that started with a nine.
Another aisle over, and a flash at the end caught my eye.
A red light, blinking. One blink a second.
Fuck. That could be a lot of things. But the one I was most familiar with was bad news.
I wanted to run, grab Sylvie, and get the hell out, but I had to know what we were dealing with.
I sprinted down the aisle and skidded to a stop.
Yep, it was what I thought. Another fucking bomb. This guy—if that was our guy—had been so close. I kicked myself for not realizing that the coincidence of someone breaking into the exact cold storage location holding Emily Shaw’s stuff was no coincidence at all.
Didn’t matter. He was long gone now.
And the timer clicked down.
Fucking 45, 44, 43…
Not enough time. I’d disarmed bombs with less time than this, but with a trained team at my back. I couldn’t risk it now, not with Sylvie in the building. Not when the other option was to get the fuck out.
“Sylvie!” I shouted, no longer worried about surveillance. “Run! Now!” I was already sprinting down the aisle, shouting, “Sylvie, get the fuck out, there’s a bomb!”
“I found the box, Eli—” Her voice drifted through the dark, from too far away.
“I don’t care. Run!”
I should have headed straight for the door. But something in her voice had tripped me. She wasn’t going to run unless I made her.
I turned, darting down the aisle where I’d last seen her to find her halfway up a set of shelves, pulling on a box.
“We don’t have time,” I shouted at her.
My internal clock counted down. 23, 22, 21, 20…
“I’ve almost got it.” She’d climbed the metal shelves high enough that her feet were even with my ribs, and she was reaching into the box.
In that moment, I didn’t care about Emily Shaw, about Silas, about anything but the bomb on the other side of the building. It had been plugged into enough explosives to take out the entire building, us included.
I wanted answers. But I didn’t want to die for them. Not yet.
I was done talking. I reached up, grabbed Sylvie around the waist, threw her over my shoulder, and took off for the door. My feet pounded the concrete, her forehead bouncing off my back. I didn’t stop until we were out of the building, through the gate, and across the street.
I bolted for the SUV, dumping her at the front, shouting, “Get in, get in, get in!”
The second her door closed, I threw the SUV in reverse and sped backward out of the alley, putting as much distance between us and the building as possible. As we cleared the alley, I turned the wheel hard, throwing the back end into another narrow street and hitting the gas.
All I could think was that we had to move.
I had to get us far away from that warehouse.
My memory of the alleys came in handy as I traveled them in reverse, literally, my eyes skipping between looking over my shoulder and at the rearview camera screen as the internal clock in my head clicked down.
5, 4, 3, 2…
The SUV shook from the blast. Above us, a flash of red and orange bloomed in the sky, illuminating billowing smoke.
I slowed down, taking the time to pull off a three-point turn so I could throw the SUV in drive, and we headed for the main road back to the highway. We needed to be gone before the fire department showed up.
I risked a turn that took us back in sight of the storage building.
“Oh God,” Sylvie said, craning her neck to look behind us. “It’s gone.”
I slowed before we took the next turn and followed her gaze. The storage building was rubble, the walls mostly collapsed around a raging fire.
“Holy shit, Eli. I’m pretty sure that had to be the guy who blew up my van.”
I was pissed. At her, at the situation. At the asshole who’d blown up our only lead.
But she’d said exactly what I was thinking.
“Did he look like the person you saw under your van?” I asked, turning away from the fire onto the deserted four-lane road that would take us to the highway.
“Pretty much,” she said. “But that just means medium-sized, probably a guy, wearing dark clothes.”
“Did they move the same?” I asked.
She closed her eyes, drew in a breath. Slowly, she let it out before she looked at me. “Yeah, yeah, I think… Fuck, I think that was him. We were so close.” She sounded like she regretted not chasing him down when she had the chance.
So did I. And I was trained. “We almost got fucking blown up, Sylvie. That’s a little too close.”
She threw her hands up in clear irritation. “I’m done with almost getting blown up. Twice in two days is more than enough,” she said, a little too loudly. She lowered her hands and grasped them in her lap, the knuckles turning white. “But it was worth it.”
“How so?” I asked, keeping my tone as even as I could. Yelling at her now wouldn’t help, I was sure. “You like almost getting killed?”
“Nope. But we got this.” She held up her hand, and I saw what I hadn’t before—a bright pink phone case.
Son of a bitch.
“Is that?—?”
“I couldn’t get the rest of the box,” she said. “But I think we have Emily Shaw’s phone.”