Total pages in book: 109
Estimated words: 103027 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 515(@200wpm)___ 412(@250wpm)___ 343(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 103027 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 515(@200wpm)___ 412(@250wpm)___ 343(@300wpm)
The people at Sinclair Security weren’t Boy Scouts, but they were a hell of a lot more by-the-book than we were. In general, that wasn’t a problem. I didn’t mind coloring inside the lines most of the time. Frankly, working on cases that were a little less sketchy was fine with me. I didn’t have a death wish. I liked my work, but when you were willing to push the limits, you attracted clients with more complex problems—things that, when I was a little younger, felt like a fun challenge. And now? Now I wasn’t sure how long I wanted to take unnecessary risks.
In this case, all bets were off. This was about Silas, not a client. And if he needed help, I was willing to take any risk necessary.
I followed the directions on my nav to an area outside the city that looked like a rough mix of commercial and industrial—warehouses, storage units, nondescript concrete block buildings surrounded by chain-link fences. In the middle of the night, everything was dark and quiet.
Exactly how I wanted it.
I dimmed the lights on the SUV and turned off the main road, winding my way through back streets I’d memorized before we left Atlanta, to pull along the back of the one-story rectangular concrete building that served as cold storage for the police department. Cold storage was so named because it held things that were accessed so infrequently that they didn’t need to be easy to get to. I was expecting low security, and so far, that was what we found.
The building was surrounded by a chain-link fence a few feet taller than me, with angled barbed wire at the top. Dim lights glowed at the corners of the building, leaving great pools of shadows everywhere else. I pulled out my phone and took some pictures through the car window.
“I need to get more than this,” I said and opened my door. When Sylvie moved to follow—as I’d known she would—I said, “Pull your hood up all the way to hide your hair and face.”
She did as I said, easing open her door and closing it almost silently. She joined me at the side of the car, watching in silence as I took pictures, staying beside me as I walked to the far corner of the building and took a few more.
I hadn’t spotted a surveillance camera, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t one. These days, they were so easy to hide, but the place had a neglected air to it. If you’d told me the chain-link fence and the locks on the doors were the sum of their security, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
I wondered what Sylvie was thinking, but she stayed silent as promised, not getting in my way, not causing any trouble. It was hard to stay irritated at her just for existing. I might not want a partner, especially a civilian whose job it was to make entertainment out of cases like this, but if I had to have somebody stuck at my side, Sylvie was a pretty good option.
“Hey,” she said under her breath, and lifted her chin at the far corner of the building.
I followed her eyes to see a shadow separate itself from the pool of darkness between the two security lights, creeping along the wall of the building, and stopping at a side door. Sylvie drew in a sharp breath but didn’t say anything. Neither did I. We watched in silence as he pulled out what looked like a screwdriver and went to work on the door.
One very long minute later, I heard a grind of metal on metal, and the door swung open. The figure crept inside. I waited, braced for an alarm. There was nothing but silence.
They’d either successfully disarmed the security system, or they didn’t realize there might be a silent alarm.
“What do we do?” Sylvie breathed, her voice so low it was almost inaudible.
I shook my head. “We wait.”
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.