A feeling of unease and washed over me. I pulled on a pair of jeans, then quickly scooped up the phone. Stepping out into the main space of the abandoned restaurant I made my way past the sleeping bikers and stepped out the front door for a bit of privacy.
The text message came from a number I didn’t recognize, but there was no doubt who was on the other end. It was my client…
My real client.
You’re running out of time, Sarah… And I’m getting impatient. Tell me I didn’t make a mistake when I hired you.
I stared long and hard at the message before tapping out a reply.
Who is this?
I held my breath and hit send. Only a few seconds passed before the dreadful sound of a text message pinged from the tiny speaker.
Do you love your father?
A cold sweat beaded on my forehead as I stared at the phone. Another message came through, and this time, it was a picture.
It was a picture of Daddy’s house.
I thought back to my aging sheriff father, with his limp and the cane that supported his step.
He’s not involved in any of this!
I knew my protest was going to fall on deaf ears, but how the fuck could anyone go and threaten my family? Fear was starting to be replaced by anger.
He’s involved now. Where is the cargo?
My fingers moved fast, flashing over the keyboard in a rage fueled flurry.
At the bottom of the ocean, according to Talon. He says the ship dumped it offshore and he has men out looking for it. I’m doing what you paid me to do. This is between you and me. Leave my family out of this!
I smashed the send button and stood there on the verge of hyperventilating.
You’re going to have to do better than that, Sarah. You have three days. For the sake of your family, find my cargo… Or prove who’s responsible for its absence.
There was a long silence as I read and re-read the message.
And Sarah… If you do anything to warn your father, anything at all, there will be no force on earth that will find his broken body.
Two days later…
True to his word, Hunter was helping me. His men were scouring the streets looking for information, and he’d already managed to bribe someone at the port to provide him with information on Talon’s salvage efforts offshore.
But it wasn’t enough.
We were no closer to finding the crate.
With the threat on my father’s life looming, I had to take efforts into my own hands. Hunter wasn’t going to help me in this. He told me he could protect me, but I saw the unease in his face every time he spoke Soroka’s name…
The answers weren’t out there on the street, and he wasn’t going to get them out of some weasel of a dock worker.
The answers were at the port.
No matter how much my morning sickness and nausea was starting to flare up, I needed to go back.
I waited for my chance to slip away unnoticed. I still had a few tricks up my sleeve, and with a little luck, I’d have something to go on by morning…
And so far, my luck had held.
I slipped into the port without difficulty, and now that I knew exactly where to find Talon and the Devil’s Dragons, I didn’t need to go rattling doors and bugging dock workers. All I had to do was get into Talon’s office, and I’d seen my way in on my first visit.
With a little know-how from my days in the police academy, and some skill from my time as a beat cop, it wasn’t hard to slip over to the stairs up to his building.
I expected the security to his office to be a little stronger, especially taking the outside approach – but on my first trip out here my police instincts had been working on overdrive.
I had paid attention to the way the guards watched the elevator, and the way the club congregated around the bar. Nobody was watching those old rusted stairs. If I could make it without being noticed, the shitty door lock I’d seen from the inside of Talon’s office would be easy work for my pick set.
It was a hell of a risk, but as I slipped past the guards and made my way quietly up the metal staircase, I knew I was going to pull this off. I didn’t even have to pick the damn lock. I tried the handle and the door swung open.
Slipping into the empty office, I reached in my pocket for the voice-activated recorder. It was a high-tech piece of equipment I’d bought on an impulse to prepare myself for a career of private investigation: just advanced enough that it could tap into the port’s unsecured Wi-Fi and upload anything it heard right into a folder I’d set up online.
To keep it from dying on me, I connected it to a high-capacity USB external battery. With that much power, this thing would run for days…
And that was long enough.
The second Talon talked about that container… I would know about it. That’s what I needed. It was definitely a step in the right direction for getting to the bottom of whatever the fuck was going on with this goddamn shipping thing.
I just hoped it’d be enough to satisfy my client…
Confident that I had a few minutes free, I turned the recorder on, plugged it into the battery, and started brainstorming where it could go. I opted for a tall sill along the top of the right wall. It was high enough where nobody would see the bug, and the row of short windows above looked like they hadn’t been touched in decades.
I planted the device and gave a quick vocal test of two sentences at medium volume to see if it caught the results.
Less than a minute later, my phone notified me of changes to my online folder. I played back the audio, and was pleased with how clear it came out.
Technology is awesome, I thought to myself, mentally giving myself a quick pat on the back as I decided to make my quick escape. It was time to get the hell out of dodge.
As I turned to leave, the shit suddenly hit the fan. A loud noise outside the door clued me into unwanted company, and I kept myself from mentally panicking as I searched for quick cover.
The large lockers on the wall looked good enough.
Quietly slipping one open, I found one that was barely occupied. It was just large enough to fit me, and I squeezed inside and closed the door right as a key entered the office entrance and the door clicked opened.
I could barely see through the slits on the front of the locker, mostly at a downward angle, but I wasn’t surprised to realize that Talon had returned with a few of his men.
“Would you care to explain to me how she got into the fucking port without anyone seeing her?”
Oh God…
He knows I’m here!
“Sorry, boss,” one of the bikers meekly replied. “I left Chet in charge to grab some lunch, and he decided he needed a shit break.”
Talon’s voice rose in defiance.
“I personally don’t give a rat’s ass if he was shitting out the fuckin’ Queen of England. If I ever, EVER catch the posts abandoned again you’ll be shitting inside a sinking motherfucking shipping crate. Do I make myself perfectly understood, ass-wipes?”
“Yes, Boss,” the biker instinctively replied quickly and thoughtlessly. “Sorry, Boss.”
“Won’t happen again,” another biker
responded meekly. I imagined that this voice belonged to the Chet who got name-dropped.
“Good,” Talon growled satisfactorily.
Not a moment passed before there was a knock on the door… the door to the staircase that I had taken up here. Talon growled angrily, clicking his fingers. I still couldn’t see them very well, but I heard one of the bikers move towards the door.
“You’ve got company, boss.”
“Yeah, shit-stain, I fucking gathered that. You let the bitch walk straight to my office.” Talon groaned.
What the hell is going on? I wondered to myself, suddenly realizing that I wasn’t the only woman who’d snuck into Talon’s domain today…
There was a moment of quiet in the room before Talon finally spoke again. “Are you just going to fucking stand there or are you going to let her in? Open the damn door and excuse yourselves from my presence. We are going to have some words alone.”
“Are you, uh, sure, Boss?”
Talon practically chuckled, although the layer of menace beneath made it self painfully clear. “Are you questioning my abilities? Wondering, perhaps, about my mental faculties? Are you honestly calling my choices into question?”
The apologies were fast and furious.
“Very well then,” Talon replied as the door knocked again. “Do as I say, or else. Answer the door, allow the girl in, and take your leave outside to guard against other unexpected guests.”
Two pairs of sturdy boots passed into and out of my sight, strolling towards the door. I heard it swing open, and the bikers offered what sounded like a quick, apologetic note to the unannounced guest as she entered.
I couldn’t see her from my vantage point, and she didn’t speak a word as she entered. Neither of them spoke a word. She was hanging out of sight, probably against the far wall.
It was Talon who broke the silence.
“So this time, it really is you, and not some fucking imposter on my territory,” Talon finally spoke. “Yes, I can see it written all over your face…”
His voice sounded surprisingly weary. There was nothing in his tone like the dark confidence that poured off him the last time that I was here.
A light laugh rolled off his visitor’s tongue before she finally began to speak: “It was only a matter of time that we would speak face to face, Talon…”