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“The one you get when you’re about to suggest we do something stupid or reckless or both.”
“It’s not stupid.”
“So it’s reckless.”
“Just hear me out. With the way you’ve been pruning all of the bad apples from your department, you don’t have the manpower to storm the commune. And I don’t have enough guys available to fill in the blanks.”
“I know where you’re going with this, but no. I’ll just have to call in the state police or the FBI.” He pulled his phone from his belt by his badge, but Zak snatched it away.
“Do you want another Waco here?”
“He’s got a point,” Sawyer said. “We don’t know what their weapon situation is up there.”
Silence fell over the room for several heartbeats.
Rose finally broke the silence. “Waco?”
Ash groaned softly. “Sometimes I forget how much younger you are than me.”
She grinned at him. “You may be an old man, but you’re my old man. So, what’s the Waco?”
Ellie looked over at Rose. At twenty-seven, they were the same age, born nearly five years after the siege. The only reason Ellie knew about it was because true crime was her whole life.
“A cult in Waco, Texas, was accused of weapons violations,” she explained. “When the FBI and ATF tried to execute a search warrant, it ended up in a shootout. Four officers died, six more were injured, and the compound was under siege for fifty-one days. It finally ended in a fire, and over seventy people died.”
“Whoa,” Rose said, her blue eyes wide. She turned to her husband. “Yeah, we definitely don’t want that. I vote we don’t call the FBI and go with Zak’s idea instead.”
“This isn’t a democracy,” Ash muttered, but he was ignored.
“I vote for Zak’s idea, too,” Anna said.
“Okay, but I can’t be involved with this. The legality of it is too gray.” Ash shook his head and picked up the box of Hope’s recordings, which Ellie had brought in with her. “I’ll take these back to the station and start going through them.”
They all watched him go.
Ellie thought she should be worried because they were crossing a line that Ash, as sheriff, couldn’t cross.
But she wasn’t.
She just wanted Cal back.
She shifted her gaze over to Zak. “So, what exactly is your idea?”
He grinned, and there was more than a little glint of mean in it. “We go ahead and stir up that hornet’s nest.”
chapter
twenty-four
Zak hadn’t elaborated on what he meant by stirring up the hornet’s nest but instead excused himself to make some calls.
When he came back, he nodded. “We lucked out. They were in Nevada on a training mission. They’re on their way. ETA ninety minutes.”
Everything kicked into high gear then, and within an hour, the team was loading up the dogs to head up the mountain for the rescue mission.
Ellie grabbed Puzzle’s harness and buckled him into it. She was just strapping on her boots when Zak stepped up next to her, blocking her path. “You’re not going.”
Outrage burned through her. “Like hell I’m not.”
