Page 80 of Playing for Keeps

* * *

“Whatta we got?” Lee demanded once all the introductions had been made. His team was gearing up in the conference room, the table full of flak jackets, guns, and the comms they were going to wear.

My team was hidden behind view, where Lee and I had agreed they should stay. They were the contractors. The hackers. The men who would be doing the things the police wouldn’t do.

“No good news here,” Angel said through the overhead speakers, his avatar on the screen at the front of the room. “I can’t get a satellite over the area for another ten hours. We can’t wait that long.”

“Butterman,” I asked, “what about you? Any luck with the cameras?”

There was a beat of silence, one I was used to but had Lee lifting his gaze my way. When he spoke, Butterman’s voice was slightly muffled, as if he were trying to hide the fact that he’d shoved his face full of food. “The cameras,” he said, pausing to swallow, “are going good. I’ve been zeroing in on the location we got from the kid. There’s definite activity around the area. There’s a lot to go through, so I’ve got Ford and Thatcher helping out.”

“What about now?” Mitch asked, and the men in the room seemed to still, raising their eyes to him. He was the odd man out. The new guy on the crew. After he brought Vivian home earlier this summer, Mitch quit working for LS Security. He was here tonight as a favor, as he’d told us he would when I took the control out of Frankie’s hands and put it into Lee’s. He’d do the big jobs if needed. Jump in on an emergency if we couldn’t find someone else. But his and Vivian’s mental health had taken precedence, and I was thankful to have him tonight.

“I’ve been watching the streets out front of the building. Bunch of people have gone in, but only a couple have come back out. Don’t know if they’re having a party in there or what.”

A grimace slashed across Lee’s face, and I was sure the look on my face mirrored his. A party at a warehouse tied to a trafficking ring couldn’t be good.

“We need to move.” I picked up my headset and secured it over my ear. With a quick check that it was working, I turned to the computer and pulled up the last satellite image of the warehouse Levi had directed us to, as well as a map of the area.

A little red dot jumped across the screen. Lee’s booming voice commanded the attention of the room. “Warren, Maxwell, you two will be coming in from the south. Shouldn’t be any doors, according to the map, but if there are, make sure they are secure. Enter if you have to, otherwise come around to the west and enter here at this door. Dennis and Johns, hold steady here on the east side until you hear from one of them. Saunders and I will be flushing them out from the north. We want to go in quiet. Take down what we can, but be careful of any women or children who are being held. Vinny and his team will be in our ears the whole time, directing us to where we need to go and keeping an eye out as best they can.”

“Police activity is low in the area tonight,” Thatcher mentioned as Dennis and Maxwell finished fitting their headsets to their ears. “So we shouldn’t have issues being interrupted by the boys in blue.”

“That being said,” Lee jumped in, “we do not have their blessing. They filed a missing person report on Miss O’Connor, but a twenty-three-year-old who’s only been missing for a couple of days ain’t making no headlines. We’re doing this ’cause we have evidence of wrong-doing, and we ain’t gonna let that stand.”

There were few questions after that, the answers from Lee short and sweet. Within ten minutes, the crew had loaded up inside of their SUVs and sped away. I watched in real-time as they made their way through the city streets, the cameras fitted into their safety glasses showing me the way.

At last, they pulled up outside of the warehouse. Maxwell and Warren were the first to arrive, and they cleared the south side of the warehouse before heading around to the west. Lee and Mitch stormed the front door, but what I saw on the screen didn’t make sense.

There was a smear of blood left over from where Aaron was shot. Beyond that, there was nothing. Not a person, not a single wooden crate. Nothing in the space looked as it had on Levi’s video.

“Butterman, are you seeing this?” I asked, and my question was followed by a curse.

“They left the building,” Butterman muttered, his fingers tapping out a frantic beat across his keyboard. “The videos were delayed somehow. They—Oh, shit.”

“What is it?” I asked, my eyes scouring the screen. But I didn’t need him to tell me as I watched it play out in front of me.

The monitor showed a whole host of activity, not more than two hours before. Men moving crates out into shipping containers, others carrying unconscious victims over their shoulders like bags of cement. My stomach churned as I caught sight of a flash of red hair.

“Angel? Get Harris Lockhart on the line. We’re going to need his help.”

“On it, boss.”

The on-screen parade of people leaving the building continued, the speed set on fast-forward, just slow enough to catch quick glimpses of a body or a box here or there. The containers were bolted. The last of the bodies carried down to the docks and loaded onto a boat just out of sight.

“Can you get another angle?” I asked Butterman as I leaned over my computer, scouring the images for any kind of clue.

“Found one,” Ford said, and a new picture flashed across the big screen against the wall.

As I watched in real-time, a car pulled into view. A familiar face climbed out of the driver’s side door, popping up over the top of the car. The man tossed his keys at the guy who came out of the passenger seat, then pulled open the back door and reached inside.

Everything inside me withered as my stomach plummeted to the floor.

Look what you’ve done.

It figures you’d mess this up.

You don’t deserve to live.