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“Nadia?” I asked the girls.
“She’s fine,” Ella said quickly, giving me permission to focus on the briefcase once again.
“He said there are kids. The briefcase has the location,” I managed as I pulled away from Colt. If there was ever a time to be strong it was right now. This wasn’t over yet.
I reached for the briefcase and the officers moved to stop me until Colt held up his hand. I knew this was against protocol and Colt would probably get in trouble for it, but I was incredibly grateful, even if I had no time to show it.
“Kids?” Aria whispered as she and Ella, along with Colt, helped me tear through the paperwork. Sometime during our search Nadia joined us but I barely noticed as I scanned the papers intently.
“Here!” Nadia exclaimed as she held up a piece of paper.
“Are you sure?” I took the paper and skimmed it quickly. A shipment was going out from Harbottle Harbor this evening.
“No. But it fits the bill,” Nadia said and I had to agree. It was the closest thing we had found to an address. Maybe Detraux was lying, and if he was I had faith in the police interrogators to get the information out of him. But until then, this was what we had.
“Jordan, shouldn’t we be the ones to go?” asked one of the officers who’d eventually joined our search through the paperwork.
Colt nodded and my heart dropped.
“But if they happen to show up to the same docks that we do, who are we to stop them?” Colt asked the officer, who didn’t look convinced with Colt’s reasoning but didn’t argue. I knew Colt had the respect of nearly every police officer on the force.
Nadia snapped a picture of the paper with her phone before handing it back to Colt and the four of us shot out of that office in disbelief that we weren’t being detained. We should have been stopped and questioned but thank the Lord for Colt. I knew we’d have to give statements and answer a bevy of questions soon, but he was allowing us this. To save these children.
My heart contracted. What if we were too late?
I couldn’t think like that.
We finally got to my car, all four of us so out of breath we could barely even pant, but I couldn’t pause to catch my breath. We flung ourselves into our seats and I tore out of the parking garage as Aria entered our destination into the GPS.
Glancing at the steering wheel, I noticed my bloody knuckles gripping it tightly, a strange sight since the fight already felt far in the past. So much had happened since then with Colt’s appearance and the search through the paperwork. And although I felt disgusted that I still had Detraux’s blood on me, it could wait. Everything could wait.
I’d noticed Ella had a fat lip, but other than that the only wounds my team seemed to have were offensive. Thank goodness.
But even those few thoughts were too much for me right now. I had to focus on driving, on getting us to that dock.
Thankfully it wasn’t quite the hour for traffic and we made it out of downtown in good time. I took the roads toward the docks and concentrated on driving like I never had before. We had to go fast, but it was also imperative that we were safe.
Sirens blared as we neared the harbor. Colt and his officers were already there. Hopefully they’d found something.
I left my car idling as we all jumped out and ran toward the containers waiting to be loaded onto a ship in dock.
“We’ve got these covered. Go check the ones already on the ship,” Colt yelled to me over the sounds of the dock and the sirens. The place was a madhouse.
I nodded and didn’t even have to speak as the girls and I sprinted up the rickety gangplank and onto the ship in question.
“We need every one of these opened,now,” I yelled at a guy who watched us with wide eyes as we commandeered his ship.
I guessed I spoke with enough authority because without questioning he and his partner turned to the nearest container. I watched as he opened the first, learning how to do it, and then we began doing the same thing to others.
I tore through the containers, opening one after the other. All of them were filled with stuff I couldn’t care less about. Most of them were filled with boxes of all shapes and sizes. But there had to be something more.
I flung back metal door after metal door but only encountered more and more cardboard boxes.
“Anything?” I yelled to Nadia, who was just a few containers down from me.
She shook her head silently.
I knew that would be the case. If anyone had found anything the others would have been alerted immediately. I glanced around, seeing only a few more containers on board. I then looked over the edge of the ship and saw Colt with his men. They seemed just as intent on finding something, meaning all of us had yet to find anything. But how?
