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The light blinked on in the living room to his right. It went dark. It blinked on in her dining room to the left; it went dark. A softer glow shone, probably where the person had moved to the back of the house.
Olivia wasn’t checking her rooms before she went to sleep. She couldn’t be in two places at the same time.
“Iniquus Communications. Identification.”
“Nutsbe, Panther Force. Possible home invasion. Track this phone’s GPS. I’m in the yard now, making a circuit to investigate the exterior. Over.”
“Copy. Possible home invasion. We have you on the board. Be advised that Alexandria P.D. is being routed to your GPS coordinates. Over.”
Nutsbe moved to the empty driveway and up to Olivia’s detached garage. Shining his phone’s flashlight into the garage door window, Olivia’s was the lone vehicle. Nutsbe extinguished the flashlight and scanned up and down the street. The neighborhood was dark. There were no extraneous cars parked along the roadway save his. This wasn’t a late-night visit from her bestie.
Rounding to the back, Nutsbe flattened himself against the side of the house and sidestepped slowly, hoping to avoid illuminating the floodlights he had positioned to protect Olivia.
He made it to her back door. It was shut and locked, but the cardboard was missing from the pane with the broken glass.
Thick storm clouds had momentarily cleared a portion of the full moon, allowing Nutsbe to decipher the most obvious of shapes inside. This was a laundry-mudroom kind of space. The door into the kitchen was half open, and a light shone from somewhere toward the front of the house.
From this position, Nutsbe could now hear a wailing cry that sent a shiver down his spine. K9 or human, he couldn’t tell.
He whispered into his comms. “Are you picking this up? Over.”
“Our computer system has identified a distress vocalization at your location. Over.”
And he wasn’t waiting. That could be an angry or injured Henrietta, or someone could be doing something terrible to Olivia.
Nutsbe slowly reached his hand through the broken glass, grasped the door handle, and turned, letting it open just past the catch and then pulling his arm back.
There was the clatter of things hitting a wooden floor, someone dumping a drawer in the living room?
“I’m entering the house through the back door. Over.”
“Be advised Iniquus has rerouted closest available tactical force operator. ETA nine minutes. This line will remain open and recording. Over.”
A hell of a lot could happen in nine minutes. “Nine minutes. Copy. Over.”
Nutsbe stole through the kitchen, slid along the wall in the darkened hallway, and peeked to the right, where a biker was rifling through a stack of papers.
Above, on the second floor, was the droning, sleepy sound of a man’s voice as if reading from a book and not engaged in a back-and-forth conversation.
Nutsbe didn’t hear Olivia.
He rounded onto the stairs and dropped his hands to the risers. He bear-crawled, both to keep his profile below that banister and for stability and quiet.
The hall upstairs was dark.
His back to the wall, he slid toward the light in the next room and squinted through the crack by the hinges.
Olivia, dressed in a nightshirt, was duct-taped to a chair.
The man in front of her wore jeans and wallet chains, spiked boots, and a heavy leather jacket. His neck muscles were massive. But his voice didn’t work with the getup. His word choices made this man educated, even refined. The oddity of the two aspects confused Nutsbe’s ability to process how to go forward. In a fight, you had to assess the background of the fighter—Chuck, the martial artist, was one kind of fight. Mickey Pauley and an alley brawl was another.
What was this?
Two against one.
An Iniquus brother was nine minutes out. Eight. Maybe seven.
Should he wait?
