What the fuck? It was after midnight. They’d only just gotten Maia home in time, but it had been before midnight. By about five minutes.
Chase slid his phone open and straightened up. The text message was from their Alpha. It read,
My office. Now.
Without saying a word he began walking briskly to the security door into the warehouse. Theron raced past him and began tapping in their code number. Every family had an individual code number, and each person within the family had a personal digit added to the end of that number. The Reilly family number was 97324. Chase’s number was 973241, Theron’s 973242, and Draven’s 973243. When the entire family entered together, they used the code 973240.
Chase was concerned. He couldn’t ever recall the Alpha summoning them so late at night before. Also, the fact that their cell phones had vibrated the moment they arrived back at the warehouse was significant. Either the Alpha himself was watching for them to return or he had someone else monitoring them. Whichever was the case, it was unusual. Why hadn’t he called them earlier? Unless he wasn’t prepared to speak to them until they were inside their ultra-secure warehouse base.
Chase hurried inside after his brothers, stopping only long enough to ensure the door had locked behind them. Theron had once again gone ahead and summoned the elevator. It was opening just as Chase arrived.
Only a minute or two later, they stood at the door to their Alpha’s office. It was open, and he was sitting behind his computer. Chase had a momentary flash of how much work the Alpha did and what long hours he often put in, caring for the pack.
“Close the door please, Draven,” the Alpha ordered.
Chase remained standing in front of the desk until the Alpha waved them to seats.
“I’m glad you got here. This job has to be done tonight, and I was beginning to think you’d get back too late and I’d need to find another team. It’s you three I want.”
All of which told Chase exactly nothing, but it certainly put him on edge. What did the Alpha want them to do tonight?
Theron and Draven remained silent. Chase thought that was a good idea. The Alpha would explain what they needed to know when he was ready.
“A junior staff member from a company that is writing some secret code for a government department left his cell phone on a bus on the way home from work. He says his pocket must have been picked, that he would never have forgotten it. That may be true.”
It was evident from the Alpha’s tone of voice that he didn’t believe the young staffer had been robbed but that he’d dropped it or forgotten it and some enterprising person had found and kept it.
“Fortunately the kid’s a geek and had the GPS switched on and had also registered it with Find My Phone. It didn’t take us very long to find out exactly where the phone is.”
Chase still didn’t understand why anyone would care about a junior staff member’s cell phone. A junior wouldn’t have access to anything secret, and even if he did, it wouldn’t be on a cell phone even if that cell was the latest Smartphone.
“The person with the phone is in an unsavory part of town. The most unsavory part of town. The company is concerned that while the phone’s owner is not privy to secret material, he does have the cell phone numbers of people who are. There’s the potential for blackmail there if the cell phone isn’t retrieved before the person with it discovers it might be worth even more than they’d originally thought. Our current hope is that the thief will take it home with them tonight and not attempt to sell it until tomorrow. It’s important you three retrieve it before the new owner works out just how valuable that contacts list really is.”
“Yes, sir,” said Draven.
“Do we have a means of tracking the cell ourselves,” asked Theron.
Chase knew it’d be Theron who thought of the important questions. He was the thinker of the three of them.
The Alpha handed them another phone. “This is a disposable that we’re using to track the Smartphone. I want them both back here today, please.”
“Yes, sir,” said Chase. He took the tracker phone, and the three of them left the Alpha’s office.
“Ten minutes to get changed and bring what you think you’ll need to the car. Remember, since this is the tough side of town, we need to look inconspicuous but clearly not potential victims.”
Draven sighed. “Because that’s so easy to do. Not. Shit-kickers coming up.”
Yes. That was what he thought. Two pairs of jeans, sturdy ones underneath to protect his skin and his oldest pair on top. Thick socks, shit-kickers, and the old battered leather jacket he’d bought in a thrift store for exactly this kind of occasion. Plus a bludgeon. A sock filled with dirt was the perfect weapon. When a person was hit on the head with it, the blow was quite hard enough to knock them unconscious, but there were no residual marks of a weapon and almost no chance of ongoing head injury. He always carried two such bludgeons with him into events such as this.
A gun would be good as well, but the risk of having it stolen and used against one of them was too high. Simpler weapons were better.
He was first back to their car and sat in the passenger seat. He had the tracker phone and would be the navigator. Draven arrived next and walked past the car to the gate. Apparently Theron would be driving. Likely that was a good decision. He’d be very unlikely to get lost.
Theron arrived, and they left. The first part of the journey was easy, onto the freeway and ten miles along it. Once they turned off, they immediately headed into a maze of smaller roads and a neighborhood that had definitely seen better days. There was trash on the sidewalks and in the gutters. A lot of windows were boarded up. Stairwells opened right onto the sidewalk, and a lot of the doors hung half off their hinges. Concrete stairs were chipped and missing chunks of tread.
The good news was no one would be calling the police if they heard strange noises. The bad news was absolutely no one here would help them if anything went wrong. The nice people wouldn’t see anything, and the less nice ones would join in to incapacitate and rob the loser in a fight.
“Theron, you’ll have to stay with the car or it won’t be here when we get back,” said Chase.
“Yeah, I worked that out myself. I’ll have to go three or four miles away as well. I can’t park anywhere around here in safety.”
“I’ll get you to let us out as close as possible to the thief, and you can keep driving until we buzz you to return.”
“No problem.”
Chase snorted. It was a huge problem, but there was nothing they could do about it. Find the phone, get it, and get out. Except there’d only be two of them to watch each other’s back instead of three. Fuck it.
* * * *
Draven was doing his best to memorize the streets they were driving through. If he and Chase had to run—and he was almost certain they would end up running—he wanted as good an idea as possible of which direction to head in.
The car was crawling along beside the curb right now. Draven hoped anyone watching them would think they were looking for a hooker, not for trouble.
“Close, very close. Next building. No, one more. That’s it,” said Chase.
“I’ll go north for four minutes then come back south,” said Theron softly.
Draven and Chase stepped out of the car.
“Okay,” said Chase, his hand with the tracker phone in it hidden in his pocket.
Draven did the math. Theron would be outside again in eight minutes. That gave them four minutes to find the right person, two minutes to get the phone from him, and two to get back here. It was doable. At least Theron could circle around and come back if they weren’t outside. Theron would be facing south so if they had to run, and he wasn’t here, south was the way to go.
Since Chase had the tracker cell phone, Draven walked behind him and a little to his left. They never stood exactly behind each other when out on a job. No one wanted to be shot, but their plan was not to make themselves too easy a target. Chase began moving fast up yet another crumbling concrete staircase. Clearly the owner of this apartment block had not paid any attention to the innumerable health and safety warning notices he would have received. Falling down these uneven stairs would be all too easy, especially as two thirds of the light bulbs were either missing or broken.
Fortunately, as panther shape-shifters, their eyesight and hearing were better than average, which helped them to avoid the chipped edges of the stairs and the piles of trash in the corners. Mr. Crawford would have had the residents out sweeping the stairs for sure, judging by how he liked the parking lot at the church kept neat and clean.
Chase stopped, and Draven stepped back down a couple of stairs, waiting with him, but it seemed Chase was just checking the tracker again. He waved back at Draven. Damn. They must have gone up one floor too many. Draven hurried back down one flight of stairs and waited while Chase followed him and pushed open the stairwell door. Draven went through right behind him, shutting the door as silently as possible. Chase was pacing down the hallway, which was bare concrete, not even linoleum, let alone something nice like tiles or carpet.
Once again Chase went too far and had to come back, moving very slowly and standing outside one of the doors. These apartments were very small. There must have been a dozen doors off this hallway, whereas Draven thought there was barely space for four normal-sized apartments.
Chase pointed to the door, and Draven moved out of sight of the peephole. He slid his right hand into his pocket and fit his set of brass knuckles on the back of his hand. Not that they were made of brass, but they were metal and helped him punch good and hard if he needed to, without doing any long-term injury to his opponent.
Chase held a piece of paper over the peephole and hammered on the door. “Pizza delivery,” he yelled.
Ah yes. That was one of Chase’s favorite means of getting people to open the door. Saying UPS wouldn’t work on this side of town where people didn’t have the money for a lot of shopping. But almost everyone ate pizza from time to time.
Inside, a confused voice called out, “Hey, Zee? Did you order a pizza? A pizza guy is here.”
Fortunately, there were several voices speaking at once, and someone unlocked the door. Chase planted his boot hard on the door right by the lock and slammed it open, causing the person who’d opened it to stumble backward. Chase raced through the open door, and Draven sprang after him. Chase had the tracker phone so he’d be searching for the missing Smartphone while Draven had to hold off the people in the apartment. He knew there were three of them at least because of the voices he’d heard.
The man who’d opened the door was still sitting on the floor shaking his head, making no attempt to get up. Smart man. A teenager was standing at the doorway to another room. Chase grabbed him by the shirtfront and yelled, “Where’s my cell phone, punk?”
The kid was trying hard to look brave, but Chase had his feet off the ground and shook him. Draven hauled the man on the floor up onto his feet. He clenched his fist with the brass knuckles on it and rested the metal against the man’s nose. His eyes nearly crossed trying to watch Draven.
“Where’s the phone?”
“I don’t know nothing about no phone. That’s god’s honest truth. Zee didn’t say nothing about no phone.”
Draven pushed the man against the wall and went through his pockets. His own phone wasn’t a smart phone, and his wallet was so thin he couldn’t have been hiding anything in it. The man was either genuinely poor or possibly just too smart to carry cash in this neighborhood.
Draven dropped him back onto the floor and raced across to Chase, going through the kid’s pockets. He found some reefers and a couple of condoms, but once again, his cell phone was several generations old. Chase dropped the kid and barreled into the inner room. Draven caught a fleeting glimpse of a gun and shouldered Chase to the side as they both flew through the doorway. The gun went off sounding terrifyingly loud in the small room, but Draven wasn’t hurt.
He didn’t stop to look at Chase but used the momentum of his entry to knock this man flat against the wall and smash his brass knuckles into the man’s nose. He threw the man onto a filthy, unmade bed and searched his pockets, taking a wallet that was much fatter than the other man’s and a ring of keys.
Chase was pulling the drawers out of the nightstand and throwing the contents onto the floor. Draven looked around the room, snatched up a chair, and carried it across to a tall, freestanding bookshelf covered with all kinds of junk, none of it books. He ran his hand over the top shelf right at the back near the wall, pushing the items there to the front of the shelf. He found several wallets, and then three cell phones, one of them the very latest Smartphone.
Draven hoped like hell it was the correct phone. The company junior might have told the truth after all. Maybe he had been robbed. These people did seem to accumulate odds and ends belonging to other people. On that thought, he turned and faced the bookshelf again, looking along each shelf fast but critically.
There was a rather nice chess set in a box and, behind a pile of tatty men’s magazines, were three more wallets.
He looked across at Chase, who was still pulling things out of drawers. He seemed to have collected a few things as well. Draven just hoped one of them had the correct phone.