“Just how long were you down here?”
“Just a couple of weeks, and only when you were home.”
Hector grabbed Will by the nap of the neck and pulled the man into his arms. “I really don’t like the idea of you being down here. I don’t want you down here again until we can get the place cleaned up and repaired.”
Will melted against him. “Okay, Hector.”
“We’ll turn it into a storage room or something.”
“If we knock out the wall between this room and the next one, maybe put in a support beam, it would be big enough for a rec room.”
Hector frowned. “What room?”
Will pointed to the far wall behind the stack of wooden crates. “There’s a door over there that leads to another room.” He wrinkled his nose. “It smells really bad in there, so I tried not to go in there if I could help it.”
Hector grimaced. “Okay, I want you to stay here while the sheriff and I go look.”
“Be careful,” Will whispered. “There’s a lot of stuff packed in there.”
Hector leaned and pressed a kiss to Will’s lips before heading toward the corner. Between him and the sheriff, they moved the crates out of the way until a small metal door was revealed. It seemed strange to Hector that all of the other doors in the place were made of wood except this one. This one was made of metal.
Considering Will’s aversion to the room, Hector didn’t know what to expect when he pulled the door open, but it certainly wasn’t a room stuff to the brim with boxes and magazines and crates and suitcases. It was insane.
“Look at all this shit,” Hector mused. “It’s like a hoarder’s paradise in here.”
There was barely any room to walk around the room. Everything was stacked so close together and nearly all the way to the ceiling.
“Do you think this could be what Doug and Gill were looking for?”
“Could be,” the sheriff replied. “But how would they know about it?”
“Uh…I might be able to answer that.”
Hector turned toward the doorway. “Will, I told you I didn’t want you in here.”
“Kinda wasn’t my idea.”
Hector’s eyebrows rose for a moment when he saw Will standing there with his arms raised up in the air, but they quickly came back down and snapped together when he saw the man standing behind him.
His lip curled back in anger. “Doug.” His breath caught when Doug shoved Will into the room and then waved a gun at them.
“Move back against the wall,” Doug said.
Seriously?
Hector grabbed Will and dragged him as close to the wall as he could get then pushed Will behind him. If the bullets started flying, they’d have to go through him first.
“Why are you doing this, Doug?” he asked. “What are you looking for?”
“It’s mine!” Doug shouted as he grabbed one of the crates and pulled until it crashed to the ground. He kept the gun pointed at Hector, Will, and the sheriff as he squatted down and rifled through the stuff that had spilled out of the crate.
“Damn it!” Doug shouted as he went for another crate. He pulled that one to the floor just like the first one and searched through it.
When he went for a third crate, Hector slid his arm back and pushed Will toward the door. Little by little, as Doug searched the crates, Hector moved them toward the exit.
“Where is it?” Doug shouted as he spun around, knocking stacks of magazines and cardboard boxes to the floor. “It has to be here.”
“Maybe if you told us what you were looking for, Doug,” the sheriff said, “we could help you find it.”
