The gun was too far across the room to reach, but he still had one weapon left—his feet. He lashed out with his right leg, catching the psychopath in the side of the knee with his heavy patrol shoes. The kick didn’t have a lot of force behind it, but then again, knees weren’t built to bend sideways, so it didn’t take a lot. The man’s leg buckled, and he went down hard, the dog still on him.
Climbing on top of the guy, Alex grabbed his knife hand, wrenching it away from the dog. The man struggled to get free of both him and the dog, and it was all Alex could do to keep his bloody hands wrapped around the asshole’s wrist.
He had to hurry up and finish this—before the guy finished him.
Growling as loudly as the dog helping him, he yanked the knife out of the killer’s hands, even though it sliced his fingers to the bone to do it. The man balled his free hand into a fist and punched Alex solidly in the jaw.
Ignoring the pain, Alex took a deep breath and twisted the knife around to get it lined up with the psychopath’s chest. Then he collapsed on the hilt, driving the blade deep. The guy jerked once, then went still.
Alex’s vision went black as the adrenaline rush disappeared, and he closed his eyes, unable to muster the energy to do anything else.
Something wet and warm lapped his face, and he opened his eyes just as a smooth, slimy tongue hit his cheek. He groaned and halfheartedly shoved the animal away. But the beast refused to stop, instead licking even more insistently. It was like he was trying to keep Alex from giving up. This dog was too frigging much.
Alex pushed himself off the dead guy and flopped onto his back, so weak he could barely move. The dog lay on the floor beside him, gazing at him with pain and sadness in his eyes. The animal’s breathing was so labored that Alex wasn’t sure how the dog had been able to attack the killer as fiercely as he had.
Wincing, Alex spared a quick glance down at his side, then looked away just as fast. Shit, there was a lot of blood down there. He didn’t know a person could lose so much and still be conscious. Then again, he’d always been a little slow picking up the obvious.
He dimly heard the sound of sirens in the distance, but something told him they weren’t going to make it in time for him. His gaze went to the girl still tied to the chair. Her parents were dead, and now she was going to watch him—and her dog—die too.
Not having anything better to do with the short time he had left, Alex jerked the knife out of the dead man’s chest, then crawled over to the girl on his hands and knees so he could slice the rope holding one of her hands to the chair. He got through one and was halfway through the bindings around her other hand when the lights suddenly went out. He didn’t even realize he was falling until he felt his head thump against the carpet hard enough to make him see stars.
He opened his eyes for a second and saw the big, furry dog staring at him with an expression that seemed to imply he thought Alex was a complete wimp.
“Sorry, dude,” he whispered as he closed his eyes again. “Guess I’m just not as tough as you.”
Chapter 1
Dallas, Texas, Present Day
“If we don’t get anything in the next fifteen minutes, I’m calling it a night,” Sergeant Rodriguez said, his voice as rough as sandpaper in Alex’s earpiece. “We knew it was a long shot that our dealers would come back to this same location anyway.”
Thank God, Alex thought. He and his spotter, fellow werewolf and SWAT officer Remy Boudreaux, had been lying motionless on this rooftop for most of the night, and he for one was more than ready to be done with this op. It was a bust—again. If they wrapped this up quickly, he might be able to grab a few hours of sleep on one of the cots at the SWAT compound before taking Tuffie to her appointment at the vet in the morning.
Of course, not catching the bad guys tonight meant they’d be back on some other roof tomorrow night providing oversight for this snipe hunt.
“I don’t know how narcotics puts up with this crap,” Remy said from his position a couple of feet farther along the roofline. He sounded just as frustrated as Alex felt. “Another night, another frigging waste of time.”
Alex silently agreed. He and Remy, along with Max Lowry and Jayden Brooks, had been working with Sergeant José Rodriguez of the Dallas Police narcotics division on this task force gig every night for nearly three weeks now. The duty schedule wasn’t Rodriguez’s fault. If you wanted to catch people selling designer drugs, you had to do it on their schedule—which seemed to be directly associated with those hours when the rest of the world was tucked in bed all happy and oblivious.
“How the hell can it be so hard to find the dirtbags selling this new drug?” Remy asked in his distinctive Cajun drawl. “This stuff is killing people who use it. You’d think there’d be a line a mile long willing to give up these dealers.”
“No kidding,” Alex said. “But something tells me the people who use this crap are more afraid of losing access to their supply than they are of dying from an overdose.”
That was why they were out here trying to catch the guys selling the drug that had killed eight people in the past month and put more than twenty others in the hospital. Because no one would talk.
Alex leaned over the edge of the roof to scan the group of people gathered down on the corner. There was a good chance that some of them were simply hanging out, but at this time of the night—in an area well known as one of the city’s go-to locations for drug deals—there was an equally good chance that a few of them were looking to buy some of those drugs. That was why the narcotics division had one of their undercover officers buried in the middle of the group, risking his life to get any information he could on the people responsible for putting fireball on the street.
Users supposedly called the stuff fireball because it burned through you like fire, making you feel an incredible rush of heat and energy, only to leave you drained and wrung out when you came down from the high. No one in the Dallas PD had even known there was a new drug on the streets until the bodies started showing up at the hospital—and in the morgue. At first, everyone thought it was simply a strong batch of heroin or some of that nasty krokodil crap coming out of Eastern Europe. But they’d quickly figured out it wasn’t either of those things when a derivative of fentanyl, a type of synthetic opiate, showed up in the toxicology reports. Fentanyl was one hundred times more powerful than heroin and would have been bad enough by itself, but whoever was making fireball was cutting in other drugs like codeine, caffeine, and ecstasy, along with a whole bunch of crud that had chemical names Alex couldn’t even pronounce. In addition to creating an intense and long-lasting high, fireball was so addictive that people were out looking for more mere hours after almost dying from an overdose.
Alex couldn’t understand why someone would put crap like that into their bodies, but within weeks, fireball had spread to the club scene and college campuses. If the cops didn’t get it off the street ASAP, it would only be a matter of time before the stuff started showing up in the local high schools.
Luckily, SWAT had a good working relationship with the DPD narcotics division. Mostly because Mike Taylor, one of their squad leaders, had spent a good portion of his career working undercover for them. So when Rodriguez had come looking for help, Gage Dixon, the SWAT commander and alpha of their pack of werewolves, had quickly agreed. Mike’s relationship with the narcotics division wasn’t the only reason Gage had been so willing to loan out Alex and teammates. The way Gage saw it, SWAT was partially responsible for this latest drug epidemic.
Over the past year, the Dallas SWAT team had taken out some major crime figures. Gage had killed Walter Hardy, destroying a syndicate that controlled most of the crime in the southwestern United States; Alex’s squad leader, Xander Riggs, had taken down a major bank robbery ring; Eric Becker had single-handedly wiped out the Albanian mobsters who’d moved in to take over; and Landry Cooper had ended up putting a family full of arms dealers in prison.
All of that was great, but by taking out those big fish, the local ocean had become swarmed with dozens of little fish all trying to get their piece of the pie. With so many small fish running around doing business on their own, it was damn near impossible to keep an eye on them all. That was why the task force hadn’t been able to find the people distributing this new drug yet. There were just too many new players in town.
