Adog? The security guard had a fuckingdog?
Anxiety was a twisting snake in my gut. I could talk my way in and out of most situations, but I was no expert at breaking and entering. And I certainly wasn’t good enough to avoid both a live guard and his canine companion.
On the flip side, would Bobby hide out in a place as secure as this? He’d have as hard a time slipping in and out without being spotted. Or maybe he wasn’t slipping out at all, had prepared everything he needed before the massacre of his family, and was just hunkered down in a space to which no one else had the key?
Could be he’d kept an office in there that none of his warehouse managers could enter.
I stood paralyzed in the shadows, trying to figure out my next step. If only Ackerson could see me now.
Paranoia had me spinning around, searching for any hint of a tail. Would Ackerson do that? Just tail a random suspect as Baxter had tailed me so many times, an obsessive presence hovering on the edges of my life? If she was doing it, she was a ghost. Nothing moved nearby, and I’d glimpsed not even a hint of another vehicle on the road behind me when I’d parked.
Maybe your car is bugged, said the part of me that had learned to watch my back.
If it was, they might know I was lurking around the business, but what would that get them? Nothing.
Metal clanged, a gate was scraped back. A minute later and powerful headlights speared the night. I sank deeper into the shadows as a van trundled out. It emerged right under a streetlight, so I saw the doggy face hanging out one side, tongue lolling.
The dog saw me, too. Or scented me. It barked.
The security guard grumbled something at the dog that quieted it before jumping out and going to close and lock up the gate. He was back in his car a minute later, the red of his rear lights soon vanishing into the distance.
Not a full-time guard, just one who did the rounds at various properties.
It was possible he’d be back again sometime tonight, so I had to be fast if I was going to do this. And at some point in the last quarter of an hour of standing here, I’d apparently decided I was—because I was moving before I’d consciously processed the decision.
The gate was heavily padlocked, but I’d figured on that. It wasn’t as if the fence had barbed wire on top—it was basic chain link. Climbable. Even if I was caught on security cameras, all they’d see was a figure in jeans, their face shadowed by a black hoodie with no branding or markings to make it stand out, and covered by a disposable face mask I’d grabbed from the hospital.
Now I grunted through that mask as I landed on the concrete on the other side of the fence.
The entire area was motionless, not even a rat skittering across the neat frontage.
Running quickly to the warehouse building itself, I began to look for an entrance. It was sealed up tight. Not only that, it had warningstickers on every door and window that bore the logo of a security company—same logo as on the guard’s van. The place was wired to sound an alert on break-in.
Of course it was.
I wanted to slap myself. I really wasn’t good at this breaking and entering thing. My expertise was in financial sleight of hand, andonlywhen it came to Audrey. I’d been scrupulous with the money that belonged to my clients, focusing all my skill on making them more money.
But I was here now, and I wasn’t about to give up. And…how fast would the security company respond to an alert anyway? This wasn’t a central location, and they weren’t cops, with the ability to run red lights. Even if they got that same guard to turn back around, it had been at least five minutes since he’d left.
If I waited a few more minutes to hopefully let him drive further away, I might get ten solid minutes.
Good enough.
In the meantime, I found a suitable projectile in the dumpster—a cracked mug someone had thrown out. At least I’d been smart enough to grab a set of disposable gloves from the box on the wall of the ICU.
I wouldn’t be leaving any fingerprints.
The mug hadWorld’s Best Bosswritten on it in big black letters. Be ironic if that had been Bobby’s mug. Or maybe the better term was “poetic justice,” I thought as I decided I’d waited long enough, and threw it toward a window that looked into a little public-facing office. Likely a pickup zone for people who lived locally and didn’t want to pay shipping costs.
No alarm shrieked, but the alarm pad inside the door was flashing red when I crawled through the window. It had alerted the security company.
I ran into the bowels of the warehouse.
Chapter 42
Private notes: Detective Callum Baxter (LAPD)
Date: Feb 18
