“Why don’t you guys fall back, and I’ll let Max check it out before we’re pulled out for the top of the hour.”
The officer snorted indelicately. “This is the craziest darn thing I’ve ever seen.” Running his hand down the front of his vest, he shrugged. “Sure. Have at it.” He stepped around Jake and Max, then called to the other side of the barn, “K-9 on site. Let’s move on, y’all.”
Jake waited until two officers emerged from the far aisle, then asked, “Where’s the bag?”
The man who’d greeted them smirked. “Won’t your doggie find it on his own?”
“Where’s the bag?” Jake let his impatience seep into his tone.
One of the other officers pointed to the opposite end of the barn. “Inside the entrance. Looks like it was placed there intentionally. Not tossed or left behind,” he added. He held his hands up defensively as the others turned to glare at him. “What? I want to get this over with and go home.”
“Don’t we all?” Jake bent to unclip Max’s lead. “There you go, Max. As the nice man said, have at it.”
Max took off; his nose to the ground, the fur along the ridge of his back rippling. Jake could tell by the dog’s intense concentration he’d already caught a whiff of something. He followed in his partner’s wake, waiting for a positive identification.
It didn’t take long.
As the call went out for them to fall back, Max sat down at the end of the row and stared at a bag parked inside the cinder-block wall and barked the confirmation.
“Good boy.” Jake squatted beside Max and eyed the bag.
The duffel was the kind used to carry a change of clothes to the gym. Small, well-worn and made of faded navy-blue nylon. Jake couldn’t spot a logo or any kind of branding. If there was a manufacturer’s tag inside, it would be someone else’s job to get to it.
“Let’s go.” He stepped toward the door closest to them and pushed out into the gathering afternoon heat. He secured Max’s lead then relayed the location of the bomb. “We have a positive on the Swine Barn,” he said into his radio. “North end of the building, duffel bag inside the door to the left, up against a wall.”
“Ten-four,” Aronson said. “Now get out of there.”
“We’re out.” He took a deep breath of fresh air, then expelled it slowly. The midway started beyond the barn, and though he’d received the colonel’s message about his chain of command loud and clear, Jake found himself cutting a direct path to the carousel.
When he hopped onto the ride, he found Cass seated on her seahorse bench, the wrapper of a fully-loaded sub sandwich spread across her lap. She looked up at their approach, her check stuffed. “Suddenly, I’m starving,” she mumbled as she chewed.
Jake froze in place, watching as she dabbed at her mouth with a paper napkin, heat crawling up his neck. “Sorry,” he said, his voice cracking like a teenager’s. He cleared his throat. “Where’d you get that?”
“My pal T.B. brought it to me.” She opened a bottle of water and took a long pull. “Anything happening?”
“We ID’d one before the call went out to fall back and I came straight here.”
Cass lowered the sandwich to the wrapper. “Where was it?”
“Swine Barn.”
She raised a thumb to her mouth and licked a bit of mayo from the side. “Gives us eight.”
“Nine.”
“The gate, Manny’s food stand, Cattle 1 and 4, Poultry…” She trailed off, searching her memory as she counted on her fingers.
“Arkansas Building, pirate ride and Swine,” he finished.
She held up her fingers. “Right. Eight.”
He inclined his head in her direction. “Backpack.”
Cass wet her lips. The nervous tic combined with the widening of her eyes to give him a glimpse of the girl he’d known so well. It was all Jake could do to keep from grabbing her and holding her close.
Let the jerk who was doing this to her blow them both sky-high.
“I keep forgetting about the backpack,” she confessed, reeling him back from his daydream.
