by Cara Adams
“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 o
nce, 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.
Chase nodded at him, and Draven ran through the other room and out into the hallway. Despite the sounds of fighting and a gunshot, no one was there, and no one was looking around. Chase raced past Draven, barreling through the door into the stairwell, and Draven sprinted after him, trying to go as fast as he could without risking slipping in the trash or on the crumbling edges of the stairs.
Outside he looked up and down the road without seeing Theron. “Fuck.”
“This way,” said Chase, heading south.
I knew that. But he didn’t say it. He needed his breath for running. Who knew how far they’d have to run before Theron caught up with them, especially if he had to go around again a couple of times. Draven had no idea how long their raid on the apartment had taken. It might have been four minutes, or it might have been ten.
But less than a quarter of a mile later, they saw their car idling at the side of the road. As they approached, Theron opened the door to the backseat, and Draven jumped in, sliding to the far side so Chase would follow him in.
“Did you get it?” asked Theron.
At the same time, Draven noticed a rip in the sleeve of Chase’s leather jacket. “Did the bullet hit you?” he asked.
“Bullet? What bullet? Fuck! Did they shoot at you?”
Chase pulled the tracker cell phone out of his pocket and breathed a sigh of relief. “Get the hell out of here. We’ve got the right cell phone.”
Theron was already driving toward home. “Will someone please tell me what the fuck happened?”
* * * *
Theron kept his gaze on the road, driving back to the warehouse by a roundabout route just in case anyone was watching them. No one appeared to be following them, which was good news. Even better news was that when Draven helped Chase take off his jacket there was only the slightest powder burn on his long-sleeved T-shirt, and his skin was unmarked, although he might end up with a bruise later.
The Alpha was waiting for them in his office, even though it was after two already. Judging by the files of paperwork on his desk he’d been working, not napping while he waited. Theron was damn glad he wasn’t the Alpha. These days being the Alpha of a pack was far more than just having enough muscles to encourage the other men to follow him. It was more like being the CEO of a company. The man in charge needed to keep the workers happy and make a profit so the company remained financially viable.
Their pack’s job might be a fraction unorthodox, but it sure as hell worked for them. There were plenty of desk jobs for those who preferred them, checking computer and financial records, searching for missing people and things. But there was also some adrenaline-inducing physical work as well for the younger men.
It suddenly occurred to Theron that when they mated Maia—assuming she agreed to mate them—likely they ought to stop doing jobs like this one tonight. One of them getting shot would be highly inconvenient.
How the hell would they explain it to a mate, and how could they expect her to be happy about them continuing to do equally dangerous jobs in future? He might get a little bored working from a desk full-time, but if it meant having Maia, it was a sacrifice he was prepared to make. Besides, they would get some damn good adrenaline rushes in the dungeon if they planned their games properly.
Chase and Draven put all the things they’d found in the thief’s apartment on the Alpha’s desk, and he just stared at them.
“Here’s your tracker cell phone back, sir,” said Chase.
The Alpha pulled on a pair of very thin leather gloves. He pointed to the newest Smartphone. “Is this the one you were supposed to find?”
“Yes, sir,” said Draven.
“The tracker indicates it is,” added Chase.
“Have you looked inside the wallets?”
“No, sir, we left that for you, although since they’re nice and fat, we hoped they’d be worthwhile. Some of them may lead to the owners of these other things.”
The Alpha just stared at them. “Yes, I suppose so. Thank you for getting back the phone. I’ll tell my contact we’ve retrieved it. Then I’ll need to speak to someone else about these other things.”
He rested a gloved finger on the chess set. “This one in particular might be interesting.”
Theron wondered about that as well. It was a very nice chess set indeed. He suspected the person who carried such a thing around with him on public transportation would be someone in a chess club. Maybe even a highly ranked player in the competition scene.
“There might be a reward for that. If these are petty thieves, likely they offload the things they steal very quickly. Since they haven’t sold this, it might mean it’s too identifiable for an everyday pawn shop owner,” he said.
“I agree with you, Theron. Very well, you may all go. Take tomorrow morning off and report for work at noon. There’ll be paperwork waiting for your attention by then.”
Theron managed no
t to groan. He was sure there would be. And the three of them always shared the boring jobs equally because they were a team.
It was going to be a long time until they saw Maia again. Already it felt more like several days since she’d been in their arms than only a few hours. He needed to talk to his brothers about mating her. He was ready to have her waiting in their bed every night when they arrived home, instead of seeing her just a couple of times a week.
Likely she’d need to keep working at the church, feeding the homeless and doing craft projects at the women’s shelter, and they would continue to help out several days a week as well. But knowing she was there to hold every night would be the best thing ever.
Yes. He needed to organize the mating conversation with Chase and Draven very soon. Like tomorrow.
Chapter Six
Maia and Zoe missed not having Leah available to help them, especially on Sundays. During the week, it seemed like either the Reed triplets or the Reilly triplets were around to help. Maia hadn’t had to shift any furniture for weeks now and was heartily grateful. The wooden pews were damn heavy. It took two of the sisters to lift one, whereas any of the men seemed to manage to move them just fine.
But Sunday was different. On Sunday, their father was completely focused on the sermon he had to give and on spending time with his parishioners. Their mother was the musician at the church, playing the keyboard for services and then sitting with the women listening to their needs. That often led to her needing Maia or one of her sisters to fetch items from the pantry to help out or to write notes of things their mother whispered to them so she remembered to follow up on necessary tasks, or people who needed help, later in the week.
The name of someone who was ill and needed visiting, or a young mother struggling with sleepless nights, or a husband who’d lost his job. Even though it wasn’t a very numerous church community, each new week seemed to bring more than one new need, and it was Maia’s mom who dealt with that side of things.