Page 17 of K-9 Guardians

He slipped his head through the opening in the vest and strapped it tight. Nervous energy prickled at the back of his neck, almost as if in warning, but there was no way in hell King was going to turn around now. Not with the possibility his son was in there. “Let’s do this.”

They shouldered out of the vehicle at the same time, keeping low and to the shadows. Hans’s and Gruber’s nails tapped against the asphalt but not loud enough to illicit a security response. King slid through the long line of cement parking space barriers. No vehicles in the lot, and half of the pine tree rooted at the corner of the building had succumbed to dry rot. They should have a straight shot inside, but his gut was telling him it wouldn’t be that easy.

It never was with Sangre por Sangre.

Unholstering his sidearm, King crossed the crumbling parking lot to where the tree provided cover. And waited. His breath lodged in his throat. The night was thick with heat, and he couldn’t swallow past the doubt. This didn’t feel right. Of all the raids he’d executed over the years, this one felt uncomfortable.

King didn’t have time to dig into that now. Julien needed him.

He scanned the surrounding desert as Scarlett reached for the pocket door nearest their location. Ten minutes wasn’t enough time. Not for a place this size, but he’d do whatever it took to recover his son before those seconds ran out. He gave the okay to breach as he had a dozen times before.

Scarlett wrenched the door back on its hinges and stepped into the blackness waiting to consume them, weapon raised. The Dobermans followed without hesitation. Just before King was swallowed by a vast emptiness on the other side.

His heart rate doubled, thudding hard behind his ears as his senses tried to make up for the complete lack of stimulus. He pressed his feet down harder into the cement floor. He was grounded. As for everything else, he was at a loss.

A click registered in his ears, and a beam cut across the floor in front of him. Holding up one hand, he tried to block the onslaught of light, but it was no use. His senses couldn’t adapt that fast.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” Scarlett directed the beam toward the floor and the K9s at her feet. “Come on. We don’t have much time before the security company alerts whoever owns this place we’re here.”

He followed Scarlett’s outline. Both hands gripped around his weapon, he took in as much as their limited light source provided.

The layout had changed in the last ten years. Now it was designed as a completely open space with exposed girders stretching across the ceiling. Some kind of inventory created a maze with pallets of crates stacked four or five high. Each box sported red-and-yellow stripes along one side, as if Scarlett and King had been thrown into some kind of messed-up circus he didn’t want to get lost in. Two forklifts were wedged under pallets ahead. But it was the unending rows of product that had him picking up the pace.

There was no evidence a bomb had gone off in here ten years ago that’d required the ATF to consult. No sign of the past infiltrating into the present. It was as though that operation had never happened, and yet Adam and Eva couldn’t seem to let this place go during their investigation into the cartel.

It didn’t matter. King was here for one reason. “They wouldn’t leave Julien out in the open. There’s got to be offices or something around here.”

“Follow me.” Scarlett pressed forward with all that confidence King wished he could siphon for himself. She was every bit the military operator she was supposed to be, and there wasn’t a single cell in his body that wasn’t grateful for her at a time like this. A time when his training had seemingly gone out the window in search of the only person he had left.

She carved a path to the right, weapon held high as though the weight wasn’t getting to her like it was to him, and heel-toed it forward like she’d already memorized the layout. Which, she probably had. They passed a steel support running straight up to the ceiling with another row of the red-and-yellow-striped boxes to his left, and that obsessed part of himself that’d pushed him from case to case all these years King prodded him from inside.

He slowed, trying to keep an eye on Scarlett and the Dobermans as he studied the nearest box.

“What are you doing?” The flashlight beam landed at his feet. Scarlett retraced her steps to him. “We have to keep moving. We have about two minutes before the security system pings.”

“The photos in Adam’s file. He and Eva were watching this place.” King holstered his weapon, punctuated by one of the Doberman’s low groans. He wasn’t sure which. “I need to know why my partner and Julien’s mother were killed. I need to know what the cartel is trying to hide.”

He pulled a switchblade from his pocket and sliced the packing tape straight down the middle. Grabbing on to Scarlett’s wrist, he forced her to angle the flashlight inside.

Packing peanuts stuck to the liner of the box and threatened to go everywhere with one wrong move. He drove his hand inside and felt around.

Then hit something solid. He grabbed on to it, even as he felt every second slipping through their fingers, and pulled the object free. Big blue eyes stared back at him.

A baby doll—heavier than he thought it should be—closed its eyes the farther he leaned it back. Her purple pajamas were pristine with yellow-and-white stripes, but there was something wrong about the angle of her head. King gripped the doll’s head with one hand and her body with the other and pulled.

The jolt dislodged hundreds of light blue pills from inside.

“Holy hell.” Scarlett followed the spill, crouching to get a better look. “These are fentanyl tabs. Enough to kill a herd of elephants.”

There weren’t many people outside of the DEA who could identify a pill just by the look and color of it. He was impressed.

Cutting the flashlight back to the box, Scarlett shoved to stand and sank her hand back into the box. She pulled out nine more dolls before turning the beam out into the rest of the warehouse. “Ten dolls per box.”

King followed her line of thinking. “In a warehouse packed with boxes. Shit. There has to be enough to here to OD fifty million people.”

“Sangre por Sangre has never dealt in fentanyl before.” There was something off in her voice. A combination of shock and anger and heaviness they didn’t have time to sit with. “Do you think this has something to do with the overseas resources Agents Dunkeld and Roday uncovered?”

“I don’t know.” He pulled a small rectangular bag from his back pocket—a necessity for DEA agents—and bagged a few of the pills as evidence.

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