Page 28 of K-9 Guardians

“How?” The answer was already there, waiting for his brain to break through the pain killer haze and catch up. Scarlett had said she’d gone back. Her team had recovered Gruber’s collar. King searched for his clothing, but it was no use. The authorities would’ve already taken them as evidence. “Where are the pills I took from the shipment we opened?”

“The DEA took custody of them after I provided my statement. One of their agents showed up dead yesterday morning, and another’s son was abducted. They weren’t just going to sit on the sidelines.” Her expression collapsed. “They know everything, King. I didn’t have a choice.”

Defeat stole the last remaining energy he’d reserved as King sank back onto the bed. A voice cut into the surrounding silence. Voicemail. He ended the call. His SSA wasn’t going to answer. “How bad is it?”

Her voice softened. Trying to ease the blow, he imagined, but he already sensed what was coming. “The DEA has put you on suspension, pending an investigation into what you’ve been putting together on the cartel the past couple of months. They confiscated everything in Agent Dunkeld’s home office, including the case he and Agent Roday were working together. The FBI is on its way to handle Julien’s kidnapping, and Socorro has been ordered to step aside.”

A headache spread from the base of his neck, threatening to break him all over again as the last remnants of his life shattered in front of him. He wasn’t just on the verge of losing Julien. His job was at stake, too. “All right. If the DEA knows about the warehouse, they can put together a raid party. Match the pills we took to the shipments in those boxes.”

“They breached the warehouse about an hour ago, King, but it was cleaned out.” Scarlett shook her head. “Everything that can corroborate our statements is gone.”

Chapter Ten

It shouldn’t have been possible. An entire operation gone within a few hours? With his injury, Muñoz couldn’t even walk. How the hell could he have coordinated cleaning out that warehouse? And where did he run to?

The logistics didn’t really matter. King’s son did. They’d been so close to bringing him home, but now Julien seemed farther away than ever.

Scarlett flipped through another series of photos put together by Agents Dunkeld and Roday for the thousandth time. It hadn’t taken much to create copies of the off-the-books investigation file and make it look like the original. The DEA could have the collection they left in Dunkeld’s home. She’d piece this together with the raw notes she and King had uncovered in Dunkeld’s office vent.

Only they were looking at the same information that’d brought them to that warehouse in the first place.

Sangre por Sangre was no longer accepting their position on the bottom rung of the ladder with their cocaine deals to high school students and underage recruiting parties. They were moving up in the world. Into fentanyl. And if history taught Scarlett and her team anything, it was the cartel didn’t have the means or the resources to get the warehouse up and running on their own. Not like that. But who in their right mind would partner with a cartel?

Her head nodded forward without her permission, the photograph in front of her blurring for a moment. Any second now, her head would collide with the stir-fry she’d pulled from the fridge, uneaten. The pain in her face seemed to shift with gravity, and Scarlett leaned back in the chair. She couldn’t stop now. Not while Julien and Gruber were still out there. She’d made a mistake, and she had to be the one to fix it. Before that little boy’s body was the next to show up on her doorstep.

“When was the last time you slept?” King looked as beaten as she felt. He shuffled into the too-small galley kitchen of Socorro’s headquarters, a crutch shoved under his arm. His facial hair had grown in over the past couple of days, revealing a single patch of lighter hair on one side. He’d changed out of the tight hospital gown that revealed more than she’d expected at the back and into what looked like a thrift store T-shirt with a popular cartoon cat and a pair of jeans that didn’t quite fit around his waist. But damn it all to hell, being his center of attention still got her heart pumping.

She readjusted in her seat, leaning her elbows against the table to give her more stability. With a shake of her head, Scarlett put herself back in the game. It was the only thing she could do. They both knew who he blamed for losing Julien last night. “Shouldn’t you still be in the hospital? How did you get here?”

His laugh shouldn’t have had any effect on her while she was this tired, but Scarlett couldn’t help but feel the tension seep out of her spine. “You’d think breaking out and calling a ride-share would be more difficult under the circumstances.”

“You just signed the discharge papers against your doctor’s orders, didn’t you?” She didn’t have the strength or the resolve to banter with him right now. Not with part of her brain focused on the file, another wishing she was asleep in her room down the hall and the last wondering when Ivy Bardot would descend from her throne on high to cut her from the team.

Scarlett had acted irresponsibly going to that warehouse without backup, without a strategy in place and without clearing it through Socorro first. And King’s little boy had paid the price for her mistake. That in and of itself was unacceptable. She’d endangered lives. All to neutralize her own guilty past. Scarlett rubbed the sleep from her eyes. “You called a rideshare?”

“You wouldn’t believe the going rate to get out here. Does Socorro expense travel for its operatives?” King dragged himself through the kitchen and pulled a chair from the end of the table that didn’t get much communal use. He lowered himself down with the help of the crutch, his injured leg stretched out in front of him, and she couldn’t help but imagine him here between assignments, as part of the team. A knife to his thigh had sliced through muscle and tendon, but the prognosis was better than they’d expected. He’d fully recover given enough time and physical therapy. “Scarlett, what are you doing?”

“I took photos of all of Agent Dunkeld’s notes from his office. I’m going back through them. There are references here I haven’t been able to make sense of yet. Random letters. Almost like it’s some sort of code, but one I haven’t seen before.”

The letters seemed to jump off the page every time she looked away, as if they were calling her. Or maybe she was just hallucinating. She scrolled through another set, these written in more feminine handwriting. Eva Roday’s, if she had to guess.

“My gut says if we manage to find the key to decode them,” she said, “I think we’ll have a better idea of where we stand. Maybe even who is partnering with the cartel and where they might be located.”

“You need to go to sleep.”

His voice intensified that exact need, like her body had been waiting for his permission. But she couldn’t stop. Not yet. Not until she had something to bring back his hope. Because she’d been the one to kill it. The second she’d gone back for King in that warehouse, she’d broken her promise to get Julien out safely. And she couldn’t live with that for the rest of her life. She could barely live with herself as it was now. “I’m fine. I just need... I just need some coffee.”

“Coffee can fix a lot of things, but it can’t fix this.” King’s breathing picked up as he got back to his feet. He wedged the crutch beneath his arm with one hand and offered the other to her. “Come with me.”

His voice had been so clear a few minutes ago but refused to register in her brain now. He was right. Coffee wouldn’t fix this. Neither would changing out her contacts or taking a cold shower. She’d given everything she had to recovering Julien, and she’d failed. Throwing herself back into the investigation wasn’t going to change that.

Her attention latched on to the pattern of lines in his palm. Just before she slid her hand into his.

King didn’t do much in the way of helping her up—couldn’t in his condition—but the intention was still there. After everything they’d been through together, he wanted to help her. As a unit, they shuffled back through the kitchen and into the corridor before King pulled up short. “I’ll be honest. I have no idea where I’m going. Every hallway looks the same to me.”

“I’ve got you covered.” Scarlett led him to the right, then took a left and shoved through a door at the end of the hallway. A deep heaviness clung to her legs as she caught sight of her bed. King-size suddenly had all new meaning as she considered whether or not to invite him inside. But her boundaries had been broken the moment she went back in to save him from Muñoz and the rest of the cartel.

Only this time King made the choice for her.

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