Page 70 of Claimed By the Deputies

Patterson shifts her position and moves to the opposite corner. There’s just enough space between the stash house and the neighboring property for her to slip through to the back.

I give her a nod to confirm, and she bolts.

“On my mark!” Tyler pulls the pin off a flash-bang grenade and tosses it through a broken window. Hopefully, the grenade will be enough to distract the men so we can move in and disarm them.

BANG! The white flash lights up the entire ground floor. A man cries out in agony. It must’ve landed right at his feet.

“Now!” Tyler shouts and runs back up the front steps, holding the battering ram as he crashes through the door. I’m right behind him.

I see the screaming man first. His assault rifle is on the floor as he covers his eyes, tormented by the temporary blindness as the smoke fills up the entire room.

Tyler slams into him and they both hit the hardwood floor with a heavy thud. At the same time, I hear footsteps running down the hallway leading to the back of the house. Our second assailant, likely still armed.

“He’s coming toward you, Patterson!” I call out.

A split second later, I hear gunshots ring out. POP-POP-POP! Followed by another thud and the creaking of an old wooden porch. I rush to the back door and find Patterson kneeling beside a man. He’s on his belly, bleeding out fast. An AR-15 rifle rests beside him, and I quickly kick it away.

Patterson looks horrified. Frozen in place and out of breath. “I didn’t have a choice,” she says as she looks up at me.

“It’s okay,” I say, trying to reassure her, still shaking and heart pounding from the adrenaline rush. It’s hard to focus with the picture in front of me.

“What the fuck happened?” she gasps, now coming to grips with reality. Something tells me she hasn’t had as much field experience as her confidence led on. Real shock is coming over her. “The house was supposed to be empty.”

Tyler joins us. “He’s disarmed and in cuffs,” he says. “An ambulance is on the way.”

“We’ll need the coroner, too,” I reply with a heavy sigh as I check the man’s pulse.

“We were ambushed. They were waiting for us,” Tyler says, frowning as he glances down at the body. There’s not a shred of remorse or regret in his voice—never is. When it comes to life or death situations, Tyler transforms into the emotionless shadow he was while in the Rangers. Cold, calculated, and focused on survival at any cost. “They left two inexperienced prospects in the house, sitting in the dark, waiting for us, Mitch.”

“Silver Stallions, for sure,” Patterson says, pointing at the dead guy’s vest.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” I mutter. “Dexter may not be the brightest bulb, but he’s not that stupid, either. If he knew we were coming, he wouldn’t have left his men here to…” My voice fades as a new realization kicks in. “Unless that was the point.”

“To show the whole town what happens when the sheriff gets too close to Silver Stallion business,” Tyler says. “That’s fucking bold, though. Why the change in attitude?”

Patterson gives me a grim look. “This all ties to Trevor Callaghan. I’ll bet money on it. He’s bringing in some kind of outside muscle, some kind of influence that likely emboldened the MC to pull such a stunt.”

The implication is startling, to say the least. We were lucky to survive, and it was mostly thanks to our honed reflexes. Tyler and I were shot at so many times during our years in the service, our survival instincts kicked in the moment the bullets began whizzing past our heads. We knew to duck and move out of theway, while Patterson was lucky to only be halfway up the front steps and off the bullets’ original trajectory by a few inches.

But even so, this is a sobering reminder.

Evil is at play here, and the game is about to get even dirtier.

It’s notuntil the CSI crew comes in that Tyler, Patterson, and I become aware of our biggest problem. The three of us stand outside the stash house, the ambulance blaring behind us as they take the surviving prospect to the hospital with a couple of deputies in tow.

“It’s empty,” Gary, our lead analyst says as he walks out of the house. “We’ll likely find residual traces of whatever narcotics they were keeping in there, but they cleared the whole place out.”

“Unbelievable,” Patterson mutters, then gives Gary an ugly look. “Are you sure? Get drug sniffing dogs in there, dammit! They’ve got nooks and crannies everywhere. It’s a stash house, for fuck’s sake!”

“We thoroughly checked, and we will bring the K9 unit in as well,” Gary replies, shaking his head. “But it doesn’t look like anything was left behind. Based on our intel, I can tell you they had heroin bricks and bags of pills hidden in the house. We’ll tear the place apart, check under the floorboards and in the walls, but for the purposes of that warrant, I doubt we’ll meet the threshold.”

“Which means we might not get our wiretap granted,” Tyler concludes. “Fuck.”

“Someone tipped them off,” Patterson says, turning to give me a hard glare.

All I can do is shrug. “Like I said, the last trace of activity was at six this morning. That’s it.”

“You need to check that camera footage again,” she insists.

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