Page 46 of Warrant
“Woman. No questions, remember?” he said, his tone patient but strained.
Grumbling under my breath, I bit back the rest of my question. “What’s the rest?”
He gave me the rest of the plate and I tapped the pen on the notepad. “I’ll text you the information as soon as I have it.”
“Thanks, Baby Girl.”
I hung up the phone, calling myself an idiot. It was the sincerity in his voice when he assured me he was helping someone. But this really was why I couldn’t start anything up with him. I’d end up helping him do God knows what and my moral code would be the one to be impaired. How could I be a sheriff and help a boyfriend who may or may not be a criminal?
Picking up the phone again, I dialed a number and waited. As soon as it was picked up, I smiled. “Hi, Todd. I have a plate for you to run.” I listed off the state and numbers. “Any chance I could get a rush on that?”
If Warrant was using me to do something terrible, something that could get me in hot water, I’d figure it out later. And at least then I’d know if he was willing to use me for any means necessary. I really hoped that wasn’t happening here, but all I could do was wait and see. And trust. Did I mention that? I was trusting that this guy I hardly knew wasn’t going to put me into a sticky situation. I was an idiot.
Still, I’d given my word that I’d help. So I’d follow through and see what kind of man Warrant really was. This was a test for us both. I just really hoped we didn’t get burned.
CHAPTER 18
Warrant
“Shut up,” I barked at Demo as he talked to me at the same time as the guy on the phone.
“What?” the voice coming from the cell asked.
“Not you,” I sighed and moved away from Demo. “Where are you?”
“We came to your damn town and there’s fucking nothing here. Some piece of shit old gas station,” Steel muttered. “And a population of one hundred and twenty on the welcome sign.”
Ainsley had run the plates on the vehicle they stole when they dumped Riggs’s SUV and it’d been found in north Cheyenne, abandoned. Another car had been reported stolen in the same parking lot so she’d sent over that information as well. She didn’t know what she was helping us with, but I appreciated it more than I could tell her.
Sure, the tech twins—Glitch and Switch—could have run the information down, but they were busy trying to figure out whatJared’s mother had taken these kids for. If it was even her that did this. It was faster and more efficient to have Ainsley look it up. And I hadn’t been lying about not wanting to bring Owen in on this and get him in trouble.
Besides, this was a way for me to test how receptive she’d be to us being…work adjacent…in the future. Not that I could tell her about the missing kids. Not yet anyway. She’d be pissed that the cops hadn’t been brought in. But this had gone over state lines, which meant the FBI would get involved and no one had time for those incompetent assholes right now.
I sighed again. “Listen closely. Like I told you before. Sen-tin-el. With an S,” I said slowly enunciating the name, “Wyoming. Not Centennial. You’re in Centennial, asshole. You should have gone North on twenty-five when you got to Cheyenne, not west on eighty.”
Steel swore over the phone and I heard him relaying the directions to the others riding with him. “We’ll be there soon.”
Rolling my eyes, I shoved my cell back in my pocket. “I see why women bitch about men being bad about directions.”
The others chuckled. We were kicked back, waiting for the Austin guys to get here. Toxic, Butcher, and Hush were here already and there may have been a bit of drinking going on. It’d been months since we’d seen our friends.
Except Glitch of course. He was busy trying to track down these kids. If there was anything the rest of us could do, we’d be doing it, but short of breaking into every house in Sentinel, we had to stand by and wait for the techies to get some kind of idea where these pieces of shit were hiding out.
Rat and Glitch had tracked the car that had been stolen out of Cheyenne, so we knew they were heading north at least. Whether they stopped here remained to be seen. So Cypher had doubled our patrols of the town just in case one of us spotted them. Jared and Aella—his sister—had been missing for almostforty-eight hours now. The window that the police used to determine if a child would be found once they went missing was closing fast. It didn’t matter. We weren’t bringing the cops in on this. We had our own fucking window, and it wasn’t closing until we had those kids safely here with us.
Sure, letting Ainsley and Owen help us out might get us further in the beginning. They had resources we didn’t, at least not until Glitch, Switch, or Rat hacked into them. Hacking took time, time we couldn’t afford to waste. In the end we were handling this our way. And that didn’t include jail cells and court hearings. My sexy sheriff wasn’t going to like that, so I was keeping her involvement as minimal as possible for as long as possible.
“I still say we just break in places,” Butcher said. “Probably be faster.”
“And have the cops on our asses in a hurry,” Jury replied with a laugh. “We’re trying to keep them out of this.”
Toxic snorted out a laugh. “Like Denison would do shit. He’d send his deputies in the opposite direction.”
“You’ve been gone too long, Friend,” Scythe said with a grin. “Denison’s gone.”
Toxic’s eyes widened. “Someone offed him? I mean the fat bastard deserved it, but damn.”
“He retired,” Cypher said with a sigh that told me he was already sick of dealing with our shit. Secretly, I was pretty sure he loved it, but there were days I wondered. We did push the boundaries more often than not.
