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Mike wasn’t necessarily a praying man, but he prayed with all his might that Mason was right.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Joe heard an unfamiliar voice.
What the fuck? Why was there someone in her bedroom while she was?—?
Ah, shit. She wasn’t at home.
As her brain began to clear, several things became apparent.
One, she’d been blindsided when, while walking that lout toward the bar, his asshole friends had injected her with Propofol. Two, they’d clearly brought her to wherever she was right now. Three, she was laying on a cold, hard surface. Four—geezus, the list was too frigging long—her hands and ankles were restrained. And five, the idiots who had done all this were right this minute arguing loudly.
Dammit. Where was she, and how long had she been out?
Think Joe, think.
The floor beneath her was clearly concrete. The raised voices had an echoey sound, as if they were in a very large, nearly empty space…
Duh.
It had to be the warehouse she’d previously surveilled, which could be good news for her. But before she’d get pumped over that possibility, Joe focused and listened in.
“…didn’t sign up for this,” one peevishly angry voice decried.
“Shut the hell up,” growled another. “You’ll do whatever I tell you. When I tell you. You’re lining your pockets with the money we get because our benefactor finds us connections and looks the other way. And he doesn’t normally ask for much except for his cut, so suck it up. We’re doing this.”
“Fine. But why does he want her to disappear, anyway?” the first man backed off on his ire and whined instead.
“Because she’s a pain in his ass, and has been getting too close to solving a few of the cases he’s got his fingers deep into. And she’s a slippery bitch. He’s tried to have her ‘accidentally’ killed in the line of fire any number of times, but the cunt manages to come out unscathed, every time.”
“So we have to do his dirty work.”
“Yeah, idiot. We do.”
Joe heard what sounded like the cuffing of someone’s head.
“Especially if we want to keep raking in the big bucks.”
Crap. None of that was good.
Joe immediately knew she had to be “the bitch” they were talking about, and rage built inside her as she also figured out who the only man was who could have set her up. Her Chief of Operations, Lester Gavin.
What a prick. She’d always known there was something off about the guy, but even more so in the last few years. He’d gotten twitchier; more remote even with the agents under his jurisdiction whom he liked. But she never would have guessed that the bastard was lining his pockets with the drug operation money he was supposed to spend his career fighting.
She was pissed.
Sanctimonious bastard.
Calling her out for her gung-ho attitude and her language. Her fucking language. Now it all made sense, keeping her off teams; isolating her on solo jobs. He’d been afraid of her, and had been trying to take her out all this time
Well fuck him.
Joe wasn’t going down without a fight. That was for sure. She’d see his ass skewered to the door of his fancy office if it was the last thing she did at the DEA.
She attempted to find calm in her head, and began thinking and strategizing.
Once Wendel discovered she wasn’t coming back on shift, would he think to notify…somebody? And would that somebody be Mike, who had all her intel, trackers, and video feeds? Or would it be some local cops who wouldn’t know what to do with a missing person? She hoped the former, but…