Page 70 of Gator

Because Gator was on his way.

Chapter twenty-two

Gator

Kat was a machine. She fed us a stream of details as we rolled—a plate number that was also registered to the same corporation as the one that had followed Julius that day, the tracking from Julius’s tracker starting at the salon and moving first to the warehouse district. Then a final ping that put the tracker at a farmhouse outside the city limits before the signal went dead.

“I’m sending you the coordinates,” she said.

Both our phones pinged a second later with the information, and Hawk put it in the car’s onboard GPS.

“We’re about fifteen minutes out,” he told me. “We’re gonna get him.”

I nodded in agreement because I refused to believe anything else.

“I’m pulling the listing now,” she said, the quick clicking of her mechanical keyboard sounding in the background.

“Listing?” Wolfe asked.

“Yep. Lucky for us, this place is listed for sale, so the listing should have… yep, there it is, photos and a floor plan. Hmm, according to this, the house has a basement. That’s unusual around here, but it makes for a good spot to hide things.”

“Or people,” I grumbled.

She either didn’t hear me or just ignored me. “I’m pulling satellite now, and I have Isaiah getting his drone in the air. We’ll need it since there are no street cams on this rural road out in the country.”

Hawk’s jaw tightened. “I hate going in blind.”

“I do, too, but you won’t be,” Kat replied. “We have the photos, the floor plan, and Isaiah’s drone will get eyes on the property and can do thermal sweeps. You’ll have plenty of info before you go in.”

I thought of Julius in some dark, dank basement with no food or water. Hell, not just Julius, but the boy from the club, and anyone else they’d grabbed. The thought turned my fear andanger into something clean and hard, something bigger. This was purpose. We had a plan. We had to use it. We would rescue these people. I would rescue Julius.

Axel’s voice came over the coms. “I’m on my way to the location. Gator, man, I’m so sorry. He was there, and then he wasn’t. I knew the back door was locked, so I assumed he was in the back doing something. It never occurred to me he wasn’t in there.”

I took a deep breath. I wanted to rail at him. I’d entrusted Julius to him. He was supposed to keep him safe. But logically, I knew that Axel hadn’t done anything wrong. None of us expected Julius to slip out the back door like that. I probably should’ve considered the possibility, but I didn’t, so I was just as responsible for this mess as Axel was, if not more.

“I know, Axel. What matters now is getting him back.”

“We will, Gator. We will,” he assured me.

Kat broke back in. “Isaiah got the tactical drone off the roof in under five minutes. ETA to the farmhouse is roughly six. The thermal images should let us know what we’re dealing with.”

“But just everything aboveground, nothing from the basement, right?” I asked.

“Right. If they’re underground in the basement, we won’t see much, but at least we’ll have a good idea where they are.”

“That’s where I would keep them if it was me,” Wolfe said. “Maybe I need to get me a house with a basement. You know, for assholes like these.”

“Sounds like a plan to me,” Crowe said. “They deserve to spend some time in a basement.”

I tuned out the comms after that as a few other guys chimed in, joking in the way soldiers joke to keep the fear from taking over. It was just what we did, but this time I had too much on the line to join them.

“Thermal’s coming in.” Kat’s voice cut through the pointless chatter.

“Great, what do we have?” I asked.

“Intermittent heat signatures inside the house… likely people moving around. It looks like three inside the house, of course remember we aren’t getting any readings from the basement. So if they have anyone down there, we won’t have eyes on them. We have two guards patrolling the perimeter. I’ll give you their location when you get there.”

“Axel, Maddox, you two will take the guards. We’ll go in the front,” Wolfe said.