Page 31 of Radar (Iniquus Certified Cerberus Tactical K9 #2)

Xander

Sunday

Lumberjack, Alaska

Xander called Radar, and Radar bounded over, spun on a dime, and stood at attention by Xander’s side.

The shithead didn’t move to get up, but lay face down in the snow, sobbing. There was blood on his sleeve that told Xander that the guy thought he could get away from Radar.

The men, eating their breakfasts in the lodge, had at least taken time to grab their coats and hats before they ran outside.

Standing on one foot then the other, like the characters in that World War II movie he’d seen on the way to Bratislava, Xander staved off frostbite for the quick moment he needed to tell the men that the snowmobiler had tried to kidnap the woman.

As he signaled Radar and headed back to his room, the area men grabbed the guy up and took him back inside to call the police.

As far away from civilization as they were here in Lumberjack, that would be a while.

In his room, Xander first checked on Radar to make sure he wasn’t injured in the takedown.

Radar, the miracle dog.

Xander didn’t watch Elyssa walk away. His emotions were getting the best of him.

But moments after Elyssa walked out the door. Radar jumped onto the desk in front of the window, growling his warning.

Xander moved up to see what Radar had focused on. There was Elyssa, standing like a statue to stay out of the snowmobile’s path. But the driver reached out and grabbed her wrist.

Radar through his body at the door to get out.

Xander was right behind him grabbing at the handle and dragging it wide.

Radar dashed out into the snow.

Elyssa did some crazy move, and the guy came sailing off as his machine continued forward. But as the asswipe fell, he wasn’t done with Elyssa and kept her wrist in his grip.

It happened so fast.

So damned fast.

Blink of the eye.

Xander was racing forward, but Radar was a fur missile.

And now that the attack was over and Elyssa was heading toward civilization, Xander was on the floor of his cottage room, his whole body wrapping Radar in a hug. “Thank you. God, thank you.”

Xander’s shaking was part adrenaline, part hypothermia.

He climbed to his feet to do jumping jacks and warm his system.

As soon as he thought his temperature crisis had passed, Xander snatched up his clothes and dressed, then picked up his phone.

He was shaking too hard to send a text – still part cold, but now also part fury at what might have happened to Elyssa.

He slid the phone into his pocket to wait for equilibrium to return.

Someone tried to take her from him.

Could it have been the guy she’d called Gaston—the one with the hurt ego from last night?

It had to be local. It was the only thing that made any sense.

Xander needed to get on the road. He planned to catch up with Elyssa’s car and shadow it, make sure she was safe to fly. He was worried about her heart.

Hell, he was a little worried about his own heart.

Seeing Elyssa in danger turned him into pure power.

He was glad that Radar had managed the guy because if he had put his hands on him, Xander wasn’t sure he could maintain his control.

Xander couldn’t save mankind from the Zorics machine if he were in a jail cell locked away for murder.

And jail would be a hell of a bad way to ride out the Apocalypse.

With a quick scan of his room, Xander shoved everything into his pack and was reaching for the door handle when a woman’s screams splintered the frozen air.

Primed by the attempted kidnapping, the entire lodge heaved out of their doors along with Xander and Radar.

The lodge staffer ran out of Eddie’s room and stood on the walkway, looking around wide-eyed. Blood was all over the sheet she held in her hand.

Xander edged up until he could see into the room. It was Eddie’s room. The sweater he’d worn the night before in the lodge lay on the floor.

Something violent had gone down. The blood on the sheet in the woman’s hand was dry. Xander would say the event happened minimally an hour before.

“Put the sheet down. Step out of the room.” Xander said with calm authority that he wasn’t feeling. “This is a crime scene.”

Xander remembered the drunk at Elyssa’s room at 4:30.

He stepped past Orest’s room to Paca’s. There, he saw the door wasn’t pulled all the way shut.

Tapping the door open with his elbow, the scene here, too, looked like there had been a fight.

A spurt of blood on the wall had trickled down and had dried to a deep brown.

Xander thought it looked like someone got punched in the nose.

On the ground at Xander’s feet, blood droplets rounded the corner.

“Here too. Blood in the snow. Everyone, back away. Stay away. This is a crime scene.” Xander pulled out his phone and recorded a video with footage of the room and the bloody trail, then stepped away to avoid contaminating the scene. He sent the footage to Finley, then dialed his number.

Finley answered with a groggy, “What?”

“Hey, man, sorry to wake you.” He looked at his watch; it was after ten on the East Coast. Finley must have been burning the midnight oil.

“We need an FBI team here in Lumberjack, Alaska, to investigate. And we need it now.” Running through the sequence of events from the guy at Elyssa’s door in the middle of the night up until that moment, Xander walked to the lodge, placed the key card on the desk, then headed toward his rental car.

“It snowed last night,” Xander said. “In the fresh snow, you can see in the film that someone was dragged from Paca’s room. I’m assuming Paca.”

“Wait. Who’s Paca?”

“Nickname for the squirrel researcher, Claude Burns.” Xander spread his fingers across the screen to enlarge the image.

Running the video through, he paused at the end.

“Yup. In the video, I can see two sets of footprints, one on either side of the dragged feet. When that trail stops, there are snowmobile tracks over the berm and into the woods.” He stopped and looked back at the room, then up to the sky.

“Heading northwest. I didn’t follow it out.

I don’t want to mess up the crime scene.

And I’m not credentialed to interfere in a crime investigation. ”

With this new information, the chance that the attack on Elyssa was a local crime was down to zero.

But the why of it was beyond Xander.

Beeping the fob, Xander looked down at Radar, who had been pressed to his thigh, ready for the command the whole time. “Time to get going, buddy.” They needed to leave before anyone with a badge detained him as a witness.

He needed to be with Elyssa.

If Xander thwarted the guy last night, and Elyssa saved herself again this morning, could they have someone going after her a third time?

Xander jumped Radar into the car, then climbed in behind him, sliding under the wheel.

While the engine was warming, he sent a text to Elyssa.

Xander: It’s Xander. Checking on you. The luggage tracker I threw into the car tells me the car is heading in the right direction. Is that right? Are you physically safe? Are you emotionally okay? That was a hell of a departure. I’m in the car heading back to the city. I’d appreciate a call.

He expected her to take the time to read it, then she’d reach out to him with an update immediately.

But she didn’t.

Did she even give him the correct contact?

Xander called Finley to run a check on the number.

While he waited for the information, Xander had the pedal down. But everything that had happened at the Lumberjack lodge had taken too much time. He’d never catch her.

The tracker was on the right road and nearly to the airport.

Xander didn’t, in fact, know if Elyssa was in the car with the tracker. Someone could have gotten hold of her, and it was only the tracker that headed in the right direction.

Until Xander got eyes on, he wouldn’t trust that Elyssa was safe.

He was flying down the highway when Finley called back. Xander tapped the call on speaker.

“Finley here. She gave you the right number.”

“Did she do an advance check-in with her flight?”

“Affirmative. I know you’re in the thick of it. I called our team, and they know everything you said to me.”

“Good,” Xander replied. “I’ll call in when I have an update. Out.”

Such a shitty twist.

There had been a connection between them. It was sublime. And then the revelation.

If the world didn’t implode and Elyssa wasn’t part of that effort, he hoped …

This wasn’t the time for hope.

It was such a mindbender to think that something was actively brewing and ready to explode, a seismic shift that would shake the world into a new configuration.

Until it happened, it was all academic, all theory, all potential.

Xander’s brain wanted him to think that he would wake up tomorrow, and the month after, and a year from now in the world as he knew it today.

That he could live in a world where he met the woman who sparked his excitement, and they could learn about each other and grow their relationship with an eye toward the future.

Last night, when Elyssa was in his arms, he thought this was the first time that he’d been with a woman who wasn’t just looking for a conversation and a stress-relieving roll in the sheets.

By design, he reminded himself.

Elyssa was the kind of woman who made him think about last calls, about hoping for ways to make things easier for her.

He found himself thinking about how much he wanted the call where her car had broken down, and she needed him.

He’d roar into the parking lot like some kind of suburban knight on a black steed.

The box was too heavy, and she needed him.

She had a bad day and needed him.

This was what that felt like.

It was a power that radiated from his core.

It always seemed cockamamie when he heard people on deployment lament that they weren’t home to be the sword and the shield for their family. But he got it now.

For the first time, on an intimate level, Xander wanted someone to turn to him to ease their life. And their relief would be the reward.

How much did it suck that she was from the enemy camp?

Xander would take the blows from Bratislavan street thugs over these feelings any day.

Elyssa haunted him the entire ride.

What the hell had he done?

What in the hell had he done?