by Paige Tyler
“I know what you’re going to say, and I’d rather not get into it.” He threw a quick glance at the bullpen area. “Not here.”
“That’s cool,” Brooks said. “But we are going to talk about this. Soon.”
Zane nodded and started for the exit again. “And don’t worry about me slipping up and revealing how close the hunters came to killing me. I’ll do whatever is necessary to make Oliver think their poison had no effect on me at all.”
Brooks didn’t doubt it. But was meeting with him worth the risk?
“You think we’ll get anything useful out of Oliver?” he asked. “I mean, it’s not like we can get this guy a reduced sentence. They’re looking at him for six murders already in addition to what he did in Dallas. Even if he does talk, anything he tells us about the hunters will likely be a lie. Especially if he is still in contact with them.”
“I know, but there’s always a chance we can trip him up and get him to reveal something critical without him even realizing it.” Zane looked at Brooks. “As long as we play along and let him assume we’re nothing more than dumb animals.”
That might work. Zane knew how to work people. It’s what made him a good negotiator. Besides, right now, he needed something to make him feel like he was still a useful member of the Pack.
As Zane shoved open the door leading out to the parking lot, Brooks picked up a strange but familiar scent. He glanced down to see a slinky black cat stroll into the building like she owned the place. Tail high in the air, she disappeared into the bullpen, then came back into the main part of the building and jumped onto the couch, where she promptly made herself comfortable.
Gage suddenly appeared in the doorway of the bullpen, a confused look on his face as he gazed at the animal. After a moment, he looked at Brooks and Zane. “That is a cat, right?”
“That’s a cat,” Brooks confirmed.
Gage studied the cat for a bit, then shook his head and walked back into the bullpen. On the couch, the cat regarded Brooks and Zane with big, green eyes. She might look like a regular kitty, but she didn’t smell like any cat he’d ever sniffed before. Fortunately, Connor, Trey, and Remy chose that moment to walk in the door Zane held open, giving Brooks something else to focus on instead of the cat.
While Connor and Remy stopped, Trey mumbled something about needing to do paperwork, glanced once at Zane, then strode away.
Brooks bit back a curse. As a medic, Trey was trained not only on how to save people but werewolves too. Unfortunately, there’d been no training to prepare him for what happened when that hunter’s bullet had hit Zane. It had been the most horrible thing Brooks had ever witnessed. Zane had writhed and screamed in pain, begging Trey to cut off his arm as the flesh rotted right before their eyes. Trey’d had two choices. Wait and see if Zane’s werewolf healing powers stopped the poison from spreading before it killed him, or cut out the infected muscles.
Trey had done what he’d had to do, but that decision had come with a hefty price.
Even though Zane had never said it, Brooks knew there was a part of him that blamed Trey for crippling him. Worse, Trey blamed himself. As a result, Zane and Trey didn’t talk to each other these days. Brooks wished he could say something to change that, but he couldn’t think of a single damn thing to say.
Instead, he looked at Connor. “You brought the cat back here with you?”
“I wouldn’t really say I brought her back here.” Connor shrugged. “She jumped in the SUV of her own accord before we left the warehouse and refused to get out.”
“Jumped?” Brooks lifted a brow. “And you couldn’t…I don’t know…shoo her out?”
Connor shrugged. “Why would I do that, since she obviously wanted to go with us? She probably figured we were going to a nicer neighborhood than that area around the warehouse. She isn’t wrong.”
Brooks was still working his way through that logic when he realized exactly what Connor had said. “Wait a second. Are you saying that you left a cat inside your vehicle the whole time we were at Terrace Grove?”
Connor didn’t even have the sense to look chagrined. “Well, yeah, I let her stay in the vehicle. It’s not like I was going to toss her out to roam around the school. She could have gotten hurt. I left the windows down, and she sat on the center console and watched us work.”
Brooks opened his mouth, then closed it again, speechless.
“And on that note, I’m out of here,” Remy said, mouth twitching as he made a beeline for the bullpen.
“We need to get moving,” Zane murmured, his tone reminding Brooks there was something more important than Connor’s sudden feline infatuation.
Brooks started to follow Zane out the door, but then a thought struck him. Of a particular pit bull mix walking into the place and finding a cat in her compound. “Have you even thought about the fact that we already have a Pack mascot? And that Tuffie and the cat might not get along?”
Connor glanced at the cat, who meowed at him. “They’ll get along fine. You worry too much.”
Brooks shook his head. “Right. Because it’s not like dogs and cats have ever not gotten along.”
As he and Zane crossed the parking lot, a brown four-door sedan pulled through the front gate and slipped into one of the reserved visitor spaces in front of the admin building. A moment later, Chief of Police Randy Curtis stepped out of the unmarked patrol car. As he approached them, Curtis’, gaze swept over Brooks, Zane, and everything else within view as if nothing quite measured up, including them. Brooks didn’t take it personally. Curtis disliked anyone and anything that had even the slightest chance of derailing his political ambitions.
“Corporal Kendrick. Corporal Brooks,” Curtis said, extending his hand.
Brooks didn’t have any choice but to shake it, though he felt greasy as hell afterward. Curtis may have been a cop before he came to Dallas to take over as chief, but since then, he’d turned into a politician. It was tough to like a man when you knew he viewed everything through the lens of what it meant for his own career.
“I heard you and your team did real good at that school shooting today,” Curtis said. “But I also heard that our gangbanger was a student there. Is this going to come back as a clean shoot?”
Brooks bit his tongue so he wouldn’t say anything he regretted. Curtis didn’t care in the slightest whether the students, teachers, and even officers on the scene were okay. Hell, he didn’t even care how badly the suspect had been injured. All he wanted to know was if anything negative was going to come back on him. That made sense, since Curtis made no secret of the fact that he was looking to make a run for mayor. The worst part was that most of the good press the man had gotten lately was because SWAT had taken down a lot of bad guys. Between organized crime figures, psycho killers, major drug dealers, and a corrupt councilman, SWAT had made a large dent in the Dallas crime statistics, and Curtis was taking credit for all of it. If he got elected mayor, it would probably be because of SWAT.
That was a horrible thought.
“There’s video and audio of the entire operation from start to finish.” Brooks glanced at Zane. “Officer Kendrick was the on-scene negotiator who tried to talk the suspect into giving himself up, but when the teen took a shot at one of the other students in the classroom, we had to go in. Officer Martinez entered through a window and tried to get him to drop the gun but was forced to take the shot when the suspect turned his weapon on the teacher.”
Curtis’s gray eyes narrowed the moment Brooks said the word video , and his interest only increased when Brooks added details. When the chief turned his attention to Zane, Brooks could practically see the gears turning in the man’s head. “You’re the officer who was injured last month at the medical clinic, right?” When Zane gave him a reluctant nod, he continued. “Injured in the line of duty and already back out on the street trying to convince a gangbanger to give himself up. That’s good. Really good.”
Brooks didn’t think anything about the situation was really good. N
either did Zane. But they kept their opinions to themselves. It was obvious Curtis only cared about how the shooting would play out with the media.
“Where is Officer Martinez?” Curtis asked. “I’d like to get his perspective on the shooting. Maybe get him in front of the cameras at the press conference.”
“You’ll need to get in line, sir,” Zane said. “Detective Coletti from Internal Affairs is currently with him. Following normal DPD procedure, he’ll likely be placed on desk duty until the investigation is complete. He won’t be able to make any public statements during that time.”
While Brooks and the other guys hadn’t fired their weapons at the high school, they had at the warehouse, so Vince Coletti had talked to them as well. While the IA detective definitely still took his investigations seriously, he wasn’t nearly the asshole about it that he had been before falling for a beta werewolf who’d recently moved into the area.
“Of course. IA has their job to do,” Curtis said. “Where are the two of you headed? It would look good to have you both with me at the press conference I’m holding later.”
Brooks bit back a growl. Like hell they would be there. “We’d really like to, but we’re on our way to Coffield Unit. The suspect from the shooting at the medical center asked to talk to us. We’re hoping he might tell us who he was working with.”
Brooks expected Curtis to ask why SWAT would interrogate a murder suspect, since they didn’t normally investigate cases. But the man didn’t even blink an eye. “I understand. I believe there were several SWAT officers at the scene, so I’m sure Sergeant Dixon has someone he can give me for the press conference.”
Brooks sure as hell wasn’t going to volunteer anyone, even though he probably should have thrown Connor under the bus for bringing the cat back here. But he’d never do anything like that. None of his packmates liked being in front of a camera.
“Good luck down at the prison,” Curtis said. Giving them a nod, he headed toward the admin building.
Zane climbed behind the wheel of the SUV before Brooks could offer to drive. They hadn’t gone more than a mile before Zane looked his way with a quizzical expression.
“What’s the story behind you and the teacher you rescued?”
Brooks frowned. “What do you mean?”
Zane shrugged. “You seemed cross you couldn’t go see her.”
“Nah, man. I saved her life and just wanted to make sure she was okay.”
“Right.” Zane glanced at him. “So that’s not why you almost growled at Curtis just now? Or why you’ve been acting distracted as hell ever since the shooting? Or why you didn’t want to go down to Coffield with me?”
Brooks opened his mouth to say Zane was way off the mark but then snapped it closed again. He hated lying to a friend, especially when that friend was right. Selena had gotten into his head—fast.
“It’s complicated,” he said.
Zane chuckled. “She’s a woman. That makes the situation complicated by definition. The real question is, what are you going to do about it?”
Brooks stared out the window at the mile markers slipping by. “I have no idea.”
Chapter 4
“You probably shouldn’t go in there, ma’am.” The young police officer standing outside the doorway of her classroom gave her an apologetic look. “It’s bad.”
Selena glanced at the officer’s name tag. “I only want to go in and grab my purse out of my desk, Officer Webber. And I really should clean up, since tomorrow is a school day.”
The blond-haired cop shook his head. “Ma’am, I don’t think you’ll be having any classes in that room for a while. Like I said, it’s a mess in there.”
Selena found that difficult to believe. She vaguely remembered there had been some broken glass from the windows and that some of the combination chair/desks had been pushed all over the classroom, but hopefully the young officer was exaggerating the extent of the damage, and she’d be able to clean up the place quickly. It had been a long day, and she was exhausted beyond belief. She definitely needed to get some sleep before facing the kids tomorrow. And today was only Monday. She’d be ready to drop by the end of the week.
She put on her best teacher face—the one she used when her kids got unruly—until the cop finally relented and moved aside. “Okay, I’ll let you in there, but only so you can grab your purse and look around. This is still technically a crime scene, even if the CSIs are already done with it. Just be careful, okay? I don’t want you to get hurt.”
Selena didn’t think that was a possibility until she noticed that the door was completely gone. There was nothing left but a broken frame and some twisted hinges. She hesitated a moment, wondering if Officer Webber was right. But then she took a deep breath and forced herself to keep moving. There was no amount of damage a little hard work couldn’t fix.
But when she stepped into the classroom, she stopped cold. Crap. It was even worse than the officer had suggested.
Broken desks were everywhere, chunks of the fake wood tops strewn about. There were bullet holes in the walls, and the entire row of windows along the outer wall of the classroom had been shattered. Glass shards spread from one side of the room to the other. The nice wood blinds that she’d paid for with her own money were smashed and hanging in pieces from their rods. The breeze blowing into the room made what was left of them sway and clatter against the frames, sounding nearly as desolate as Selena suddenly felt.
Even the little Christmas tree she’d put up in the front of the room near the corner looked saddened by what it had witnessed today.
Moving farther in, she saw what could only be pieces of the door lying halfway across the room. She couldn’t even begin to understand how they’d gotten there.
But worse than any of the broken glass and furniture was the blood. So much blood.
She expected to find it where Pablo had been shot. But the largest spatters of the reddish-brown stuff were in the middle of the floor, where she’d been tackled by that big cop. She frowned, trying to understand where the blood there had come from.
She replayed what had happened in her head, distinctly remembering Pablo pointing the gun at her, recalling how angry she’d been with him. After that, the windows had come crashing in, then the cop had tackled her to the floor. Even now, Selena could almost feel his muscled body shielding her as the sound of booming gunshots filled the air.
Had Pablo moved closer to them after he’d gotten shot? It didn’t seem possible.
She closed her eyes and forced herself to replay the scene again, even though it made her heart thump harder. She almost snarled as she realized how close Pablo—another kid ruined by the gangs in this city—had come to killing her and Ruben.
But no matter how many times the events flashed through her head, no matter how hard she dug for something she might have missed, Selena couldn’t come up with an explanation for how all that blood had gotten from where Pablo had been shot to the place she and the cop had been lying. How it had gotten on her was even more of a mystery. The only thing that could have possibly explained it was if one of the cops had been hit.
More precisely, one particular cop.
“Was the officer who saved me injured in the shooting?” she asked, turning to look at Officer Webber.
He stood a few feet away, looking around at all the destruction like he was as stunned as she was. “You mean Senior Corporal Brooks from SWAT?”
“Is he the big, good-looking black guy with all the muscles?” she asked.
Webber laughed. “I can’t really speak to the good-looking part, but yeah, that’s him. It’s kind of hard to miss those muscles. He’s a really big man. But as far as him being injured, I don’t think he got a scratch on him during the shooting.”
That didn’t make sense. There had been blood all over the both of them, and there didn’t seem to be any way it had come from Pablo. And it sure as hell hadn’t come from her. “Were you here during the shooting? Did you see him after I was taken away in
the ambulance?”
The cop shook his head. “No. I got here about ten minutes after everything went down. But I saw Corporal Brooks several times after that and talked to him before he left. There were definitely blood stains on his uniform, but there’s no way it was his.”
Selena sighed. Was she ever going to figure out what had happened in this room?
“Do you happen know where his office is located?” she asked the cop.
It was nearly impossible to live in this town and not have heard about the team of elite police officers in SWAT, but while she’d seen a few video clips of their exploits, she’d never had an opportunity to meet one in person.
“They have a training compound on the southeast side of town off Highway 175,” Webber said. “You can get the exact address online if you need it, though.”
Selena nodded, already pretty sure she knew where it was. She thought she’d seen a sign out that way the last time she’d driven to Athens to see some friends.
She was about to ask Webber what Brooks was like and what other cops thought about him and whether he was married, but the young officer held up a hand as a string of chatter came over his radio. She had no idea what all the codes and cop speak meant, but Webber obviously did.
“I gotta go,” he said. “They need me out front. You can grab your purse, but don’t try to clean up, okay? This is still a crime scene.”
Then he was gone, leaving her in the middle of the mess that was her classroom. He didn’t need to remind her it was a crime scene. That much was obvious.
Selena was digging her purse out of the big desk positioned in the front of the room when she heard the crunch of shoes on glass. She looked up, expecting to see Webber, and was surprised to see the principal and vice principal, relief on their faces.
“Selena,” Eva said, coming over to wrap her in a warm hug. “I tried to get the hospital to tell us if you were okay, but they wouldn’t release any details. I feared the worst.”
