Marina sighed. At one time this route had been burned into her brain. She’d had nightmares about it. It had been dark when she had stumbled through these streets in what was often considered a not-so-great neighborhood deep in the bowels of Baltimore. Now, though, it was bright, and there were few shadows lurking about the buildings.
She forced herself to peel back the layers of protection she’d been applying every moment since the night she’d regained her freedom. Her instincts tugged her south of the hospital’s emergency entrance. “This way.”
Marina felt the pavement beneath her feet. She didn’t use her vision. It was too unreliable in the stark light of day. Instead she saw in her mind’s eye the deep, dank shadows of the old buildings that towered over each side of the street. She heard the whisper of papers being blown down the street, and she smelled the fetid odor of the dumpsters stationed in each alley.
She took a right, following her gut, and then went left at the next block. Behind her she could sense Bones following. He didn’t say a word. Maybe he didn’t have to. It was enough to have him there with her. He kept the demons at bay. Her heart was hammering against her ribs, and she felt the needle-sharp teeth of terror nipping at her, but it did not overcome her. Not when she had this man at her back.
BONES HAD SEEN others sink deep into what might be called a cognitive recollection. Marina was not seeing the same things that he was. In the stark light of day the streets were derelict, but innocuous in their own way. There were more than a few parked cars, and several people moving with a purpose as they headed toward the next destination of their day.
“Whoa there, sweetheart.” He reached out and touched her shoulder to keep her from walking right out in front of a passing car.
She seemed disoriented, and didn’t open her eyes. He understood. She was trying to recall something that existed only in the pit of her gut. Open eyes would interfere with the memory process.
“All right.” Bones gave her a little nudge. “I’m right behind you, Marina.”
His gut clenched with each little whimper that slipped out from between her lips. He knew that the last time she had traversed this way she had been dirty and broken, with her spirit crushed and her life in tatters. She was not that woman anymore. She was stronger. But that didn’t make it any easier to go back into the flames.
She abruptly stopped walking and pointed. “There.”
Bones gazed in confusion at the building where she was pointing. Unfortunately it all made sense in a sick sort of way. This place had been on his radar ever since Romero and Yates had discovered the connection between the vaunted Inner Circle of this bullshit human trafficking ring and a company called Hansen Pharmaceuticals. That didn’t make it any easier to think that the company might be a front for many aspects of this operation, including the holding of women who were deemed useless by upper management.
“Open your eyes,” Bones murmured.
Marina immediately did as he suggested. Her gasp of horror was like a dagger in his side. “Oh my God.”
“That about covers it,” Bones agreed. “Did you have any idea that there was some kind of packaging operation going on in there?”
She pursed her lips for a moment. “There were noises, but it was such a constant hum that I stopped noticing it after a few hours.”
“Hum,” Bones grunted. “Like the hum of machinery in a factory, right?”
“Yeah.”
She took a step back, and Bones realized that she was looking for him. Whether conscious or unconscious, she was seeking the comfort of contact with him. He would be lying if he didn’t admit to himself that he received an equal amount of comfort from having her near. Of course, this only damned him a little farther down the road. Marina wasn’t his, and he would do well to remember that a little more often.
“I need to tell Romero about this.” Bones pulled out his phone and sent off a quick text to his friend. “They’ve been researching the full spectrum of Hansen’s involvement, but we never considered them as anything more than a company that provided the necessary chemicals for day to day operations.”
“The drugs,” Marina said with a nod. “I remember them talking about that. And I know what we were given was unusually strong.”
“Yeah, that weed has a real kick nobody would be expecting,” Bones agreed.
MARINA WAS AT a loss. She’d found it. At least, she was ninety-nine percent sure that she’d found the place where she had been held all those months. But now she didn’t know how to proceed. She had been anticipating a lot of things, but Hansen Pharmaceuticals wasn’t one of them.
“We can’t just waltz in there and demand they let the prisoners go,” Marina told Bones. “They’ll think we’re insane, right before they call security and have us escorted off the property.”
“Yeah,” Bones agreed. “It’s an interesting choice for a place to hold people.”
“How so?” Marina did not like the idea that the people who were running this thing were smart. She knew that they were, but since she was pretty sure they were all assholes, she just wanted them to be stupid assholes.
“Well.” He squatted down, and she quickly did the same. Then he gestured to the security guard who had meandered around the corner of the building. “There’s a good chance that nobody in that place has a clue what’s going on in back. Hell. I bet the dimensions inside that building don’t match the outside and nobody has even bothered to take note of it. If they notice anything at all, someone will probably have told them that it’s just storage.”
“So the fact that nobody has a clue is good?” Marina frowned. “Deniability, right?”
Bones shrugged. “The fewer people that actually know what’s happening, the fewer mouths can say something.”
“Bet you that guard would be horrified if he knew what he was actually guarding,” Marina said bitterly.
“I bet you’re right.” Bones gestured to the warehouse. “We’re going to have to wait for dark.”
“What?” Marina wanted to protest, and yet she knew he was probably right. ”What if there are women dying in there right now?”
“Sweetheart, we’re not going to do them any good if we go in there and make a big fuss. There’s a possibility that the people who do know what’s really in that storage area might just murder the evidence and dispose of it.” Bones gently touched her shoulder. “I understand how hard it must be to just sit here and do nothing, but we need to observe things for a while.”
“Ugh!” she groused. “I hate surveillance.”
He snorted, but didn’t say anything else. Marina settled down beside him to watch the building. She began counting in her head. When she reached sixty she sank down onto her butt and tried to stop fidgeting. Her muscles were already cramping and they’d been here less than two minutes. How did Bones do it? The man was motionless! It was like he’d turned into a statue of a totally hot guy squatting in the street.
BONES COULD FEEL her watching him. Her gaze was weighty, and he knew it matched the thoughts no doubt marching through her mind. Nonetheless, there was no way in hell he was letting her into that building before he was sure it wasn’t going to be full of people who were very likely paid good money to be ruthless in service to their employer.
“What happens after all of this is over?” Marina asked suddenly.
Bones glanced over at her. He wasn’t even certain what she meant. “You mean after the entire trafficking ring has been dismantled and the women are somehow accounted for?”
“Well, yes.” She made a face. “I suppose I hadn’t thought about all of the details.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being focused on what’s happening here and now,” he admitted. “Taking down this ring is the first priority. Those responsible need to be held accountable in some way. Either the money needs to dry up so it’s no longer lucrative to traffic in human commodities, or we need to destroy their supply chain and their network.”
“How hard is it going to be to find
these women, though?” Marina wondered out loud.
Bones hated to tell her the truth, but there was no point in lying. “Marina, right now the purpose is to prevent anyone else from being taken. The chances of actually finding all of the women aren’t good at all.”
She blew up her cheeks and then pushed the air through her lips. Tendrils of her hair fluttered around her face. “I think I knew that.”
“I’m sorry,” he told her. “About your friends.”
“It was all a shot in the dark anyway. I should just be glad of the opportunity to clear out this place.” She gestured to the building ahead of them. “But my original question still stands. What are you going to do after all of this is done?”
“Go back to work,” he murmured. “I’m still a SEAL. That doesn’t stop just because I took some time to help a friend find his missing sister.”
It was obvious that she hadn’t liked that answer. He could have predicted that from the start. His own rampant, selfish stupidity was coming back to haunt him. He should have told her from the beginning that this was temporary. Instead he had been so enamored of the idea of helping her that he hadn’t thought about what would happen once he had to leave again.
“Is that all you want in life?” she asked softly. “To be a SEAL?”
He shrugged. “It always has been.” Although, the more she said things like that, the more he wanted to give another answer.
“Don’t you want a family someday?”
Bones snorted. He couldn’t help it. “Men like me don’t have families, Marina. I started out alone and I’ll likely die that way, except for my brothers in arms.”
“That’s not fair,” she told him. The edge in her voice cut him deeply. “Just because you’re afraid of what it might mean to have a family doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try.”
Her words scalded him like acid. Standing abruptly, he shot her a dark look. “Stay here. I’m going to get closer and try to figure out how the building is laid out.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“No.” He put out his hand, palm out. “You’ll just slow me down.” It was harsh, but maybe he needed to be that way. If he showed her what he was really like, maybe she would stop trying to push him out of his comfort zone.
Chapter Eighteen
Bones slunk around the side of the building. He tried to focus on the task at hand, but his mind kept going back to the look on Marina’s face when he had told her that she would slow him down. Her expression had been utterly crushed for a moment or two before she had hid her feelings behind a mask of indifference. Still, he could tell that it was a mask. He had hurt her. And despite his resolve to be a cold-hearted bastard in order to keep her from getting attached, he felt bad about it.
“This is ridiculous,” he muttered.
He shook his head and focused. The building was large, and the loading docks were located conveniently in the center of the left side of the warehouse. That meant that the pharmaceutical operation could function entirely in the front of the space, and nobody would likely wonder what was in the back beyond the necessity of storage for an operation of this sort.
A semi-truck pulled up. The driver skillfully backed his trailer to the loading dock. A security guard appeared, and the giant doors slid up to allow access to the bay. Bones watched as pallet after pallet of product was loaded onto the truck with a forklift.
He fished in a pocket of his cargo pants for his tiny pair of field binoculars. He flipped them open and tried to decipher what might be on the pallets. He could make out the Hansen logo, but the rest of the units were wrapped in cellophane and impossible to identify. He needed to get closer. This might be one of the locations that specialized in the GHP and Rohypnol infusion that allowed the traffickers to render their victims insensible in the clubs after the women had passed out from the THC-rich marijuana.
Bones moved as quickly as he dared. He took cover behind a stack of discarded pallets. Leaning around the side, he realized that the security guard was staring right at his position. Had the man seen him move?
His heart hammered against his ribs, and he felt the rising adrenaline in his blood. His battle reflexes were beginning to take over. Taking deep breaths in and out, Bones asserted forceful control over his senses. This was not the time to succumb to PTSD symptoms that would render him helpless. Besides, he was not in a desert awaiting the sound of an air strike. There were no rebel battalions headed in his direction. He was just trying to see what kind of freaking drugs were getting loaded onto this truck.
MARINA WAS PISSED and could not decide whether she should be or not. How awful was it that she couldn’t even trust her own emotions? What was Bones’s problem, anyway? It was like the guy was actively trying to make her dislike him, after spending so much time making her like him in the first place. Who did that? And why?
She paced energetically back and forth in the mouth of an alley right around the corner from where Bones had disappeared. She knew that she should probably be cowering behind a dumpster somewhere or watching the boring facade of the pharmaceutical operation, but she was tired of waiting for things to happen. She wanted to go into the building. She wanted to find where they held the women, and she wanted to free anyone who might be left inside that place.
Suddenly she heard something different—out of place. She spun around and ran back to the place where Bones had been squatting during his observation of the warehouse. She knelt on the ground and tried to see what was happening. Maybe someone else was trying to escape! Maybe they needed her help.
There was a truck parked by the loading docks. That was new. She’d totally missed that arrival. Marina frowned. Then a pallet came flying out from behind the truck. It bounced off the brick wall and splintered in half.
Marina gasped and threw her hands over her mouth to keep herself from squeaking in shock. What was going on?
Without even considering the possibility of danger, she bolted toward the truck. Bones had to be back there somewhere. And if there were pallets flying, there was a good chance that he needed some help!
She sprinted toward the left side of the building. Darting behind a dumpster, and then hiding briefly behind the corner of a neighboring building, Marina tried to see what she was stumbling into. Unfortunately the truck was completely blocking her view. Then she heard a grunt and several shouts. There were men fighting back there!
Giving up the pretense of safety, Marina ran for the back of the truck. She used the long trailer for cover as she ran. Ducking down, she could see camouflage-clad legs jumping and lunging on the other side of the truck. Then she burst out into the open and gave a soft gasp of shock.
Bones was engaged with four men in security uniforms. He was beating the crap out of them—all at the same time.
Marina felt her mouth pop open in shock as she watched him pummel one man, catch a second guy beneath his arm, and then bash the two men’s heads together. A third guy rushed the SEAL, and Bones spun effortlessly to let his opponent fly on by. Then Bones gave the guy a kick in the pants to increase his momentum, and the opponent smashed face-first into the loading dock.
Guy number four seemed to be a little more cautious. He kept reaching for something, and Marina realized that there were handguns scattered all over the place. Bones must have disposed of them right when the fight started. Guy number four was trying to swipe one, which would have given him a distinct advantage over the unarmed Bones.
Marina set her jaw and forced herself to be brave. She was going to help Bones, even if it meant putting herself in the line of fire.
BONES HAD ONE eye on the three men on the ground, and the other on the fourth security guard. Number four wasn’t as bold or stupid as his compatriots. Plus he was trying to edge his way around in order to grab one of the guns Bones had already taken from the guards. Bones could not let that happen. It would irrevocably sway the odds.
Then, movement in his peripheral vision drew his attention forcefully away from his opponent.
Marina had somehow entered the fray. He couldn’t decide what she was doing until he saw that one of the guns he’d flung away from its owner had managed to slide beneath the semi-trailer.
It was like watching a disaster happen in slow motion. Marina lunged for the weapon at precisely the same moment the fourth security guard made his move. Bones moved to intercept, but he was too far away. Marina and the guard both got their hands around the semiautomatic gun laying ominously half beneath the giant tire of the eighteen-wheeler.
“Back off!” Marina snarled.
She squirmed sideways, half rolling to get her legs within striking distance. The guard didn’t speak. He was too busy trying to muscle the weapon away from her. Bones cringed as the weapon went off. His heart stopped for a moment, until he heard the telltale pop of a tire and realized that the semi had been the one to take the hit.
Marina twisted and planted her boot solidly in the guard’s midsection. “I said let go!”
Bones picked up one of the other guns and pulled the slide to chamber a bullet, but he was helpless to do anything. Marina and the guard were too entwined on the ground for Bones to get a clear line of sight. With the trailer in the way and the tires blocking any hope of a shot, he was helpless.
“Marina, move!” Bones shouted. “I’ve got a weapon!”
To her credit, she responded immediately. She let go of the weapon and attempted to roll out from under the trailer. Then Bones realized his mistake. He was horrified to see the guard wrap one hand around the butt of the gun and use the other to snatch at Marina’s long black braid. She squirmed valiantly, but the guard managed to get three wraps around the wide part of his hand, and there was no way she was getting out of that without ripping her hair out by the roots.
“Now,” the guard panted. “Drop your weapon, or I’m going to blow her brains out.”
MARINA COULD BARELY see Bones’s face from her position on the ground. The trailer was in the way, and the guard had her head cranked back so hard that she was afraid he was going to break her neck. She froze for a moment and wondered if this was going to be the end. Surely Bones wouldn’t just drop his gun and surrender? That would be madness!
SEAL INVESTIGATIONS: A 5-Books SEAL Romance Series Page 42
