Page 82 of Bite the Bullet

“Yet, you don’t touch the stuff now,” he surmised. “A junkie always goes back for more. Especially one that shot a cop.”

The sadistic look in his eyes showed me everything I needed to know. He wasn’t after the truth about Rico. One thing always won out with this man above all else, and that was blood. It wouldn’t have mattered if I’d told Baz about Rico’s new job. It was me he really wanted to know about.

“I’m done with the lies,” he spat. “I’ve waited through over a year of prison, hoping Rico wouldn’t fail me, that he would get something out of you. Do you think I’m stupid enough to believe that the profile you put together would stand up against my best investigators? Jack McClain, who was arrested multiple times and spent years in prison over the last ten years. Yet, when my men looked into your prison stays, not a single person could recall who you were. Not a guard, a warden, or any of the inmates. It’s almost like you were only there on paper.”

My cover was blown, and pretending to be trapped in this chair was no longer to my advantage. I wiggled my wrist, moving the connection of the zip tie to the edge of the arm of the chair, then yanked hard, snapping the plastic. Baz rushed me, expecting to be able to subdue me. My hand shot out, hitting him hard in the neck with thelength of my hand. He stumbled back, gagging as he held his hand over his throat.

It gave me just enough time to snap the plastic around my other wrist, but my legs were still latched to the chair. The door burst open and his men came charging in, guns drawn as they ran toward me. It was only Baz’s raised hand that stopped them firing at me. With no time to spare, I grabbed onto the chair, holding it to me as I jumped, throwing myself to the ground and snapping the leg off the chair. The wood from the arm dug into my side as I landed, cracking at least one of my ribs.

Ignoring the pain, I jumped to my feet, still attached by one leg to the chair. The leg of the chair was still attached to my other leg, clinging to it with the zip tie. I gave a hard tug, releasing it from the confines, then swung hard at the first man charging. Blood spurted at me, spraying across my face as I slammed it into his mouth. I spun and attacked the second man, almost knocking him out when I was tackled from behind. With limited mobility, I couldn’t get the upper hand.

No matter how hard I fought back, I couldn’t get away from them, and as more men poured into the room, I knew it was a lost cause. The wood was yanked from my hand as someone stepped on my wrist. I was being held down by five men, all of them using their entire body weight to contain me.

Baz’s shoes clicked on the concrete and he walked over to me, loosening the tie from around his neck. “We could have had a good working relationship. But I don’t deal with traitors.”

The last thing I saw was his designer shoe inches from my face.

21

JOHNNY

“Something’s not right,”I said, staring at the screen. “Why the fuck hasn’t he come home?”

“He went on a run,” Rae said, placing an apple between her teeth as she ran a search of cameras in the area.

“Yeah, but he’s been gone for hours.”

“We just got into town,” Jason said, trying to reason with me. But even I knew he was worried about Jack’s sudden disappearance. He was trying to come up with a reason we shouldn’t be calling in every fucking person at OPS to get Jack out. “It’s entirely possible that there’s something he’s doing that is completely normal, and we just don’t know about it yet.”

“Like what?” I asked. “Unless you mean that he’s out getting more heroin.”

“He’s clean,” Rae snapped. “You have to trust him on that.”

“It’s not him I don’t trust,” I said, shoving away from the table. “Who goes out on a run and doesn’t return for hours?”

Neither of them said anything. There was always that point in a case where the team started to worry about the man who was undercover, in too deep for anyone to truly help him out. We were about tensteps past that point. Hell, the moment he shot that cop, I knew this job was going to kill Jack. I hated being powerless to stop it.

“Maybe the neighbor knows something,” Rae suggested.

“She’s a nurse. She wasn’t even home this morning.”

“No, but that doesn’t mean she’s not involved in some way.”

I wasn’t sure what to believe. Everyone here was a new player, ones that we had to vet to fully understand the scope of what was going on. That would take time that we didn’t have.

“Rae, bring up the footage from the house at the end of the street.”

She sat down, tucking her foot under her ass as she brought up all the feed. Speeding through it over the last twelve hours, it was clear something was going on there, but without more intel, we were flying blind.

“They left, but there’s nothing to indicate where they’ve gone.”

“What about traffic cams?” I asked. “There has to be something on that license plate.”

Her fingers flew across the keyboard again, moving faster with every new lead she found. “The vehicle made eleven stops in the last few hours,” she said, pulling up a map. The stops were each shown by a red dot at each location.

“This will take hours to comb through,” I said, getting frustrated.

“What’s at each address?” Jason asked.