“Some of them,” he said. “Well, most of them probably.”
“We’ll need a list of those names,” he said, “because, if nothing else, families are out there, looking for their loved ones.”
“Won’t even be anything left,” he said. “Those dogs are so damn vicious.”
“And, of course, they are more vicious because he keeps them half-starved.”
“That’s the only saving grace,” the gunman said quietly. “At least for the people still alive when they go in. They die quickly.”
“Well, the dogs will have to be put down. You know that.”
“I do,” he said, “and I, for one, would like to see it. I know that they didn’t deserve it and all that jazz,” he said, “but they’re too far gone now.”
“Good to know,” Ansel said, as he looked at Caleb.
“There still could be a chance to save the dogs,” Caleb said.
“You know what happens when you are after killer dogs.”
He nodded. “I know. It just breaks my heart because it wasn’t their fault.”
“It isn’t, but it is,” the gunman said. “God, I’m so tired of this life. Good to know it will be over soon.”
“Well, you could also do something right for a change, before it’s over,” the detective said.
He looked at him, smiled, and said, “If it takes down that asshole, fine, but I’m telling you that I won’t live until tomorrow. So anything you want to know, you need to know tonight.”
Chapter 15
Laysha watched as the detective marched the intruder outside onto the porch, where she stood with the other dogs. Graynor walked over, put his heavily grayed muzzle into her palm. She gently stroked his face and whispered, “Thank you, boy.”
His tail wagged, as he sat beside her, the other dogs milling around. They didn’t have the same guard-dog instinct that he did. They were family pets. They would bark if there was something to bark at, but they wouldn’t see it ahead of time. At least the guy from her horrible being-followed incident earlier today was now safely caught. At that, she looked up to see Caleb make his way slowly down the stairs. She winced as she saw how stiff he was. “Too bad I don’t have a hot tub,” she murmured, as he came close, wrapped an arm around her shoulders. He dropped a kiss on her forehead.
“I have to admit that sounds about right for tonight,” he said. He watched with her as the intruder was loaded into Ansel’s vehicle.
“Is he connected to the one who abused Beowulf?”
“Not only connected but he’s also the one who shot the guy at the rental house.”
She looked up at him in surprise. “Seriously? He admitted that?”
“More or less. He said it was his cousin, and he didn’t have a whole lot of choice, according to him.”
“Well, it depends,” she said. “Sometimes you just get in so deep that there’s no way out.”
“And that’s partly what this was. Apparently that Huevo guy has kept a grip on this area for a long time, making them do things that nobody was comfortable doing.”
“I can believe it.”
“So can I,” he said. “I saw it with my own eyes today.”
“That just makes it way worse,” she said. “I’m sorry you had to see it.” Gently she wrapped her arms around him and held him carefully. She knew how sore he had to be after that long run. They had only spoken about his injuries once and not so much about his recovery, but she knew that he had both because she’d seen the scars when he took off his shirt at night before sleeping.
And she’d seen the soreness as he tried to move sometimes and didn’t quite make it the way he thought he would. Anything that hurt him hurt her. To think about all the suffering he’d already gone through choked her up. And knowing those risks just made it that much harder to let him go off and do whatever he felt he needed to do. But she also knew that to hold the warrior back, like Graynor, she couldn’t do that to them. They would feel their lives had no use or no value anymore. She sighed as she watched Ansel and her intruder go. “It’s not over though, is it?” she asked Caleb.
“No, not until we get this Huevo guy,” he murmured. “There’s likely to be an even stronger backlash.”
She stiffened at that.
He nodded. “So now I have to consider our plans carefully.”
“But will they know where my intruder is, or that he was here?”
“It depends on how rogue this guy is and how well he hid his tracks to make the boss think everything was okay.”
“If he was still a trusted employee, maybe Huevo wouldn’t watch him as closely?”
“Maybe, but in a case like that, some other guys are always out there, eager to help pull down the others.”
“Tattletales?”
“Possibly, and, once the news of the body in the house broke out on the media, it’s hard to say just what the boss is feeling like.”
Ansel walked back toward them and said, “If you guys have a place to go to for a few days, it would be a good idea,” he said. “We’ll organize a raid on that compound and take them down,” he said, “but it’ll take a couple days to set it up. The property lines cross the border giving us some leeway here. And no doubt it needs doing.”
“I’d like to be in on that,” Caleb said.
Immediately Ansel shook his head. “Can’t do that. I understand the sentiment, but you’re not part of the team.”
“Well, you could make me one,” he said in a mild tone.
“No, not without training.”
“I’ve probably had more training than all the guys on your team put together,” he said. Ansel looked at him in surprise; Caleb shrugged and gave a little bit of his US Navy SEAL private black-ops history, and he saw Ansel slowly nodding.
“It’s not my decision,” he said. “It’ll have more to do with what the captain sees fit. You’re still a civilian in his books.”
“Yeah, I am,” he said. “But, if you ever needed an extra set of hands, I know exactly what to do with them.”
“Point taken.” As he walked back over to the police vehicle, he stopped, turned back, and said, “You know what? If you wanted to go into law enforcement, even if it was like I said, a K9 unit, handling something along that line, you wouldn’t need the same physical training the rest of us went through.”
“It’s possible,” he said. “I also have some that might go a long way to convincing the higher-ups.”
“Why don’t you set up an interview with the captain? See what he has to say.”
“I might do that,” he said.
Ansel nodded, got into his car, then stopped and said, “Give me a chance to talk to him first.”
“That might go a long way to smooth that pathway.”
And, with that, he drove off.
“Did he just say he wanted to recommend you for some special training or some special job?”
“I’m not sure he really knew what he was saying,” he said in a mild voice. “But I think something was in there.”