Page 39 of Savage Ranger Daddy

"Smart," Silas says. "Switching now."

I'm in the hallway, moving toward the exit, when I pass the conference room where Hazel was working. The door is open. Her notebook is on the table, closed, her pen beside it. The coffee the deputy brought her sits half-finished. Next to the notebook is her jacket, draped over the chair.

She wasn't even wearing her jacket when they took her.

I keep walking. There's nothing in that room that helps me get her back. What helps me is the GPS dot still moving on my phone screen, the tactical frequency in my earpiece, and the team falling in behind me as I push through the front doors into the parking lot.

Mason, Silas's units, and Harlan's Haven 7 team. Three approach vectors converging on the south fork. If Dale stays on the road, we'll box him in. If he turns off, the GPS gives us his position until the signal dies.

I start the truck and pull out. The road south opens up ahead of me, straight and clear for the first quarter mile before it begins to climb.

On my phone the blue dot is still moving. Still broadcasting.

She texted me. She took photographs. She tried to bring Alice to us. She fought. She activated the SOS. Every move she made was the right one, and she's still in that car because two men with a locked door were the one variable neither of us planned for.

I push the accelerator down and the truck surges forward into the mountains.

Eleven minutes head start. South fork access. A sedan with three hostiles and one hostage who is smarter and tougher than any of them know.

I'm coming.

20

Hazel

The secondary location isn't the logging camp. It's a clearing I've never seen before, higher up, tucked into a fold of the mountain where the road dead-ends against a rock face. Two shipping containers sit side by side on a gravel pad. A flatbed truck is backed up to one of them. Three men I don't recognize are loading crates from the container onto the truck bed while Dale barks directions from beside the sedan.

He pulls me out of the car by my arm and walks me toward the second container. Alice follows three steps behind, her face blank, her role apparently finished now that she's delivered the package. The driver stays with the sedan, engine idling.

Dale stops at the container door. It's held shut by a heavy padlock and a steel latch. He produces a key, works the lock, and hauls the door open. The interior is dark, the air inside stale and metallic. He shoves me forward.

"Sit down. Shut up. You'll be moving with the next load." He looks at me the way someone looks at an item on a manifest. "Your article cost me the logging camp. The weapons cache.Four men. And eight products I spent three months acquiring." He says products and my stomach turns to ice. "You're going to help offset that loss. There are buyers who'll pay premium for a journalist. Especially one stupid enough to publish her real name."

The door slams. The lock clicks. Darkness.

I stand in the black for five seconds while my eyes adjust. Thin lines of light bleed around the door edges and through two rust holes near the ceiling. It's enough to see shapes. The container is about forty feet long and twelve wide. No crates inside this one. Just bare corrugated metal walls, a concrete floor with drainage grates, and in the far corner, huddled together, six women.

Not the same women from Storage Building Three. Those were rescued this morning. These are different. A second group. Held somewhere else, moved here while the raid was happening at the camp. Dale had a backup. Of course he did. A man who's operated for four years without an indictment doesn't keep all his inventory in one location.

The women stare at me. Most of them are young. Early twenties, maybe younger. Their clothes are dirty and mismatched. Two are huddled under a single blanket that looks like it came from a truck cab. One has a bruise along her jawline that's yellowing at the edges, a few days old. None of them speaks.

I crouch slowly, making myself smaller, less threatening. "My name is Hazel. I'm a journalist. People are looking for me right now. Federal marshals. They know about Dale and they know about this operation. Help is coming."

A woman with short dark hair and hollow cheeks speaks first. Her English is accented but clear. "They always say help is coming. No one ever comes."

The words hit me in the chest. I don't argue with her. I don't promise something I can't guarantee. Instead I tell her what I can guarantee.

"This morning, federal agents raided a logging camp in these mountains and rescued eight women who were being held in a storage building. All eight are alive and safe. That happened because of information I helped uncover. The same people who ran that raid are searching for me right now." I pull out my phone and show them the screen. No signal. The SOS icon is grayed out, which means the broadcast stopped when we lost coverage. But the activation log is visible. "I triggered an emergency alert before they brought me here. The marshals have the route we drove. They know the direction. They're coming."

The woman with the bruised jaw looks at the phone, then at me. "How long?"

"I don't know. But Dale said we're moving with the next load. That means the flatbed outside. If they finish loading the other container before help arrives, we're on that truck and the signal trail goes cold." I stand and look around the container. "So we don't wait. We prepare."

I walk the perimeter, running my hands along the walls. The corrugated metal is cold and solid. No give. The door is the only exit and it's locked from outside with a padlock I can't reach. The floor is concrete, poured flat, with two drainage grates about eighteen inches square. I crouch and grip one. It's heavy but not bolted. I pull. It shifts. Underneath is a drainage channel, maybeeight inches deep, running under the container wall and out through a gap where the base meets the gravel pad.

Too small for a person. But not too small for a signal.

"Does anyone have a phone?" I ask. "Anything electronic. A watch with GPS. Anything."