Page 52 of Warrior Security
The old equipment shed sat in the back corner of the property, screened by a stand of pines, well out of sight from the barn and the house. Lark had mentioned it once as a leftover from the previous owner, full of junk she’d never gotten around to clearing. I’d walked past it a dozen times without much thought.
Today, the door was cracked open about six inches.
I stopped. “Well, that’s not right.” Tova circled back to me, and I put my hand on her head without looking down. “Stay here.”
The last time I’d been back here, that door had been shut. I couldn’t pin it to a specific date, but I was certain enough that the difference registered.
I pushed the door open the rest of the way. The hinges complained but moved.
Inside was a dirt floor, old shelving along one wall, a rusted implement shoved into the far corner. Maybe fifteen by twenty feet. Equipment that used to sit against the back wall had been pushed to one side, clearing a rough circle of floor space in the center.
And in that…five or six beer cans, mostly Coors, crushed and tossed toward the far wall. Three cigarette butts ground into the dirt near the door.
The dust on the shelving was undisturbed. Nobody had touched the old tools. All the activity was on the floor, the kind of cleared circle you’d make if you wanted somewhere to sit and drink without being seen.
Tova appeared at the threshold anyway, sniffed once, and lost interest. She wandered back toward a patch of sun near the fence.
“Yeah,” I told her. “What the hell do you think this is all about?”
I stepped back outside and walked around the shed. Behind it, hidden from the main property by the pines, the grass was worn in a rough patch. Tire tracks in the soft ground, partially filled by rain but visible.
I stood there and turned it over. Could this be the drug runners Beckett had mentioned? Entirely possible.
Also entirely possible? Kids.
I’d grown up in small-town Wyoming. More than once when I was seventeen, my buddies and I had found an empty building on someone’s back forty and used it as a place to drink where nobody would catch us.
So, beer cans and an old shed on a rural property with back road access? Definitely could have been teenagers getting into teenager-type shenanigans.
But the cut fence from a few days ago wouldn’t let me land there. Kids climbed fences. They went over gates or squeezedthrough the wire or walked around. They didn’t bring cutters and make clean cuts in a boundary fence.
And Beckett’s briefing from a few days ago sat right behind it. The operation used remote rural properties. Back road access. The edges of land where the owners weren’t watching.
This was Lark’s land. Forty acres she’d built from nothing with money she didn’t have enough of, on a property she was three months behind on, in a life she’d chosen after walking away from one that had nearly destroyed her. Every fence post on this boundary was hers. Every board on that shed was hers.
And someone had been out here without her knowing.
If it was kids, okay. But if it wasn’t…
Fuck. I couldn’t take the chance.
I left the shed the way I’d found it. Door cracked, nothing disturbed. I walked back to the truck with Tova at my heels, dropped her at the barn, and drove over to Resting Warrior Ranch. I didn’t want to worry Lark until I had as much information as possible.
The Warrior Security office occupied a converted outbuilding on the north side of the ranch property. Only around a ten-minute drive from Pawsitive. I hadn’t been back since I’d left.
Hunter was at the planning table with a county map spread in front of him and photographs weighted at the corners. He looked up when I came in. His focus shifted to me and settled, immediate and complete, and I felt the weight of it land.
“Logan.” He didn’t stand. Didn’t need to. “Is it my lucky day and you’re here to work with us again?”
“Maybe. But not in the way you think. That drug operation you and Beckett told me about last week. Beckett mentioned it again a couple days ago.”
“Yeah. It’s very definitely still a pain in our ass. We’re working with the sheriff.”
“I’ve been noticing some things at Pawsitive, and I want to run them past you.”
He leaned forward. Elbows on the table, full attention. “Talk to me.”
I sat across from him and laid it out in order.
