This was a woman who went against her brother’s criminal lifestyle, but blood was blood. She thought she could save him.
Gabby took another step forward. “I won’t repeat myself. Drop your weapon. We can work this out.”
The biker’s eyes darkened, and his expression took on a look Gabby couldn’t decipher. When he stared past her shoulders and smirked, her blood ran cold.
“Gabby!”
Two shots rang out. She instinctively dropped to a knee, finger still on the trigger, gun pointed down. She must have blinked because Ariana and Biker Man disappeared and Declan was pulling her into his arms, his fingers securely clasping her wrist—the hand that held her weapon.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” she yelled.
He flinched. She must have screamed but she didn’t care. She surged to her feet, shoving away from him. Her head pounded with a thousand jackhammers. “I could have shot you!”
“But you didn’t.” His face was calm, which infuriated her more.
She gestured furiously to where Ariana and the biker had stood. “You let them get away.”
“Gabby, where the fuck are you?” Kelso’s voice crackled through comms. “We’re about to go in.”
At that moment, Delgado jogged up to them. “Let’s go, Woodward.” He looked at Declan. “Thanks, detective.”
Detective? What. The. Fuck.
Declan shot her a warning look, and it was then that she spotted the badge clipped to his belt. “Come on, your squad needs back-up.”
The three of them converged with Kelso, Mitchell, and Chen at the corner of a Mediterranean-style villa surrounded by galvanized steel fencing. Black mold stained the exterior walls and the overgrowth of shrubs and leggy flower bushes indicated the landscaping hadn’t seen maintenance in a while. Crab grass had overtaken the front lawn. Some suits from Bravo unit showed up while two Valley PD cruisers blocked the street, and their patrol officers started securing the area. Judging from Kelso’s scowl, there was a new development.
“What’s going on?” Gabby asked.
“SWAT’s taking over,” Mitchell announced. He narrowed his eyes briefly at Declan before addressing the rest of Charlie and Bravo team. “They’ll be in charge of initial assault. We’ll do clean up. Make sure to tag every item, disk, or document we could use as evidence to nail his ass.”
“Is our warrant solid?” Gabby asked the Cap.
Mitchell nodded. “Standing arrest warrant from a month ago holds. I’m going to direct the patrol officers and set up a command post.” His gaze landed on Kelso. “This is not reflective on our division. We follow protocol so the sixth floor won’t have our asses when the op goes pear-shaped. Got it?”
Ortega’s men didn’t put up much of a fight when SWAT swooped in. There was a brief exchange of automatic weapons, but the whole takedown was over in ten minutes.
One would say it was anticlimactic, but the shock was seeing the elusive crime lord in a fragile state. Ortega wasn’t a tall man, probably five-ten. Gabby could picture the man he once was. Expensive silk pajamas hung loosely on a body ravaged by cancer. As the officers helped him up and cuffed him, he maintained an arrogant posture and exchanged a defiant look with Mitchell—his mouth firmly pressed in a straight line. State of the art medical equipment surrounded a hospital bed and a stash of vials and syringes lay on a hospital caddy.
“Gabby,” Nadia called her over to a room. She walked into a space full of boxes, but her eyes landed on a familiar laptop. It was scuffed, but she recognized the stickers on it from the different Revenant productions of the past two years including Hodgetown.
“That could be Peter’s,” she whispered. “Why is it here?”
“I’m going to dust it for latents,” Nadia said. “Then I’m gonna take it back to the lab and try to get into it.” She heard the other woman vaguely, but she was already looking around. There was a box that contained a bunch of memory sticks and backup drives.
“Oh my God,” she choked, her mind trying to absorb this new information, misfiring like faulty wiring that couldn’t quite make the connection. It gave her an almighty pounding headache.
“Gabby!” Nadia gasped.
She had sagged into a column of boxes and would have fallen if the analyst hadn’t held her up.
“Told you to go home,” Kelso growled, stalking into the room. “We got this, Woodward.”
She pointed weakly to the laptop, unable to speak.
Kelso stared blankly at the computer, then his brows shot to his hairline, eyes bugging out. “Oh, fuck.”
12
Declan glanced worriedly at Gabby. Her head was tilted against the headrest