Johan's Joy (Heroes for Hire #22) - Dale Mayer Page 0,19

down on that level, going to every door that he couldn’t access, only to find his key card didn’t let him into very much at all. He’d been told he’d have full access but apparently not down here.

And, of course, every time his card was swiped, it should have shown up on the security feed. So, if somebody was watching what he was doing, they would know exactly where he was. If this were his company, he’d make damn sure that every time somebody’s security card didn’t work in an unauthorized area, somebody armed and in uniform would be checking, in person, to see where the offenders were. Johan could only hope that was the case here. Yet he had already been at this for a good fifteen minutes, and no one was chasing him down. Johan shook his head. Still, he’d also been given clearance at the highest level, and he could go where he wanted without question.

He wandered down a little farther and found several more locked doors that didn’t have security card readers. He checked to see if any cameras were in this area but didn’t find any. That concerned him too. He snorted. “It’s a wonder they aren’t missing a ton more drugs.”

He had his wallet out and his tiny pick in hand a moment later. He’d learned a lot of skills on the job, and making sure he was never stuck without a way to get in and to get out of places was one of them. He had the lock picked and the door open in thirteen seconds flat.

By the time he slipped in and turned on the light, he could see he was in yet another storeroom full of boxes. He just didn’t know what they were full of.

He wandered through, looking at shipping labels, trying to tell what the boxes held. He quickly took photos and sent them to Levi. But, interestingly enough, nothing that he did allowed the photos to send. The icon on his phone just kept spinning. Studying the concrete walls, he noted he was too deep underground and the walls were too thick to allow the signals to go through.

He wandered through the boxes before taking out his pocketknife and cutting one of them open. It appeared to be medical supplies, but nothing he opened revealed any drugs. Just cotton swabs and tongue depressors and medical tape mostly. Why were medical supplies here? Was this just an overflow area for the real lab down the block? Like a place to store stuff they couldn’t take all at once? But why would you do that? That’s a recipe to lose things. Plus, if all this was for the big lab down the street, how the hell did they do inventory if stuff was left here? Johan shook his head. “Not a profitable way to do business.”

The shipping docks weren’t here, so somebody would have to hand truck all this stuff here from the bays and leave it. Then hand truck it all back out to retrieve it to possibly transport it to the lab. Granted the truckers making the deliveries couldn’t know what was inside these boxes any more than Johan could tell, not without opening them up. Yet the random labels Johan had checked were all for this building. Why?

Frowning, he stepped out of this storeroom, with as much intel as he could get from that room in one efficient visit, then went through the next room and did the same thing. Again he found more stuff, but this stash was separated into different groupings. One area appeared to be office stuff. Another had old newspapers, cages, feeders, and that type of thing for animals. Shaking his head, he went through the whole room, spot-checking and taking pictures again, then headed to the third and last locked room on this level. He wondered what the hell was going on here, and what kind of a crazy filing system they had for all the random stuff stuck down here.

He bet that Joy knew nothing about all this and that her records wouldn’t entail any of it as well. What was going on here?

As he stepped through the door into the last room, he froze because it sounded like somebody was inside. Then he noted a flashlight beam. So Johan didn’t turn on the overhead light and immediately dropped to the ground and crept onto the other side behind the doorway. He waited and listened. He was a pro at