“By the way, I’m supposed to be your backup, not the other way around,” Howard said, thankful Val hadn’t run into the other jaguar on her own while she was trying to track down him and Eric’s men.
“And Jillian is yours. Since she wasn’t there for you, I had to be. Lucky me.” Val smiled. “Besides, how would it sound if an Enforcer stayed behind, cowering in her boots?”
He chuckled. “Like that would ever happen. I was glad you showed up and helped me to deal with the other cat. I worried about you, and I had no way of telling you I was okay.”
“Same with me. When you didn’t answer, I was worried they’d taken you down.”
“And you still came after me?” Not that Howard was surprised, but she could have put herself in a world of danger.
“Yeah. I don’t know. I’m kind of getting used to having you around.”
“Good. I feel the same way about you.”
“I thought the two of them would have stuck together and ambushed you. If you and I had been able to, we would have.”
“I agree. They ran for a long time, then finally split up. I was sure they would want to prepare an ambush, but if they tried to come around and search for my scent, they wouldn’t have found it. They’d have to have a visual sighting, and I guess I seemed like an invisible predator stalking them both instead. Maybe I spooked them because of it. They split up, giving them a fifty-fifty chance for one of them to get out of there alive, and I followed the one trail. Still, I kept believing the other guy would come to help out his partner.”
“No, he just tucked tail and ran.”
“I wish we could have caught up to him, but we will. What will your parents do now?”
Val sighed. “Convalesce. Maybe work desk duty for a while. Maybe they’ll consider retiring now. Though they’d been outnumbered, so it wasn’t really their fault. Any of us could have ended up in their situation.”
“Right.”
The rain stopped when they finally reached her parents’ rental house, and Val went in first, gun readied. She knew the layout of the place, which was why Howard was fine with her going first. She signaled the all clear for the living room and the kitchen, and he saw broken glass on the wooden floor in the living room. They headed down the hall to the other rooms.
He smelled the blood and saw a couple of trails all the way down the hall. He imagined the horror Val must have felt when she’d first seen the blood and hadn’t known her parents were still alive.
The bathroom was clear. The next bedroom was clear. They went to the last room, another bedroom. This one was clearly where her parents had been tied up. Blood had pooled on the floor and was smeared on the wall. Discarded duct tape and cut plastic ties littered the floor. He felt terrible for Val and her parents, knowing how much it must have killed her to see them so badly injured. In that instant, he regretted not staying with her. His only thought had been taking out the bastards who had fled the house, certain he could get them to tell him where her parents were.
He couldn’t have been gladder that they had survived.
Val grew pale when she looked at the blood.
He rubbed her back, and that brought Val back to the present. “I’ll check the garage to see if the rental car’s there while you’re packing their things, and then I’ll help you finish up.”
“Yeah, all right.” She began pulling her mother’s clothes out of a bureau drawer.
He walked back down the hall and finally reached the door to the garage on the other side of the small house. He opened it, dagger in hand, but the garage was completely empty, smelling of the same men he’d been chasing, Benny, and the ones he’d killed. The garage window on the left side was broken, glass all over the concrete floor.
Howard returned to the bedroom and grabbed an empty field pack and began packing her dad’s things in it. “Rental car’s gone. We need to ask your parents if they left it somewhere else.”
Val finished packing her mother’s bag and pulled a first aid kit out of one of the bureau drawers. She got antiseptic and bandages out of the kit. “I’ll text my mother.” She pulled out her phone and began texting her mom.
Howard finished packing her dad’s bag, and Val shook her head. “No response. She could be in surgery, heavily medicated, or asleep.” She took hold of Howard’s shirt. “I’ll take care of your wounds before we leave.”
He wasn’t going to say it wasn’t necessary at this point because he figured she’d just insist. He pulled off his wet shirt.
She ran her hand over the skin below some of the bite and claw marks, her fingers soft and warm against his skin. He wanted to kiss her again. “I’ll be right back.” She went into the bathroom and returned with a wet cloth. Then she got to work, wiping off the blood and debris. She added antiseptic to the wounds, then wiped her hands off on the towel. Then she carefully covered each of the wounds with a bandage.
“All right, hopefully nothing will become infected.” She threw the rest of the supplies in the first aid kit and grabbed her mother’s bag. “We can worry about their car later. We need to go.”
“Thanks for doctoring me up.” He felt the same urgency to rejoin Jillian and Rowdy, but while they were here, they needed to do whatever needed to be done. He wrung out his shirt in the bathroom, then pulled it back on.
They carried the bags out to Val’s rental car.
Howard glanced at the house and vehicles across the street. The car tires were all flat. “Looks like they had some tire trouble recently. Some of your handiwork?”
“Yeah. In case they returned and planned to take off.” Val studied the house, and he was sure she was thinking the same thing he was.
“What if the other man has returned to the house, thinking we won’t catch him there?” she asked.
“I was thinking the same thing.” They placed the bags in Val’s rental car and locked it. “No sense in leaving business unfinished if the other guy returned there. What happened to the blue pickup and the woman?”
“I told her to run. I don’t think she was involved, and she gave my dad blood.”
They moved through the fruit trees to the front door. They didn’t bother knocking, just shoved the door open, waiting safely on either side of the doorjamb. Then Val went in first, gun readied. Howard was right behind her, his knife out. They quickly checked the rest of the house, but no one was there.
“While we’re here, why don’t we look for anything important related to these guys and their business?” Howard wanted to get on the road, but if they could make a further break in the case, they had to make the effort.
Howard yanked the covers off the bed in the main bedroom and flipped the mattress over, frowning at the bulging fabric.
He cut through the fabric, and money spilled out.
Val stared at it for a moment, as surprised as he was, and then she said, “I’ll see if I can find a bag.” She opened the closet and pulled out one of the larger roller suitcases. Then they began filling it.
Once they finished in there, they found loose floorboards under a throw rug in the spare bedroom. When Howard removed the boards, they found forty-two paper-wrapped bricks of heroin, money-counting machines, debt lists, and digital scales. They’d hit the mother lode.
Howard called Martin. “Hey, this is Howard. We’ve got a new case we’re working on, if Sylvan hasn’t told you.”
“Eric and his cohorts and their little drug empire.”
“Yeah, well, we found money, drugs, and more. We can send the money home with the Guardian agents who are flying out Val’s parents. Drugs too? To destroy the drugs, we’d need an oven with about a 2200-degree temperature. I’d thought of sneaking into a mortuary and burning the drugs up in one of their ovens, but they only get to about 1700 degrees. I’d hate for the Guardians to be caught up in this if the local police check over the plane.”
“Turn it over to the Guardians, money and drugs. They’ll get it on the plane, no questions asked. I’ll let them know to pick it up from you.”
“Okay, sir.” Howard nodded to Val as she motioned with another roller bag.
She began filling it up.
“Good job,” Martin said.
“Thanks, sir. Out here.”
After searching the two bedrooms, kitchen, living room, bathroom, and garage, they didn’t find anything more useful. They checked the vehicles and found a couple of guns and three knives in one of the cars’ trunks. “My parents’,” Val said.
Howard had smelled their scent on the weapons, so he’d assumed they were her parents’. “Good. At least we’ve secured them and will return them when we can.”
“You can use one of the guns while we’re here.”
“All right. Let’s get out of here and grab something to eat on the way.”
They returned to Val’s rental car, shoving the suitcases in the trunk, and she got in to drive. But then she got a text from her mom. “Why don’t you drive, and I’ll answer this.”
“Okay.”
They switched places, and she said, “Mom says they parked the rental car in the garage. She heard the car’s engine and the men talking in the garage. Then the car was driven off.”
Howard drove off for their cabin resort. “How is she feeling?”
“Much better. Tomorrow, they’ll be flying home in one of our jets that has medical transport equipment.”
“Okay, good. How did Eric and the rest of his gang know who they were?”
“I didn’t ask. They were in too bad of shape when I saw them. I’ll ask now that Mom seems to be doing better.” Val texted her mother back. She paused, then said, “Oh wow. Mom said they’d done the beach touristy stuff so it looked like they were really tourists. They did everything by the book, winged it when they were trying to look the part, but Eric recognized her.” Again, Val didn’t say anything as she texted back and waited for a return text.
“Okay, so she went to a grocery store to pick up some things for them to eat while Dad stayed at the rental house to keep an eye on Eric’s place. Mom saw Eric but acted as though she didn’t know him or that he lived across the street from the rental house. He didn’t say anything and must have been pretending not to know her or that she was a new neighbor. She returned to the rental house, and Eric returned to his place. A short while later, others joined Eric at his house.
“It wasn’t long before some of them made their way secretly around the back of the rental house and broke a window, and then the others barged in through the garage window.”
“Had she tried to take him down before?” They normally never assigned an undercover agent to go after someone they’d failed to eliminate before.
“No. That was the thing. She didn’t know what he even looked like before she got the case. But Eric said he remembered her from when she’d gone after a friend of his. She hadn’t seen Eric because he’d run. He’d seen her when she’d identified herself as an Enforcer agent to the perp before Eric had taken off.”
“Okay, so that could have happened to any of us.”
Val got a call and she answered it. “Thanks, Sylvan. I’ll let Howard know.” She ended the call. “Well, Jillian’s mate is flying in tonight. Vaughn apparently thinks you aren’t protecting her well enough.”
Howard shook his head. “I’m not surprised. Jillian and Vaughn have been texting each other constantly since we got this mission. He’s been worried about her the whole time she’s been with me. Not because of me,” Howard quickly said. “He just thinks no one can protect her like he can. SEAL wolf, you know. Not that she hasn’t felt the same way about him.”
“We wouldn’t be that way.”
“You mean if we were mated?” Howard was surprised Val would be thinking in those terms.
Val laughed. “As partners.”
“They’re partners and newly mated. And yeah, we would be the same way. You’ve already told me you were anxious about my well-being when I took off after the men, despite you being sick with worry about your parents.”
She smiled.
“See?”
“Yeah, all right. I tried to get ahold of you several times. But some of it was to tell you that my folks were barely alive so you didn’t need to kill yourself trying to track down the perps on your own to learn where my parents were.”
“I’m glad to know you worried about me.”
“Of course I did. We’re on the same team. Side.” She was quiet for a moment, looking out the window.
He watched the road for any sign of a fast-food place along the way. They weren’t like American franchises, which were few and far between in Belize. In fact, he’d traveled extensively all over the country and only found one. But the service and food were good in the Belizean eateries.
She turned to face him. “I have a…proposition to make. Strictly professional. You and Jillian can toss a coin to figure out which one will stay with me. Rowdy can stay with one of the teams. That way, everyone has backup until we put Benny and his cohorts down.”
“A coin toss, eh?” Howard was certain she knew no one was going to do a coin toss to determine who stayed with her. Vaughn and his mate would stick together. The civilian was here of his own accord. Which left just Howard, and he was certain Val wanted him to stay with her, but she didn’t want to openly suggest it.
“Yeah, so neither of you will feel left out or obligated,” Val said.
“Professionally speaking, we’d just be doing our job.” Not that he felt that way about Val in the least.
“Good. That’s the way it needs to be.”
Because she’d lost her partner before? He suspected that was the case. “Hey, that looks like a place where we could grab a bite to eat.”
“Looks good to me. Lots of vehicles and foot traffic there.”
They pulled into the parking area, and both went to the window to order. “How about garnaches as an appetizer?” Howard asked. “I’ve been addicted to them ever since I’ve come down to Belize.”
“I’ve never tried them before.”
“Fried corn tortillas topped with cheese, beans, shredded cabbage, and other goodies. I’m going to have tacos, and you?”
“The salbute. Corn tortillas with lettuce, avocado, pulled chicken, and tomato. It’s the staple in Belize, and they sure are good.”
Howard bought the food and a couple of bottled waters. Then they ate in the car. Howard finished his before Val did, so he drove to the resort while Val finished her salbute.
“Now I’m ready for more action. I needed to eat,” she said.
“Me too. Here I thought we were going to share breakfast at my place.”
“Depending on what’s going on, maybe we can still have the ribs for dinner. I was looking forward to them. I haven’t had grilled pork ribs in forever.”
“Sounds good to me. How are you doing, Val? I mean about your parents.”
“Better, knowing they’re going to pull through okay.”
“We’ll make the ones responsible pay.”
“We will. Thanks for getting some of them.”
“I only regret I didn’t get Eric. How about your injuries?”
“I’m feeling much better, thanks. What about yours?”
He smiled. “Same. We’re a pair, aren’t we?”
She chuckled.
It began raining again. Howard turned the windshield wipers to their fastest speed, but the rain was coming down so hard that it quickly obscured his view. Thunder crashed overhead. Streaks of white lightning flashed through the dark-gray clouds. The roads were wet and slippery, and it was hard making out the centerline in the road. Luckily, there wasn’t much traffic. His rain jacket had been sitting in the vehicle the whole time. So much for using it in the rain.
“We sure made some tourist group happy,” Val said.
Howard smiled. “Those make for some special times when we can do that. So you wear the pants in the family.”
She laughed. “That was cute.”
“I was like you, figuring they wouldn’t leave until we did.”
“Can you blame them?”
“No, not at all.”
Val got a text and responded before saying, “Mom must be feeling a lot better. She wants to know what happened with regard to taking care of these bastards.”
“Good. I’m glad to hear it. What about your dad?”
“He’s starting to recover. Which means he’s grouchy.”
Howard smiled. He knew the feeling.
She reached over and patted his thigh. “Good to know you’re just like him.”
“Not just like him. I have no problem letting my partner take charge of a situation we’re in. Whoever’s got the best plan of action works for me.”
“Hmm, I recall telling you that you had to stay on the other side of the resort so you didn’t tip Benny off.”
“Right. But that wasn’t the best plan of action.”
She smiled. “Uh-huh.” Val texted someone and then told Howard she was letting Jillian know they would be there in another hour. And she told her mom Howard had taken down three of the men already.
Jillian called right after that, and Val put her phone on speaker.
“We have a problem. Izzie Summerfield, Benny’s girlfriend, came to our cabin, and she’s hysterical,” Jillian said.
They heard a woman sobbing in the background.
“She says she thinks Benny gave her some kind of mind-altering drug because she was seeing things.”
“He gave her that purple heroin?” Howard growled.
“Worse. Well, I mean, that could kill her, sure. But he turned into a jaguar in front of her.”
“Tell me he didn’t bite her.” Howard was afraid that’s what had happened, if Benny’s past history was any indication. Couldn’t the ass get a jaguar girlfriend? Then again, if he did have a jaguar girlfriend and he got her involved in his drug dealings, she’d be in the same trouble as him.
“He bit Izzie about half an hour ago. Then he shifted again, told her he was going to get groceries, and if she needed anything, just go see the neighbors. Afterward, he got in his car and drove off!” Jillian sounded just as exasperated as when Vaughn had tried to take her brother down. “She came over in a panic because she was having hallucinations and was feeling ‘weirded out.’ Those were her words.”
“Don’t tell us he did it on purpose so we’d be stuck dealing with her,” Val said.
“I’m sure of it,” Jillian said. “It ties some of us up with having to take care of her.”
“Then he’s not returning to the resort,” Val said, which was just what Howard believed.
“I suspect that’s the case. I’ve never handled a situation like this before. I wasn’t sure how to deal with it. Rowdy’s talking to her in the living room. He’s good with people. He’s calmed her down. At the same time, this gives him an inkling of how it feels to be newly turned. Though at least he knows about us, unlike the woman.”
“Hell, so she’s a jaguar shifter now. A Guardian family will have to take her in to teach her the ropes, and hopefully she’ll adjust just fine,” Howard said.
“Jillian, I’ll call it in. Just help Rowdy keep the woman calm in the meantime. Hopefully, we’ll get a Guardian agent out here right away. Maybe even the brother and sister who were taking care of my parents. We found money and drugs at Eric’s house, and we need to transfer that to them as well. They can fly it all out on a private plane.”
“Okay, praying that will be the case. Let us know what you learn.”
“Will do.” Val called the brother-and-sister team after that and reached Matt. “Hey, it’s Val, and if you and Katrina are still in the area and can handle another mission, we have a new problem.”
“Oh? Martin said we needed to take some stuff off your hands. Is it something else?”
“The guy we’re after just turned his new girlfriend. He murdered his wife after he’d turned her. Now the new one is with the rest of our team, under our protection. We’re still trying to destroy this drug ring, which includes the guy who did this. We’re at the Tropical Rain Forest Resort, cabin three. It’s about two hours from where you were. Can you handle it, or do I need to call my boss to have him ask your branch for another Guardian team?”
“We’ll do it. Your parents are doing fine, and we’re free to pick up the newly turned jaguar and take her with us. We’ll go with her and your parents on the return flight to Houston. In the meantime, our boss will assign her a family to take her in.”
“Thanks so much, Matt. We’re still on our way back to the resort. It’ll take us another hour to get there.”
“Who’s watching the woman for now?”
“Jillian, but she’s a wolf shifter, and we have a human homicide detective there. Long story, but he knows about our kind. He’s trying to reassure Izzie that everything will be all right. We’ll see you in a couple of hours then.”
“Uh, yeah. I’ll let Katrina know we’ve got another assignment. We’ll need to know who the woman’s family is and will have to deal with that too.”
“That’s true.”
Something Howard hadn’t thought of. All he’d focused on was getting Izzie away from here and safely home without anyone else knowing what she was. He was relieved the Guardian agents would take care of her. They were trained more for that kind of work than the JAG, USF, or Enforcers were. He could hear it now though. The last time they’d had an issue like this come up, Martin had made them take training to deal with it. After this, Howard could see them having to learn how to cope better with newly turned shifters. He guessed it wouldn’t hurt. He just hoped, since they were stuck taking care of this here, Martin wouldn’t assign them the task of teaching others how to deal with it. That’s usually what he did. Those with firsthand knowledge in the field became the instructors for the other agents.
Val called Jillian and told her the news. She was relieved Howard and Val would be there soon to help out until the Guardian agents arrived. She sounded harried, and Howard wished they were already there. Because of the rain and road conditions, he had to watch his speed, though his foot was pressing down a little more on the gas pedal than it should have been. Especially when he was carrying all this dope and money in the car.
After that, Val updated her boss, who was glad the Guardians would take care of Izzie but insistent that Val and Howard take Benny down before he bit anyone else. As if that hadn’t been their intention in the first place.
When Val finished the call, she turned to Howard. “Okay, so we’re going to have a full house, if Matt and his sister have to stay the night with us. And of course, so will the newly turned woman.”
“I hate to say this, but because we’re all jaguars and better equipped to handle her, all of us need to stay at your cabin. We can take turns watching her through the night until Matt and Katrina can take her with them in the morning. I feel for them though. They could have a challenge, just taking her anywhere.”
“Maybe they can sedate her. Their vacation sure has been ruined.”
“I’m sure they’ll get plenty of comp time to make up for it.”
Val smiled at Howard. “That takes care of the coin toss then.”
Howard chuckled. She couldn’t seriously have thought it would come to that.
He considered what Benny had done to the poor woman. If he wasn’t already on Howard’s terminal list, that would have done it. What if she was really close to her family, and now this happened? She probably couldn’t see them for years, until she could get her shifting under control. It would be a nightmare for her for a long time. Here the woman thought she had been drugged.
So what was the next step? Tell her that almost all of them were shifters and not to worry? He imagined that would go over big.
“If he wasn’t a dead man before, he would be now,” Val said, thinking along the same lines as Howard. “From his action today, I’d say he was planning all along to do the same thing as before. Maybe he’d keep doing it until he found a woman who could handle being turned.”
“He won’t have that long to live. At least I hope he won’t. At least in Emmie’s case, she was already one of us.”
“Right. Since Benny took off, assuming he’s not going to return after saddling us with another crisis, Eric probably won’t be showing up here looking for his brother either,” Val said.
“Unless he wants to learn what happened to him. If Eric was close to him, he might. I hope he does. He’ll have a whole bunch of shifters to deal with. We’ll see if the Guardians have ever dealt with a case like this. It’s not something I’ve ever had to take care of.” Howard had thought they could take turns sleeping while someone watched Izzie.
Surprising both him and Val, Jillian called again. They were nearly to the resort, and he figured her call only meant they had more trouble. He just hoped Benny and his cohorts hadn’t showed up.
Val put the call on speaker. “Yeah, Jillian? What’s wrong now?”
“She tore off her clothes and shifted. I told Rowdy to run. To get out of the cabin. He ran for the door and opened it, and she nearly bit him! I interceded and she bit me instead, but she ran off.”
“Ah, hell. Okay, at least she didn’t turn Rowdy,” Howard said. “We’re nearly there. What about you? Are you going to be okay?” Howard worried Jillian might have been injured badly.
“I’m okay. She didn’t bite hard. She…she’s gone. I’m so sorry. When Rowdy opened the door to leave, she ran after him. He thought she was going to attack him, but then he realized she was trying to leave, and he attempted to shut the door so she wouldn’t escape. That’s when she tried to bite him. Then she ran off into the rain forest. Rowdy’s cleaning my bite. She bit me in the arm, and I might need some stitches until the shifter genetics help me to heal.”
“The Guardians are physician assistants. They can sew you up. Just stay there with Rowdy. We’ll search for her as soon as we arrive,” Howard said. “Benny is so dead.”
“I agree. Rowdy’s upset Izzie bit me. He wants to be a wolf, but no one has offered to turn him. He doesn’t want to be a jaguar, so he was glad she hadn’t bitten him,” Jillian said.
“Well, hell, he’s going to be what he’s going to be. And that’s being a jaguar or a wolf, depending on the trouble he gets himself into. If one of the branch chiefs agree, we’ll take him into one of the jaguar branches—hopefully with the USF where we have both wolves and jaguars working together—and train him to be one of our agents. But it’ll be a while before he can work in the field.”
“All right. I’ll tell him. He’s pacing around here, furious with Benny for turning Izzie.”
“He should be. Just don’t let him run off after her. I wouldn’t put it past him to think he has to chase her down and try to talk her into returning to the cabin. He doesn’t know his way around, and he might run into Benny or any of the other jaguars.”
“I agree.”
“Okay, we’re pulling up now.” Howard parked, and he and Val hurried to leave the car so they could look for the woman. He just hoped Izzie didn’t get herself into any further trouble in the meantime.