“Why the hell is IA grilling my senior corporal?” Gage demanded.
Hal waited until Vince had gone into the room where they were questioning Xander before answering. “IA is just doing their due diligence on this shooting, that’s all. They aren’t trying to screw Corporal Riggs, you have my word on that.”
Gage snorted. “You could have fooled me.”
The way his boss was looking at him made Gage think Hal wasn’t telling him everything, but the deputy chief only sighed. “Go back to work. I’ll make sure Riggs gets a ride out to the compound when IA’s done with him.”
Gage hated the idea of leaving Xander with IA, but Coletti could have him in interrogation the rest of the day, and he still had to tell the Pack about Mackenzie Stone—who’d be at the compound in a little over an hour.
Shit
.
“Tell Xander I’ll see him back at the compound.”
Hal nodded. “I will. And Gage? Good job out there today.”
Gage grunted.
Luckily, there was no sign of Mackenzie Stone’s news van in the lot when Gage arrived at the compound. He parked the SUV, then went around to the training building, figuring that’s where everyone would probably be.
He heard the sounds of growling before he even opened the door. Officers Landry Cooper and Eric Becker were sprawled on the couch in the dayroom watching TV and eating popcorn.
“What the hell’s going on back there?” Gage demanded, jerking his head toward the rear of the building.
Cooper, the team’s explosives expert and coincidentally—or maybe not so coincidentally—the most laid-back, in-control member of the Pack, shrugged. “Martinez and Delaney came back a little fired up from today’s action,” he said in his southern drawl. “They got into an argument with some of the other guys and now they’re just working it out.”
Which was code for going at each other like a couple of MMA fighters.
Gage swore. Sometimes he felt more like a damn school teacher than the commander of a team of highly trained police officers. “And Mike didn’t think it was necessary to break it up before they destroyed something expensive?”
Cooper grabbed a handful of popcorn from the big bowl Becker was holding. “Domestic abuse call came in about an hour ago. Mike took Duncan and Boudreaux with him.”
“Didn’t you consider that maybe you should step in and do something?” Gage all but snarled.
Cooper didn’t take his eyes off the TV show he was watching—a damn G.I. Joe cartoon, for crying out loud. “Not my argument.”
And sometimes it felt like he was in charge of a day care center—for out of control werewolves.
Gage didn’t waste his breath asking Becker why he didn’t do anything. The surveillance expert was one of the newest members of the team. He might be as big and tough as anyone in the unit, but they weren’t going to pay attention to anything he said. Besides, Gage didn’t think he could pry the tech and electronics experts away from their tub of popcorn.
He headed toward the back of the building, wincing at a particularly loud thud. There was always a little roughhousing after a mission. It was how werewolves dealt with stress. But usually he, Xander, or Mike were around to keep things from getting out of hand. And when you had sixteen oversized alpha wolves in one pack, things could get out of hand pretty damn quick.
He noticed a couple broken chairs and a crushed desk as he passed the classroom. The disagreement must have started there, then moved to the back of the building where the weight room and gym were. He hoped they were in the gym instead of the weight room—not only was there less stuff they could break, but there were also fewer things they could use as weapons.
But while three members of the team—Senior Corporal Zane Kendrick, Senior Corporal Trevor McCall, and Officer Alex Trevino—were in the gym tossing around a basketball, they weren’t the source of the racket he’d heard.
His nose confirmed the identity of the men in the weight room before he got there. All six remaining members of the team were in the weight room. Damn it.
On the bright side, only four of the men were fighting. Two of them—Senior Corporals Jayden Brooks and Carter Nelson—were doing their best to keep the other cops from grabbing anything they could use as weapons while at the same time working just as hard to keep them from destroying the workout equipment.
They were only marginally successful at both tasks.
Gage ducked to avoid a forty-five-pound weight someone threw across the room. It smashed against the wall of mirrors on the far side of the room, completely shattering the floor-to-ceiling piece of glass. Shit, he’d paid for those out of his own pocket.
A low rumble erupted from his lips. This was the reason alpha wolves rarely ever got together in a group—it was damn near impossible to keep them from fighting. But when he’d taken over the SWAT unit eight years ago, he’d made the decision to seek out the best cops in the country and get them on his team. If that meant bringing in other werewolves, that was what he did.
But days like today made him wonder if it was worth it.
Martinez and Delaney had squared off against Connor Malone and the newest member of the team, Max Lowry. Their claws were out, their canines were extended, and their eyes gleamed gold. All they’d done so far was slash each other up, but their faces and jaws were changing shape even now, which meant bites would be coming next, and they were much tougher to recover from. Worse, Malone’s back was already starting to bunch up in that way it did before a full shift. And if Malone shifted into his two-hundred-and-forty-pound wolf form, someone was probably going to get killed.
Gage let out a deep growl and waded into the midst of the brawl, letting his fangs slide out in a partial shift as he started laying backhanded swings that sent people flying. The moment he had them separated, he grabbed Malone by the shoulders and yanked him off his feet, then slammed him against the remaining mirror hard enough to shatter it like the others. Then he bared his teeth and let loose a snarl loud enough to be heard well outside the compound. He didn’t care who heard—he wanted their full attention and he wanted it now.
Malone immediately relaxed in his grip while Martinez, Delaney, and Lowry took a few steps back.
Gage held on to his lead sniper until the man had completely shed any vestige of his wolf form. By the time he turned to look at the other three, they had shifted back, too. There was no evidence of the werewolves they’d been—except for the bloody claw marks covering their bodies and shredding their uniforms. Gage didn’t shift back. He wanted them to get a good look at his yellow-gold eyes and gleaming fangs.
“What the hell is wrong with the four of you?” he demanded. “I walk in here expecting to find a team of professional cops, and instead I find you acting like a bunch of freaking out-of-control Chihuahuas.” He pointedly looked around the room at the broken mirrors, crushed weight benches, and torn mats. “We paid to renovate this weight room out of our own pockets and you’ve wrecked it with your bullshit. Somebody here better start talking fast or I’m going to give in to my first instinct and have you all transferred to bicycle patrol handing out parking tickets downtown.”
“They started it, Sarg.” To his credit, Delaney actually looked a little chagrinned at all the damage they’d done. “Martinez and I were talking about him getting shot in the arm, and Lowry said it happened because we didn’t know what the hell we were doing.”
Gage stared menacingly at Delaney. “The four of you tore up pack property because the new guy was trying to get under your skin?”
“That’s not the way it went down, Sarg,” Lowry protested.
“No?” Gage hoped like hell this new pup wasn’t about to say something that was going to get him buried. “So, how did it go down? Please tell me.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Gage saw Brooks and Nelson exchange a worried look. Like they thought he might snap someone’s neck. He’d be lying if he said the thought hadn’t crossed his mind. He’d never do it, of course.
Unfortunately, these kinds of brawls happened a lot. Regardless of the formal rank structure placed on them by the Dallas PD, his wolves were constantly challenging the pecking order within the Pack as each cop tried to outperform the other and each squad tried to make its group look better. With all the new guys he’d brought in over the years, he shouldn’t be surprised the issue had come to a head again. Well, he was going to nip this competition shit in the bud right now. His team would be one, well-oiled unit, or he’d tear it down and start over.
“So?” he prompted Lowry again.
Lowry swallowed hard. Gage knew the man wasn’t actually afraid of him, but he was the unchallenged alpha of the Pack, and whether the younger guys knew it or not, that position came with a certain amount of inherent control over the other pack members. Standing this close to his pissed-off lead alpha, Lowry probably felt seriously uneasy for the first time in his life. Gage hated making any of his men feel that way, but he’d learned he had to either lead them by force of will or learn to live with chaos.
Gage didn’t like chaos.
“It’s was nothing, Sarg,” Lowry finally conceded. “We were just messing around and things got out of hand. It won’t happen again.”
Gage held him there until he was sure all four of them had firmly received the message. Then he lowered Delaney to the floor.
“No, it won’t happen again,” he agreed. “Because I’m breaking up your teams. Lowry, when Mike gets back, let him know you’ve been reassigned to Xander’s team, and that Delaney’s going to be your entry buddy. I want him to put you two shoulder-to-shoulder on every mission from this day forward.”
Gage ignored the look of shock on Lowry’s face and turned to look at Martinez. “I assume you got that arm looked at before you decided to get in a fight?”
The stocky man flexed his injured arm. “Yeah. Trevino fixed me up the moment we got back. It’s fine.”
“Good,” Gage said. “Because you’ll be taking Lowry’s spot on Mike’s team. Same thing applies—you’ll be tied to Malone every time the two of you walk through a hostile doorway.”
Martinez opened his mouth to argue, but Gage silenced him with a glare. Malone, on the other hand, was too fuzzy from his recent near-shift to keep his trap shut.
“But, Sarg, I’m your best sniper. I don’t usually go through doors.”
“You do now,” Gage told him. “So, I suggest you spend a lot of time with your new entry buddy and learn real fast.”
“Sarg, you can’t do this,” Delaney said. “We know we screwed up and we’ll fix everything, I swear. But you can’t break up Martinez and me—we’ve been on the same team for more than three years.”
“Then you’ll be able to bring Lowry up to speed on Xander’s tactics.”
“But Sarg—”
“Have you ever seen how tight the shorts are on those bike cops?” Gage asked.
Delaney snapped his mouth shut.
Gage looked at Brooks and Nelson. “Next time I expect you two to get in the middle of a fight and break it up—or you’ll be wearing the bike shorts. And I’m not sure they make any in your size, Brooks.”
The big African American shifted from one foot to the other. The ex–college fullback was probably envisioning himself in tight blue shorts and perched on a bicycle. Apparently, it wasn’t a very pretty image.
“Sure thing, Sergeant.”
“Good.” Gage jerked his head at the four junior officers. “Make sure they get those wounds cleaned up right before they start to heal. And make sure Martinez didn’t rip his open again.”
All he needed was for Martinez to be the first werewolf who got an infection. Going to the hospital really wasn’t something werewolves preferred to do.
Gage started for the door, then stopped and turned back to them. “And get this mess cleaned up. I want everyone in the classroom in fifteen minutes.”
He didn’t need to see his men’s scowls to know he wasn’t their favorite person right now. It made him wonder what they were going to think of him when he told them about Mackenzie Stone.
***
“Xander isn’t getting jacked up,” Gage said for the third time.
He’d started their all-call meeting with a quick briefing of the hostage situation earlier, then touched on the detailed level of questioning he and Xander had gone through downtown. At least he’d planned on it being brief. He wanted to get to the real reason he’d called everyone together—Mackenzie Stone—but he couldn’t get the team to focus on anything other than Internal Affairs grilling one of their own.
“Then why is IA still questioning him?” Remy Boudreaux asked, a trace of his Louisiana accent coming through.
Gage suppressed a growl. Sometimes his guys were bigger conspiracy nuts than Mulder and Scully. “They’re just going over his statement to make sure there aren’t any inconsistencies that could end up in a lawsuit. They’re trying to help him, not screw him. Besides, he’s probably already on his way back.”
“Then if you didn’t call us here to talk about Xander, what’s this about?” Martinez asked.
Gage was pleased to see the cop sitting beside his new best buddy, Malone. On the other side of the room, Delaney and Lowry were doing the same. Maybe they had the ability to overcome their petty squabbles faster than he’d given them credit for.
“Yeah, Sarg.” Mike was lounging back in his chair, a knowing smile on his face. “What are we here to talk about?”
Gage scowled at his squad leader. Mike wasn’t going to cut him a break, damn him. And while the rest of the guys might not know what was going on, they’d definitely picked up on the strange vibe. Well, everyone except for Cooper. He was reading a damn comic book.
“I wanted to tell you that we’ll be having a visitor hanging around the compound for the next few days,” Gage said.
“What kind of visitor?” Cooper asked, raising his gaze from his comic book long enough to show he was capable of multitasking.
Oh hell, no way to avoid this. Might as well rip off the Band-Aid. “A reporter from the
Dallas
Daily
Star
—Mackenzie Stone.”
Gage waited, expecting an immediate firestorm of negative comments. But his announcement was met with complete silence. Though whether that silence was because they were stunned or just indifferent, he couldn’t tell.