Chapter 49 - The Crossing at Midnight
The knife blade sliced through the air with a deadly, whistling arc.
Jax didn't evade; he countered.
With the supernatural agility that made his bloodline legendary, Jax ducked beneath the thrust, drove his heavy snout into Cruz’s sternum to break the man's balance, and snapped his jaws shut around the knife wrist.
The sound of Cruz’s ulna cracking beneath four hundred pounds of pressure echoed off the concrete walls.
The knife slipped from the convict's paralyzed fingers, clattering onto the diamond-plate steel catwalk before tumbling into the water below. Cruz screamed, thrashing against the railing, his free fist beating desperately against Jax’s armored flanks, but my dog held the bite like a hydraulic clamp, his amber eyes dead-level and merciless.
"Jax, AUS!" I shouted, charging up the iron stairs, my weapon leveled at Cruz’s forehead.
Jax released the wrist on command.
He stepped back two inches, placing his front paws squarely across Cruz’s throat as the convict lay pinned against the cold steel deck. The dog’s lip was curled, his fangs gleaming in the twilight, a low, tectonic rumble vibrating through his chest that shook the very metal beneath them.
Down on the ground floor, the heavy wooden doors swung open with a bang.
Tommy and the SWAT stack breached the lower floor, securing the terrified barge tender who had been tied to an iron bollard near the intake sluice.
Standing in the center of the doorway, illuminated by the red and blue flashing lights of the arriving tactical convoy outside, was Nova.
She had slipped her harness lead to follow her father’s scent. She trotted across the bloodstained concrete of the lower bay, mounted the iron stairs with slow, measured steps, and sat down squarely beside Jax on the high catwalk.
She looked at the pinned convict, then looked up at her father.
Jax lowered his head, giving his daughter’s black muzzle one brief, reassuring nudge, before turning his eyes back to the road.
The escape was over. The ring was shattered.
Cruz looked up into the faces of the two black-masked dogs—the battle-scarred giant pinning his neck and the young pup watching him with cold, unyielding judgment.
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"You cops are crazy..." Cruz wept into the iron deck, his face streaked with tears and grease. "Even your damn pups fight like demons."
"They don't fight like demons," Tommy said from the foot of the stairs, clicking heavy steel cuffs around Cruz’s ankles. "They fight like family."
