Chapter 7 - Shadows at the Tree Line
By three o’clock in the morning, the veterinary hospital was locked down by a full detachment of armed federal marshals. Dr. Shaw had been treated for a concussion and was back on her feet, fiercely guarding Titan’s newly established clean room with two armed federal agents flanking the door. The assassin, identified as an ex-mercenary on the payroll of North-Pac’s maritime security division, was under twenty-four-hour armed guard at Harborview Medical Center with a shattered radius and a fractured skull.
Titan was stable. The burst of movement had miraculously accelerated his blood circulation, allowing the secondary dose of antivenom Dr. Shaw administered to flood his system. The swelling on his snout was beginning to recede, leaving a raw, angry puncture mark that would leave a permanent scar.
He was alive. But the clock was ticking.
"You have six hours, Marcus," David Vance said, leaning against my 4Runner in the wet shadows of the hospital parking lot. The federal prosecutor was wearing a heavy dark parka, handing me a thermal imaging scope and an evidence retrieval kit from his trunk. "At nine o'clock this morning, Councilman Raymond Cross and the Director of Animal Control will appear before a King County municipal judge to demand an emergency warrant to seize Titan. Cross has packed the docket. Unless we have undeniable, physical proof connecting the snake at Centennial Park to North-Pac before that gavel falls, the judge will grant the order. They will take your dog by force."
"They took the box from the park," I said, checking the battery on the thermal optic. "What am I looking for?"
"Centennial Park isn't just grass and swings," Vance pointed out, tapping a topographical map on his tablet. "The north perimeter borders the old BNSF railway spur that runs straight down to the commercial docks. That railway has been decommissioned for five years, but it’s the only unmonitored blind spot between the park and the shipping yards. If someone brought an exotic crate into that park on foot without being caught on public traffic cameras, they came in along that rail line."
"And they had an exit point," I finished his thought.
"Find where they staged the delivery," Vance said, his eyes burning with resolve. "I'll hold the line in court as long as I can. But Marcus... you are technically suspended. If internal affairs or the precinct finds you at that crime scene, they will arrest you for tampering with evidence."
"Let them try," I said, putting the truck into gear.
The rain had turned into a thick, clinging mist by the time I reached the north side of Centennial Park. The city streetlights flickered against the heavy foliage, casting long, distorted shadows across the wet earth. The yellow police tape that had marked the original confrontation was shredded, fluttering limply in the freezing wind.
I left my vehicle half a mile away, slipped through the broken chain-link fence, and entered the overgrown treeline behind the playground.
The forest floor was a thick soup of decaying cedar needles and wet mud. I activated the handheld thermal scope, bringing the rubber eyepiece to my face. The world turned into shades of green and glowing white.
Even four hours after the assault on the park ranger, the ground retained thermal signatures where the heavy mud had been churned up, exposing warmer layers of subterranean earth.
I moved silently, keeping low to avoid the headlights of occasional patrol cruisers sweeping the main boulevard. Fifty yards deep into the brush, near the rusted iron tracks of the old BNSF line, the thermal scope illuminated a distinct footprint pattern: heavy, lugged combat boots, deep impressions indicating a runner carrying significant weight.
I followed the trail down the embankment.
Beside an abandoned concrete signal shack, the boot prints stopped near a fresh set of tire tracks. The tire impressions were wide, aggressive—all-terrain truck tires with a distinctive chevron tread pattern.
I knelt, pulling a small evidence ruler and a digital macro-lens camera from my kit. As I snapped photographs of the tire tread, my flashlight beam caught something small, metallic, and reflective trapped in the prickly undergrowth beside the tracks.
I used a pair of plastic evidence tweezers to extract it.
It wasn't trash. It was a serialized aluminum seal, the kind used to lock intermodal shipping containers arriving from international cargo vessels.
Stenciled across the aluminum band in black industrial ink was a code: NPL-TAC-4099-BIO.
North-Pac Logistics. Tacoma. Biological cargo.
The bastards hadn't just dropped off the snake; they had cut the seal directly at the rail line, loaded the viper into the acrylic trap, and carried it straight to where Lily was playing.
Suddenly, a loud snap broke the silence of the woods behind me.
I dropped the evidence bag into my inner pocket, drew my Glock, and pressed my back flat against the cold concrete of the signal shack, holding my breath.
Through the trees, two figures in dark rain ponchos were moving swiftly along the tracks, sweeping the brush with high-intensity blue-filtered flashlights.
"He dropped the seal somewhere near the switch," one of the men muttered, his voice carrying clearly over the rustle of the wet leaves. "The boss said if that container tag links back to Bay 14 at the docks, every single one of us is going down for federal conspiracy. Find it and burn the brush."
"What about the cop and his dog?" the other voice asked, the beam of his light sweeping within two feet of my boots.
"Don't worry about the dog," the first man sneered. "Councilman Cross is handling the dog. By noon today, that mutt will be in a municipal incinerator."
May you like
I tightened my finger on the trigger, waiting for the light to hit my chest. But as the beam hovered inches from my jacket, my phone in my pocket vibrated against my ribs with three short, rapid pulses—a signal from the hospital.
The warrant had been signed early. Animal Control was already at the clinic.
