Chapter 8 - The Threat in the Mailbox
The vibration in my pocket felt like a live wire against my ribs.
Ten yards away, the two sweepers were kicking through the ferns, their blue flashlight beams slicing through the Pacific Northwest fog. One of them racked the slide of a heavy subcompact pistol, muttering a curse as the cold rain drummed against his nylon poncho.
I didn't engage. A firefight along the abandoned railway line would call in half the precinct, chain me to an interrogation table downtown, and leave Titan defenseless while city lawyers signed his death warrant.
I melted backward into the cedar shadows, matching my footsteps to the sudden rumble of an outbound freight train running along the parallel commercial line half a mile away. The ground trembled. The diesel roar swallowed every snap of a twig beneath my boots. By the time the sweepers realized someone had already disturbed the soil by the signal shack, I was over the chain-link fence, back in the cab of my 4Runner, and throwing the transmission into drive.
The screen of my phone lit up with a string of encrypted texts from David Vance:
Cross bypassed the morning docket. Emergency judicial order signed ex-parte at 4:15 AM. Animal Control transit van dispatched to Northgate with a police escort. You have twelve minutes.
My jaw set so hard the muscle throbbed in my cheek. I hit the gas, bypassing the main thoroughfares, taking the slick residential side streets of Phinney Ridge.
Before hitting the clinic, I needed my fallback bag. My personal home was a small craftsman bungalow tucked away in a quiet neighborhood off 65th—the home I had shared with Titan since he was an eight-week-old pup with oversized ears and a boundless drive to work.
When I pulled into the gravel alley behind my house, my headlights caught something wrong.
The security light above the garage had been smashed, glass glittering like wet diamonds across the driveway. The iron security gate was unlatched, swinging three inches in the wind.
My Glock was out before my boots hit the gravel. I kept my back low, sweeping the shadowed perimeter, my senses hyper-attuned. The house itself was locked tight, no thermal signatures visible through the ground-floor windows.
Then my eyes caught the mailbox nailed beside the front porch.
The sheet-metal door hung open. Pinned to the cedar post with a four-inch titanium fishing knife was a plastic evidence pouch.
Inside the pouch was a single sheet of paper: the official, full-color flyer for the Seattle Police Foundation’s annual awards dinner, where Titan and I had received a commendation the previous spring. Someone had used a black grease pencil to cross out my face. Beneath Titan’s photo, a single hand-scrawled sentence burned against the white paper:
A stray bullet in a kennel solves many problems. Walk away, Marcus. Let the dog take the fall, or the girl and her father won't make it to Friday.
A cold, vicious clarity settled over me. This was no longer about city politics, a staged viral outrage, or a bureaucratic inquiry into an alleged rogue police dog.
It was a total war of attrition.
They had tried to assassinate the federal prosecutor's daughter to derail the racketeering trial. Titan had shattered their timeline. Now, they were using every dirty lever—bribed city officials, manufactured media hysteria, and hired mercenaries—to clean up the loose ends.
I sliced the bag free with my tactical folder, kicked my front door open, and grabbed my go-bag from the hall closet: six spare magazines, my personal first-aid trauma kit, my backup encrypted radio, Titan’s heavy-duty leather field harness, and two bottles of canine broad-spectrum antibiotics Dr. Shaw had given me weeks ago.
May you like
I tossed the bag into the 4Runner, slammed the hood down, and turned toward Northgate.
"They want a war," I muttered into the empty cab, watching the red digital clock on my dash flip to 4:48 AM. "They're going to get one."
