He drove down past two more blocks of warehouses and then he had to turn right because the creek and the perimeter road made a dogleg turn to the right. The warehouse parking lots were well lighted and filled with trailers awaiting their trucks. They were also surrounded by high chain-link fences, so he couldn’t duck into one of the parking lots. He turned right again, which pointed him back toward Terminal Avenue. The Suburban stayed behind him, neither closing in nor falling back. At the next corner, he saw a semi rig pulling out of the gates beyond a warehouse’s loading-dock apron. He turned right and went through the gate as the semi pulled clear, ignoring the angry yell from the elderly gate guard. The Suburban had had to stop to let the semi get through the intersection, but it then turned right and came up to the gate as the guard was trying to slide it closed. Cam drove over to one of the empty loading docks, turned his pickup truck around as if he were going to back up to the dock, and then stopped.
There were trailers on either side of him, but he’d left enough room to drive out if he had to. He left his lights on and the engine running. A forklift driver up on the dock backed out of a nearby trailer with a load, but if he saw Cam he paid no attention. Cam saw the gate guard arguing with someone sitting on the driver’s side of the Suburban, and then, to his surprise, a very large man dressed all in black appeared around the back of the Suburban, grabbed the gate guard, and shoved him into the backseat of the Suburban. He then slid the gate fully open and got into the backseat himself, slamming the door shut behind him.
Show time, Cam thought, and there are at least three of them. A driver, someone in the backseat to hold the gate guard, the big guy, and maybe even a fourth in the right front seat. He put his foot on the brake, dropped the truck into drive, and waited as the Suburban came over to where he was parked, stopping about fifteen feet in front of him. All four doors came open at the same time, and as soon as he saw figures in the doors with what looked like baseball bats, he floored it, his truck leaping forward and hitting first the door on the driver’s side and then the left rear door, slamming them into them before the men had gotten clear. He swerved left, stomped on the brake, hit reverse, and this time backed up at full speed along the other side of the Suburban, aiming for the doors on the right sides, although by now the men who’d been getting out were diving out of the way of the roaring pickup truck as his rear bumper stripped the doors right off the vehicle. He slammed on the brakes again, put it in park, opened the front passenger door, and sent Frick out the door with a “Get ’em” command. Then he piled out the other door and rolled under the adjacent semi, pulling out the. 45 as he went and ending up in the prone position behind the trailer’s jack stand.
The shepherd achieved complete surprise, lunging at the nearest of the men on the right side and knocking him down in a frightening display of teeth and growling. From underneath the trailer, Cam couldn’t see the top half of the fourth man, but he could see that he had a baseball bat in one hand and a gun in the other and that was enough. These boys weren’t here to talk. Aiming at the man’s legs, he fired once with the. 45 from under the trailer and saw the heavy bullet hit him in the right shin, causing him to scream and windmill backward toward the loading dock, gun and baseball bat flying. He swung the gun around to set up on the man wrestling with Frick, but the guy was already down on the concrete, trying to protect his arms and face from the snarling shepherd. His bat was lying on the concrete.
Cam glanced quickly at the Suburban to see if the other two were getting out, but his position and his own pickup truck blocked the view. Just to make sure, he took careful aim and fired two rounds high, one through each side of the Suburban’s windshield. He knew that the trajectory was such that he wouldn’t hit anyone in the vehicle, but the big slugs did a satisfying job of showering safety glass all over the interior. He rolled then, in case someone was setting up on him, emerging at the back of the trailer. Frick was still shaking the man down on the pavement like a terrier with a rat. The man Cam had shot was wadded up in a fetal position against the loading dock, holding his broken leg and moaning. Cam sprinted toward his pickup, kicked the gun lying on the concrete under the Suburban, and then opened the door and yelled for Frick, who released the man, bounded over immediately, and jumped into the truck. He could see faces on the loading dock now, and men pointing at the two men down on the concrete. Cam slammed his door and burned rubber as he headed for the gate, which fortunately was still wide open. He hung a two-wheeled turn to the left and bolted out of the warehouse area onto Terminal Avenue, driving back up toward Tilly’s. The two gate goons stared at him as he flew by. He was tempted to throw a couple of rounds in their direction just on general principles, but he was past them too quickly. He checked his rearview mirror, but there were no headlights visible behind him.
He slowed as he reached the end of Terminal and turned right onto the access road just as two semis came rumbling by, headed into the warehouse complex. He saw some blood on Frick’s muzzle in the glare of their headlights. He’d trained her to run at full speed right at the target, knock the man down, deliver a dozen or so bites to the arms and hands, and then latch onto a coat or a shirt and shake him until he went limp and stopped resisting, all the while making as fierce a racket as she could. Frack didn’t have it in him to go on the offensive like that, although he was fully capable of all that and more if somebody came into the house or attacked Cam. At ninety pounds, Frick did just fine, and the sudden appearance of a German shepherd coming at you full tilt, ears flat, about nine yards of ivory showing and a wolf’s roar in her throat, was usually enough to paralyze any attacker.
“Good girl,” he told her repeatedly as he drove up the access road to the freeway at normal speed, still trying to control the shaking in his arms. “Very good girl.” It had begun to rain, and he switched on his wipers. The good news was that he’d gotten away from four assailants, none of whom would be in the mood to do much of anything for a while. The bad news was that four men had sucked him into an ambush by using the supposedly secret communications channel that he and Bobby Lee had set up. If those guys were cops, they’d probably manage to get out of there before the Sheriff’s Office showed up in response to the warehouse calls. They’d dump the gate guard somewhere and then ditch the battered Suburban, which was probably a throwaway drug seizure, as quickly as they could in some accommodating auto junkyard. The bullet wound would be harder to explain at an ER, but cops occasionally incurred a few self-inflicted wounds when they’d mess around with their own gun collections. All it would take would be one buddy corroborating the “accidental” circumstances, and then it would turn into a line-of-duty paper drill, along with a lot of ribbing from fellow officers. The dog bites might be a tougher proposition to explain, however.
He tried to recall faces, to remember if he’d ever seen any of those guys before, but the only thing he was pretty sure about was that they were not Manceford County cops, as had been the case with the older deputy who’d come calling at his house. The truth was that he still didn’t know anything about his attackers. It might easily have been one cop with some buddies, or just a leg-breaking squad for hire. There’d been no badges flashed or anyone yelling “Police officers. Freeze!” at him. So if they were all cops, then this thing was a whole lot bigger than Manceford County.