Keane parked the SUV and they all got out.
“Do you need anything from me?” Shay asked his daughter as he helped her to put on her overfilled backpack. He saw the other kids rolling their backpacks around, but not his daughter. She didn’t want rollers on her bag. She just wanted sparkle and the Hello Kitty brand.
“Just ask Uncle Dale to look in on the dogs if you go out today.”
“Dani—”
“Please, Daddy.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
She threw her arms around his waist and hugged him. “Love you, Daddy.”
“Love you, too, baby.”
She pulled away and ran toward math camp. What his ten-year-old self would have thought of as the most boring camp ever, his daughter ran toward. Happily! He’d never seen her more excited. Well, at least she had the smart female genes from his Malone side.
“Call Dale,” Keane suddenly ordered, staring at his phone. “Tell him to stay home and take care of those dogs.”
“Why?” Finn asked.
“Because we’re going to the docks.”
“Why? What happened?”
He gripped his phone so tight, the glass started to crack. “Those motherfuckers have been texting me.”
“Our cousins? What did they say?”
“Just get in the car.”
“Keane, we’re not getting into a fight with our Jersey cousins.”
Keane glowered at Finn and, for a brief, horrifying moment, Shay was afraid he’d have to kill his eldest brother to save his younger one.
But then Keane blinked and said, “No. We’re not. We’re going there to protect Shay’s new girlfriend.”
“From what?” Shay asked.
“We can’t trust our cousins to leave her and her badger friends alone. So we’ll go there and calm the situation down ourselves.”
“Calm the situation down? By what? Starting a fight with the Malones?”
Keane shoved his damaged phone into his back pocket. “That’s on them.”
Shay watched his brother walk back toward the SUV, but he couldn’t let this go . . .
“And Tock is not my girlfriend!”
*
Tock and Mads continued searching around the containers until they got a text from Charlie telling them to meet her by the car. They had turned around, about to head back, when Mads’s head suddenly lifted and she started walking toward a big container.
She checked the door and reared back, nearly crashing into Tock.
“What?” Tock asked, steadying Mads before she could fall on her ass.
“Decomp.” She pointed at the container. “From in there.”
“Could be mob guys just working out their own shit.”
“With bears? Because that’s what I’m smelling. Dead bears.”
Pulling out her set of lockpicks from the back pocket of her jeans, Tock crouched down and got to work on the thick padlock. It was currently protected by a lockbox of some kind so she couldn’t just cut through the padlock. She had to work on it from underneath. A deterrent for run-of-the-mill thieves but not for badgers. Or wolves. Tock knew for a fact wolves could break into and out of anything.
She twisted the pick but briefly froze when she heard a new sound. Then she realized it was just Max and Streep coming around the storage container, followed a minute later by Nelle.
“You smelled it, too?” Max asked.
“Mads did,” Tock said, continuing her work.
With her teammates watching the area around them for trouble, Tock asked, “Where’s Charlie?”
“She’s already at the car. Waiting for us.”
“Should we let her know—”
“Not until we’re sure,” Max replied. “I don’t want to waste my sister’s time. She hates that.”
Tock felt the click of the padlock and relaxed when the lock finally opened. She tossed the lock aside and opened the handles near the bottom of the doors. With Mads’s help, they grabbed one of the long handles and dragged the right door open, leaving the left one closed.
The smell of decay hit hard once the door was open, but they didn’t cough or choke the way most full-humans did when hit with such a strong scent. Decomposition was just another stage of life; many predators were able to feed off decaying corpses.
Tock stepped inside, Mads behind her, and the rest of their teammates followed along.
They found the bodies at the end of the container. About eight of them. All bears. Grizzlies, one black, and a couple of polars. They smelled of death and the ocean. Not Tock’s favorite scent, but what could a girl do? Flies and maggots already swarmed the bodies, but that didn’t stop Max from digging around the pockets of the grizzlies until she found a wallet.
“Giuseppe Romanov.”
“That is not a common name,” Streep noted.
“Text Charlie and see what she wants us to—”
Max’s next words abruptly stopped when the sunlight coming in from the opening began to disappear. They all looked up in time to see a woman Tock didn’t recognize closing the door. Seconds before she closed it completely, the woman smiled and gave them a little wave.
The next second they were in complete darkness. That wasn’t a big deal, though. Badgers were nocturnal.
But still, Streep probably summed it up best when she muttered, “I don’t know about the rest of you guys . . . but I find all this disconcerting.”
*
Shay knew his brother wasn’t really concerned about “backing up” Mads and Tock at the New Jersey dock. They didn’t even know where the badgers were, and the docks were huge. He did, however, think Keane would at least pretend to be doing so. But that did not happen. Not once he spotted Seán and a healthy chunk of Malone cousins eating tacos near a food truck. They weren’t even by the docks, but several blocks away.
Why argue, though? Why bother reminding Keane that they were supposed to be in Jersey to help the badgers? Especially once Keane pulled to a stop, got out of the SUV, and charged over to their cousins like a rampaging rhino.
“You got something to say to me?” Keane challenged, stomping up to Seán, who was mid-bite of his taco. And interrupting an eating tiger . . . such a bad idea.
Instead of replying, though, Seán took another bite from his taco.
That’s when Keane slapped the rest of the taco out of his cousin’s hand.
*
Charlie leaned back against the SUV, stared at her phone, and waited for Max and her friends. Max had texted that they were “looking at one more thing,” so Charlie wasn’t too concerned that her sister and teammates were taking their time.
Besides, online shopping always kept Charlie busy when she had to wait for one of her sisters.