The boys all glanced at each other, still uncertain.
Zeke showed up from the side of the house, looking impatient. He crossed his arms and glared at them. “Some kids your age just died the other day cooking meth. You want that to be you?”
“N-no Sir,” the baby faced one stammered.
“Who hired you to work here?” Brock asked. The kids all looked at each other again. “We’re not going to turn you in,” he said. “Just answer the question.”
“A guy named Morris,” the boy who had tried to fight said. “We don’t know his last name.”
Brock stared into the boy’s eyes. He got the sense the kid was telling the truth. “Do you know Rhys Dillon?”
“No.”
“Ever heard of him?”
“No.”
Brock flicked his eyes over at Zeke to see if they had any more questions. He didn’t. “Get out of here…and remember our deal. If I catch you at another lab I’ll remember your faces.”
Brock stepped aside and the kids took off out the back door.
“So there’s a middle man,” Zeke said, stepping around the white buckets and trash that littered the floor.
Brock pulled out his cell phone and gave Haverty a call. “We found a meth lab.”
There was a brief silence. “Should I ask how?” Haverty slowly asked.
“It could be as a result of a safety check, but maybe not.”
Another silence. “All right. Actually, are you even phoning me right now? Because I don’t know a Detective Moore on the force.”
“See, this is why I knew we’d work well together, Haverty.”
“Christ. Just give me the address. Is anyone there right now?”
“It’s abandoned, and we’ll be gone too. Dispatch a Hazmat team too if you can.”
“I said…don’t tell me anything more. Just the address.”
Brock shot off the address, keeping an eye on Zeke the whole time. The other shifter walked around the room, looking at the devices with great interest. “Don’t touch anything,” Brock told him after hanging up the phone.
“Where to now?”
“We’ll wait in the truck until the cops get here, just to make sure no one else comes inside.”
Leaving the house, they waited in the vehicle, watching from the distance. without being noticed. Two patrol cars were the first to arrive, followed by a Hazmat truck. A uniformed officer knocked on the front door while another went up the side of the house and saw the open door. He poked his head inside, and that was enough for him to call it. The other officer nodded at the men in the next patrol car. One started taping off the area, and the fourth joined them and the hazmat team, ready to enter the house and clear the scene.
“Let’s go,” Brock whispered.
“The second address?”
“No. The firehouse.”
The rest of the team would be wondering where they were. Forty-five minutes was excusable, but anything longer than that would make the Chief suspicious. He would have to find another time to sneak away and check out the second location, perhaps the next day after his shift ended.
Halfway to the firehouse his phone rang.
“The second meth lab exploded,” Jax said abruptly.
“The address Zeke just gave us?”
“Yeah.”
“Shit”
“I’ll bring your gear.”
“We’re on our way.”
The rest of the A-shift team was setting up outside the scene by the time Brock’s truck pulled up. The Chief was there too, assessing scene. Brock met Jax at the side of the truck and got into his gear. Dammit, he and Zeke should have come to this address first. They might have made it there before the explosion.
They might have saved someone’s life.
Or they could have gone up with them, if anyone was inside at all.