“Why is it always my fault?”
“Because it usually is.”
“You’re starting to sound like Cas.”
“Nick.”
“I need you to call him. Please.”
Another sigh. “Why?”
“Because there’s a lab here, and he knows where it is.”
She relayed the news to someone in the room with her.
The phone exchanged hands. Sam came on the line. “We’re coming down. Don’t do anything until we get there.”
“I don’t need you here. I can handle it myself.”
“Nicholas.”
“Samuel.”
“I’d rather we go together, instead of you going alone with Trev.”
“We can trust Trev,” Anna said in the background.
“No we can’t,” Sam argued.
“Despite my obvious hatred for the guy,” I said, “I do think we can trust him. I just need him to talk to me.”
Sam was silent, then said, “Fine. But first sign of trouble, call. I don’t like you being down there without backup.”
“You’re like a broken record, you know that? I said I could take care of myself. I don’t need you to hold my hand.”
“Stop being so damn defensive. You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, I got it, boss. I’ll send out a bat signal if shit gets real. Now, is Anna going to call Trev or not?”
“She’s calling him now on the other cell.”
I waited. Sam waited. I could hear Anna talking in the background, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying.
After a few minutes, she came back on the line. “He said to tell you to stop being so obstinate.”
I didn’t even know what that meant. “Fine.”
She went back to Trev to tell him he’d gotten his way, then said good-bye. To me she said, “He’s coming to pick you up right now.”
“He doesn’t even know where I’m staying.”
“It’s Trev,” she said. “Of course he knows.”
Trev and I didn’t talk much on the way out to the lab. Fine by me. It took us nearly twenty minutes to reach it. It was an old dairy farm, stuck in the middle of nowhere. There was a run-down house on the property, the windows boarded shut. The barn was in good shape though, and had clearly been kept up.
That must have been where the lab was hidden.
Trev parked just outside the double barn doors with the Jag pointed outward, for a quick escape.
“Did you go in the other night?” I asked him. “After you dumped me on the side of the road?”
“No.” He shut the car off. “I just drove past, then parked about a half mile away and walked back. I wanted to do some surveillance before I broke in.”
“And?” I asked.
“Nothing. No activity. None whatsoever.”
At least I hadn’t missed any fun.
There was a chain on the barn doors, padlocked with a commercial-grade lock. Thankfully, Trev had thought to bring bolt cutters, and we were through in less than a minute.
The doors shuddered as we opened them, the tracks corroded from neglect. Inside, the place was pitch-black and smelled faintly of hay and wet animals.
Trev clicked on a flashlight and shot the beam across the space. There were several rooms on the left where the horses would have been kept. Another room on the right, probably for supplies. There was a hayloft fully intact above us. Bats flickered in the beam of light.
“So how do we get in?” I said.
“Good question.”
I was the first one inside, and I used the light cast from Trev’s flashlight to guide me. I checked the horse stalls and didn’t find anything suspicious. Trev checked the supply room. Nothing there, either. There was one more room, on the right, in the way back. That, too, was empty.
“Shit,” I muttered. “Why do they have to hide their hidden lab so well?”
“It’s gotta be here somewhere.” Trev returned to the main part of the barn. “I’ll check the hayloft just in case.”
Seemed unlikely they’d hide a lab in a hayloft, but whatever. Gave me a chance to snoop alone.
Using my boot, I cleared away dry hay from the concrete floor of the back room. No embedded door handles. No obvious seams in the concrete. I went back out to the main room and did a circle as my eyes adjusted to the darkness.
Something wasn’t right about this place. I just couldn’t tell what yet. I went to the back wall of the barn and ran my hand along it, feeling for anything that stuck out from the raw wood. There was another door there, but it led straight to the outside.
I glanced at the empty back room again. Then at the back wall.
“Trev,” I called.
He hung his head over the edge of the loft. “Yeah?”