Hungry Like the Wolf(14)
Which was IA’s way of saying he didn’t want Gage hanging around because it was going to take a hell of a lot longer than a little while. But getting into it with Coletti wasn’t going to help. While he might be more than ready to rip someone in half right now, Gage reined in his inner wolf. He jerked open the door and stormed out of the interrogation room, almost running over his boss, Deputy Chief Hal Mason. If he didn’t know better, he’d think Hal had been waiting for him.
“Why the hell is IA grilling my senior corporal?” Gage demanded.
Hal waited until Vince had gone into the room where they were questioning Xander before answering. “IA is just doing their due diligence on this shooting, that’s all. They aren’t trying to screw Corporal Riggs, you have my word on that.”
Gage snorted. “You could have fooled me.”
The way his boss was looking at him made Gage think Hal wasn’t telling him everything, but the deputy chief only sighed. “Go back to work. I’ll make sure Riggs gets a ride out to the compound when IA’s done with him.”
Gage hated the idea of leaving Xander with IA, but Coletti could have him in interrogation the rest of the day, and he still had to tell the Pack about Mackenzie Stone—who’d be at the compound in a little over an hour.
Shit.
“Tell Xander I’ll see him back at the compound.”
Hal nodded. “I will. And Gage? Good job out there today.”
Gage grunted.
Luckily, there was no sign of Mackenzie Stone’s news van in the lot when Gage arrived at the compound. He parked the SUV, then went around to the training building, figuring that’s where everyone would probably be.
He heard the sounds of growling before he even opened the door. Officers Landry Cooper and Eric Becker were sprawled on the couch in the dayroom watching TV and eating popcorn.
“What the hell’s going on back there?” Gage demanded, jerking his head toward the rear of the building.
Cooper, the team’s explosives expert and coincidentally—or maybe not so coincidentally—the most laid-back, in-control member of the Pack, shrugged. “Martinez and Delaney came back a little fired up from today’s action,” he said in his southern drawl. “They got into an argument with some of the other guys and now they’re just working it out.”
Which was code for going at each other like a couple of MMA fighters.
Gage swore. Sometimes he felt more like a damn school teacher than the commander of a team of highly trained police officers. “And Mike didn’t think it was necessary to break it up before they destroyed something expensive?”
Cooper grabbed a handful of popcorn from the big bowl Becker was holding. “Domestic abuse call came in about an hour ago. Mike took Duncan and Boudreaux with him.”
“Didn’t you consider that maybe you should step in and do something?” Gage all but snarled.
Cooper didn’t take his eyes off the TV show he was watching—a damn G.I. Joe cartoon, for crying out loud. “Not my argument.”
And sometimes it felt like he was in charge of a day care center—for out of control werewolves.
Gage didn’t waste his breath asking Becker why he didn’t do anything. The surveillance expert was one of the newest members of the team. He might be as big and tough as anyone in the unit, but they weren’t going to pay attention to anything he said. Besides, Gage didn’t think he could pry the tech and electronics experts away from their tub of popcorn.
He headed toward the back of the building, wincing at a particularly loud thud. There was always a little roughhousing after a mission. It was how werewolves dealt with stress. But usually he, Xander, or Mike were around to keep things from getting out of hand. And when you had sixteen oversized alpha wolves in one pack, things could get out of hand pretty damn quick.
He noticed a couple broken chairs and a crushed desk as he passed the classroom. The disagreement must have started there, then moved to the back of the building where the weight room and gym were. He hoped they were in the gym instead of the weight room—not only was there less stuff they could break, but there were also fewer things they could use as weapons.
But while three members of the team—Senior Corporal Zane Kendrick, Senior Corporal Trevor McCall, and Officer Alex Trevino—were in the gym tossing around a basketball, they weren’t the source of the racket he’d heard.
His nose confirmed the identity of the men in the weight room before he got there. All six remaining members of the team were in the weight room. Damn it.
On the bright side, only four of the men were fighting. Two of them—Senior Corporals Jayden Brooks and Carter Nelson—were doing their best to keep the other cops from grabbing anything they could use as weapons while at the same time working just as hard to keep them from destroying the workout equipment.