Grimm - The Icy Touch (21 page)

No, it wasn’t that. It was Lily Perkins—and the other girls, whoever they might be.

And it was Monroe. It was Nick getting suspended. It was how far these Icy Touch scum were pushing this town.

He turned a corner, drove by the shuttered metal shop, then slowed, catching sight of two men get out of a blue Lincoln Continental, half a block up. One of them had a pretty recognizable silhouette.

That beard. That bushy hair.

Hergden.

Hank turned left into a driveway between two warehouses. He didn’t want Hergden to recognize him.

He stopped his car, jumped out—and shivered in the cold wind. He got a trench coat from the trunk of the car, pulled it on, then headed to the corner of the building and peered cautiously around the edge. He could see Hergden and a big bull of a man with red hair walking up to the door of a warehouse just down the street. The bigger man unlocked the door, while Hergden glanced around, to see if they were watched.

Hank drew back and thought about calling for back up, right now.

But he called Renard instead.

He got straight through to his boss. “Captain? Listen, I’ve got something out here—that area where they gassed up their truck...”

“Griffin? It better be something solid. Bloom’s been on the phone to me. He’s got word this kidnapping might be Icy Touch. He wants in on this. We need to make some progress before the feds take it away from us.”

“This could be what we need. Did that Hergden character get released?”

“He did. After filing a police brutality complaint. We didn’t have enough to hold him and the DA said he didn’t want to follow up.”

“I just watched Pete Hergden walk into a warehouse out here, with a big red-haired guy I’ve never seen before. Not three blocks from that gas station.”

“We can set up a watch, but...”

“I need a warrant and I need back up, Captain. Right away.”

Silence. Renard seemed to be thinking about it.

“I’ll send out some back up. Give me the exact address. But the warrant, that’ll need to wait till you find something more. Maybe if you scout the place out.”

Hank ground his teeth. “Okay. But Captain—tell the patrol cars to stay off the street—they need to keep their distance till I give the word. Last time we spooked these guys and lost them.” He gave Renard the address.

“Keep me informed, Detective. And keep your head down.”

Hank clapped the phone shut and went back to the street. The two men had vanished into the warehouse. It was a one-story aluminum-sided place, neither big nor small, with construction material piled outside. Like someone was doing some building work inside.

Should he call Nick? He wanted to. But he couldn’t. This wasn’t a good time to call in the Grimm. Especially when the Grimm wasn’t carrying a badge just now.

Hank crossed the street, the wind snagging at his trench coat. He buttoned it up, mostly to hide his gun, and hurried past the front of the warehouse that the Wesen had gone into. The place was windowless on the front and there were no business signs on it that he could see.

He sidled past stacks of empty paint cans, piles of torn out wallboard, and an aluminum ladder, and walked down the narrow concrete passage between the building Hergden had gone in and the one on his right, which bore a sign that said “North Portland Imports.”

Hank moved as quietly as he could, listening. But he heard nothing but the wind whistling overhead.

He looked up, and saw a long strip of narrow windows well out of reach, stretching horizontally just under the roof overhang. One of the panes was slightly broken, in a lower corner. Brown paper blocked off the window from inside, like the storefront on Salem Boulevard.

Hank hurried back to the front of the building. He saw no one on the street, so he grasped the ladder, and, careful not to bang it on anything, he carried it back along the narrow alley. He set it up under the broken window, and climbed its rungs, trying to make as little sound as possible. When he reached the broken window, he pressed his ear to the papered-up section.

Nothing, for several seconds. Then... faintly... voices. A gruff man’s voice.

And then a girl’s voice. A fairly young girl.

“Don’t, I don’t need it—
don’t!”
she said; her voice sounded genuinely distressed.

Close enough for a warrant, anyway, along with the gas receipt, and Hergden’s being there.

Hank climbed down, wincing when the ladder squeaked, returned the ladder, and headed back to his car. He sat inside, and called Captain Renard.

“Captain? I’ve got something solid. Young girl in distress. Suspicious persons possibly connected to kidnapping and vehicular theft and the smuggling of...”

“Alright, alright, Griffin. Check your email in ten.”

Hank hung up and waited impatiently, phone in one hand, checking his watch, knowing that the Captain had sent some patrol cars out and worried that some overeager rookie would run his siren and alert the gang.

Finally his smartphone signaled to tell him he’d gotten an email. He opened the message, and smiled. The warrant.

Hank backed onto the street, drove to the corner and turned left. He went around the block to where he found four patrol cars waiting, along with a van of vice officers just finishing putting on helmets and bulletproof vests.

Sergeant Wu emerged from a patrol car, returning Hank’s wave.

A lanky guy with a blond crewcut nodded to Hank. Aaron Kasacki, the vice lieutenant.

“Detective!” he called. “We’re ready when the warrant’s here!”

“Already got it. Let’s do this.”

Standing in the alley across the street from the warehouse, Hank took the digital print out from his shirt pocket, unfolded it, and looked at it again.

It was a photograph of Lily Perkins.

He shook his head, thinking of this young teenager in the hands of these monsters. Not Wesen monsters—he’d come around to Nick’s viewpoint, that Wesen differences were sometimes monstrous, like the
Jinnamuru Xunte,
the flylike Wesen who’d temporarily blinded Nick, but others were just people with unusual characteristics. Maybe Wesen weren’t exactly human. But they were still people.

No, these guys would be monsters whether they were ordinary humans or not. The Wesen element just made them much trickier to apprehend. And maybe lethal to handle.

He folded the picture up, checked the straps on his Kevlar vest, and spoke into the radio on his shoulder.

“Okay, Lieutenant, let’s do this. Just remember, speed matters. These guys have a tendency to use tunnels to escape. We don’t know where those tunnels are and where they go, so we need to catch them before they can use one.”

“Copy that, Detective. We’re moving in.”

Moments later a large police van pulled up in front of the warehouse. The van was unmarked—they were going for a “jump out” style raid.

The back of the van popped open, and Kevlar-strapped officers with handguns, helmets, and headsets jumped out, and lined up to one side of the warehouse’s front door. Both hands on his semi-auto pistol, Hank hurried over to join them as an officer tried the door. It was locked.

Lieutenant Kasacki nodded to a powerfully built officer carrying the big metal handheld battering ram. The officer slammed the bazooka-shaped steel ram into the door close to the knob and the door flew inward.

The Lieutenant shouted, “Portland Police! Stay where you are!” as the officers streamed into the building, with Hank just a few steps behind the leader.

The door opened into a lobby done in red velvet, with several red velvet plush chairs, presumably for waiting customers.

Hank figured none of the Icy Touch thugs would be woged—they wouldn’t risk that in front of a phalanx of police officers. And by now they must know that cops were raiding the warehouse.

He followed the lieutenant and two other officers down the hallway at the back of the lobby. Immediately Hank saw Hergden ahead of them, running away at the other end of the hall, his distinctive bushy hair bobbing as he went. The officers with Hank were already rushing through a side door off the hallway—they’d seen the girls in there.

Hank shouted, “Hergden! Police! Stop!”

Hergden partly turned as he ran, and fired a random shot down the hall with a big revolver. Hank moved to the side and the bullet hummed passed his right ear.

Hank paused, then fired back, aiming carefully and using only two rounds, afraid he might accidentally hit one of the girls. The bullets from his powerful police handgun could punch right through these thin walls.

Hergden was hit, stumbled, then fired again, the shot going into the floor. He fell on his side, doubling up, groaning, then he tossed the gun aside.

“Don’t shoot!” he grunted. “I’m not going anywhere!”

Hank moved to him—saw the injured man half woge into a growling wolflike face for a moment, maybe in sheer pain and fury. Then the Blutbad suppressed the woge, gritting his teeth, squeezing his eyes shut.

Hank picked up the discarded revolver and glanced behind him to see if Hergden’s shot had hit anyone. Sergeant Wu and the other officers were ushering two girls out of one of the rooms. No one seemed hurt.

He turned back to Hergden.

“Where are the rest of the girls, Hergden? And where’s the tunnel?”

“You shot me,” Hergden groaned, sounding amazed.

“Yeah. Where’s the...”

“Detective?”

Hank turned to see the lieutenant coming toward him. Kasacki opened his visor, revealing a grin.

“We’ve got the girls. At least some of them—maybe all. And I think we found that tunnel, too. It’s another closet setup. The other suspects seemed to have busted ass like rats down a hole already...”

A uniformed African-American female hurried down the hall toward them. She had a stethoscope around her neck and carried a large red and white medical kit.

“Man down?” she asked.

“Suspect, here, took two rounds,” Hank said. “I’d like to cuff him if you okay it.”

She went down on one knee and examined the now-limp form of Hergden.

“You won’t have to, Detective,” she said after a moment. “Two hits, one up pretty high in the rib cage— doesn’t look like there’s any point in trying to resuscitate.”

* * *

They didn’t have a warrant for the adjacent buildings but they had probable cause to follow the tunnel back.

Hank broke out his flashlight. He and Sergeant Wu shared a look of resignation as they approached the tunnel.

“Not this again,” Hank murmured. Peering into the opening, he could see the tunnel was pretty poorly shored-up. Nodding to Wu, but wishing it was Nick and his finely honed Grimm instincts following him into the hole and not the sergeant, who knew nothing of the real dangers that lurked inside, Hank climbed down the ladder and began to walk along the grimy passage. Wu shuffled along behind him.

The narrow way soon broke through a curved concrete wall and they found themselves in a large drainage tunnel, full of old silt deposited on the floor by a shallow green stream.

Wu hesitated, looking at the ground.

“That’s weird,” he said.

“What?”

Wu laughed softly. “Those tracks look almost like hooves. Like someone was really
hoofing
it.”

Hank realized he couldn’t let the sergeant come any further, not without telling him about the Wesen. And he couldn’t do that, not without speaking to Nick.

“Yeah—um, Wu, how about if you head back, get some patrol cars looking wide through the area. Maybe someone can figure out where this tunnel comes out.”

“Good call, Detective. You’d better not follow this thing back yourself...”

“Right. I’ll be up there pretty soon.”

Hank didn’t like misleading Wu, but he felt he had no choice. Plus, he’d noticed another track near the hooflike mark. It was the footprint of a girl’s shoe.

He was fairly certain the Icy Touch gangsters had taken at least one of the girls with them. It didn’t matter which one.

Sergeant Wu went back up the tunnel. Hank stayed, thought about it for a moment. Once again wished he had Nick with him.

This, right now, would be a really handy time to have a Grimm around.

He shook his head and started down the drainage tunnel.

The dripping, cracked ceiling was barely an inch over Hank’s head; though he tried to stay quiet his footsteps alternately clacked and squished on the muddy edges of the tunnel floor. Hank walked on about fifty yards, came to a turn and halted; he heard the echo of unintelligible voices. He switched off the flashlight, pocketed it, drew his gun, and craned to look around the corner.

Standing in a pool of light about thirty feet ahead, two figures were at the bottom of a ladder. One was climbing quickly up; the other, with a silhouette almost like a two-legged bull—reminding Hank of a minotaur—was looking up, waiting for his turn.

Hank stepped into view.

“Police! Hold it!”

The minotaur turned, and roared, its guttural voice booming up and down the tunnel. Half bent over, the Icy Touch Wesen charged toward Hank, like a bull charging toward a matador.

Hank raised the pistol, started to shout a warning—the Wesen wasn’t showing a weapon and Hank was reluctant to just open up on him. But the creature came at him so quickly, before Hank could pull the trigger he was past Hank’s gun muzzle, and on him, driving him back.

Struck in the lower chest, Hank felt like he’d just been hit by a car. He found himself skidding backwards on the slimy floor, water sloshing over the shoulders of his trench coat.

Another perfectly good coat, ruined,
he thought dimly.

The breath was knocked out of him and the dark tunnel seemed to spin around the looming outline of the Wesen. But Hank still had the gun—he raised it and fired. The muzzle flash lit a snarling bestial face, exposing a flattened nose, red eyes, downturned bovine ears, and horns.

Mordstier,
Hank remembered. He’d seen the entry in one of Nick’s Grimm books.

Hank could see blood along the creature’s side—his bullet had torn into the Mordstier’s shirt, slicing along the ribs.

Hank raised up on an elbow for a better shot—but suddenly the creature was gone, hooves clacking as it moved away.