Mike scowled at him, his brows drawing together to make his already chiseled features look extra fierce. “I don’t have a sweating problem, you jackass. I’m wearing thirty-five pounds of Kevlar on a hot Texas day. Of course I’m going to sweat.”
“I’m not sweating,” Xander pointed out.
“That’s because you haven’t hit puberty yet,” Mike retorted. “But just wait, in another year or two, it will happen—I promise.”
Gage chuckled as his squad leaders unloaded their weapons and put away their gear. Another tense situation defused—and he didn’t mean the one with the hostages. Keeping his pack of alpha werewolves under control was just as much a part of his job as figuring out when to green-light an operation or determining the best way to enter a building full of armed thugs. In some ways it was the toughest part of the job. Because nobody wanted to have a bunch of out-of-control SWAT types running around town, especially when they also happened to be werewolves.
Yeah, they were a pain in the ass sometimes. But at the end of the day, they were his pack and he wouldn’t want it any other way.
* * *
“What the hell’s going on, Vince?” Gage asked as the Internal Affairs officer ran down the same list of questions for the third time.
After dropping Mike off at the compound, he and Xander had come to police headquarters for what was supposed to be a quick debriefing on what had obviously been a clean shooting. But they had already been here for almost two hours.
The gray-haired man looked at him over the top of his glasses. “Just being thorough, Gage.”
That was a crock of shit. It was standard procedure in an officer-involved shooting to talk to both the cop who’d done the shooting and his supervisor on the scene, but if this was just about being thorough, Internal Affairs wouldn’t have put him and Xander in separate rooms for questioning.
“You already have a statement from the woman Xander saved,” Gage pointed out. “She corroborated what he said—that the gunman was in the process of pulling the trigger on her. According to the other hostages in the E-Brand building and the employees at the bank they robbed, the guy had been coked up to all hell. Even his own crew admitted he hadn’t been in control. How much more thorough do you need to be?”
“Just work with me on this, okay?” Vince sighed. “Trust me. We have our reasons.”
Trust and Internal Affairs normally didn’t go together, but it wasn’t as if Gage had much of a choice. Unless he wanted to call in a union rep and really make a mess of this situation. Which he didn’t.
So, Gage leaned back in his chair and answered Vince Coletti’s questions again. God, he hoped Xander was keeping his cool in the other room. His senior squad leader was smart and had been in these shooting reviews before, so he knew what to say—and more importantly, what not to say. If the questioning seemed like it was heading in a bad direction, he was savvy enough to ask for his union rep. But Xander also had a short fuse sometimes. If IA got in his face, he might tell them to pound sand.
“Okay, I think we’re good,” Vince said after the fourth rehash of his story. “We’re going to need to talk to Corporal Riggs for a little while longer, though.”
Gage stared at the man. “Seriously?”
Vince gave him what was probably supposed to be a placating smile. “Don’t worry. I’ll have patrol give him a ride out to the compound.”
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
