Private Dublin

Chapter 46

I couldn’t remember falling asleep, but at some point exhaustion swept over me like a tide, and as the adrenalin dissipated, fatigue carried me to a place of nightmares. I was back in the chair, staring down the barrel of Raymond Chalmont’s gun. Only this time I didn’t escape. He pulled the trigger and in the muzzle flash I was transported to the flaming wreckage of the Sea Knight helicopter I’d been piloting when it was shot down and many of my comrades had died. The nightmare seemed so real, I could have sworn I felt the heat of the flames on my face as I watched the chopper burn. But there was no crash and no chair, just the wild imaginings of my tormented mind trying to make sense of a life that had already seen too much horror and violence.

Andi saved me from the dreamscape when she shook me awake, and for one bleary-eyed moment I struggled to recall why I was sleeping sitting up in the front seat of a car.

“There’s something happening,” she said, gesturing down the street.

It all came flooding back to me. My abduction by Raymond Chalmont, the three warehouses, our stakeout, Andi volunteering to take first watch.

I glanced at the dashboard and saw it was 3:42 a.m. I looked down the street to see a large truck parked in the yard outside of the warehouse owned by Longshore Holdings.

“We should take a closer look,” Andi suggested.

I nodded and took the optical camera from the gear bag on the back seat. We opened the car doors quietly and crept out. We headed along the street, carefully hugging the building line and shadows.

When we reached the adjacent warehouse, Andi and I clambered over a high wall and dropped into the front yard, which was filled with a fleet of delivery vans belonging to an electrical components business. We crept across the paved area, trying to stay clear of the field of view of the security cameras mounted on the exterior walls of the warehouse.

Once on the other side of the yard, Andi and I climbed onto the roof of one of the delivery vans and peered over the high perimeter wall. The Longshore Holdings warehouse was an old Victorian building that looked as though it had been renovated and extended many times in its long history. There was no sign or business markings of any kind, and the windows were opaque. The truck outside was an unmarked late-model DAF 18-wheeler. Its rear doors were open toward the warehouse loading bay, and a team of six men were using pneumatic trolleys to unload boxes on pallets.

I took photographs and tried to get headshots of all six men and close ups of the boxes they were shifting.

“What is that?” Andi asked.

I lowered the camera and switched to playback to scroll through the images I’d taken. When I came to a clear one of a man pulling a pallet load of boxes, I zoomed in, and the word stamped on the side of the carton came into focus: Xylazine.

“What is it?” Andi asked when I showed her the photo.

She crouched behind the wall and used her phone to search for an answer.

“That’s weird,” she said. “It’s a tranquilizer used on horses. Legal for veterinary use, but if it’s legitimate, why are they moving it in the middle of the night?”