A mafia boss put a $500,000 bounty on a retired K-9—never expecting the old cop to fight back

Chapter 4

They moved parallel to the ridge line, keeping to the thickest timber, where wheels couldn’t follow. The going was slow and it was cruel: fallen logs, dense underbrush, steep ravines that stole the strength from Mike’s legs with every mile. Shadow ranged ahead, his old training reasserting itself like muscle memory, freezing at sounds Mike couldn’t hear — twice saving them from walking straight into a patrol.

Hunger took hold of Mike’s stomach by noon. His throat was raw, his water nearly gone. When they crossed a small stream, they both drank until they couldn’t, and Mike refilled his bottle, thinking bitterly that giardia was the least of his problems now.

He noticed Shadow favoring his left front paw. A cut, not deep, but enough — a wound that would slow the dog down on ground like this. Mike tore a strip from his shirt and wrapped it as best he could, and Shadow let him, patient as a saint.

His phone buzzed. A text from an unknown number. A single photograph.

It was the cabin. Or what was left of it — the roof collapsed, flames devouring the timbers, black smoke pouring into the sky like a wound in the afternoon.

You can’t hide, read the message. We will find you. And when we do, you’ll watch the dog die before we kill you too.

Mike deleted it and kept moving. Anger was a waste of fuel. Fear was a heavier waste. Only motion mattered now.

The helicopters came mid-afternoon, two of them, flying search patterns that crisscrossed the canopy, their rotors a steady thrum that never quite faded. Castellano had money to burn, and he was burning it. Mike revised his arithmetic: whatever help Sarah could arrange, it would need to arrive sooner than twenty-four hours.

He found an old logging road, overgrown but passable, and made a call. Roads were exposed — a gamble. But they were also speed, and speed was running out. He took the gamble, walking along the edge, ready to dive for cover at the first wrong sound.

They made good time for an hour. Then Shadow stopped, body rigid, a growl rumbling up from deep in his chest. Mike heard it a heartbeat later: an engine, approaching from behind.

He hauled the dog into the underbrush just as a black SUV rounded the curve — slow, deliberate, a searchlight mounted on the roof sweeping the road. Two silhouettes inside, both armed. Mike pressed himself flat against the muddy ground, ferns and a fallen log between him and death, and did not breathe as the vehicle crawled past and took the bend.

They couldn’t stay on the road. He led Shadow back into the woods at an angle that would eventually intersect the border, through terrain rough enough to laugh at vehicles. The price was speed — they crawled at maybe two miles an hour, every step a negotiation with exhaustion.

Darkness swallowed the forest, and Mike found shelter in the hollow of a massive fallen cedar, its heart rotted out, dry and hidden, just big enough for the two of them. He dared the phone. Twenty-one percent. Three missed calls from Sarah.

When he called back, her voice was tight with something like fear — and Sarah Chen had never been easy to frighten.

“Mike. Where are you? Castellano’s put the word out through the contractor networks. Half the mercenaries on the West Coast are heading your way. This stopped being about revenge. It’s about reputation now. If you get away, he looks weak. He can’t afford that.”

Mike gave her their coordinates. She was silent for a moment.

“You’re forty miles from the border. At your pace, that’s a day and a half. I don’t think you have a day and a half.”

“What are my options?”

“I’m working on something. There’s a man — ex-Marine, runs a wilderness guide service near the border. He owes me. If I can reach him, he might meet you halfway and get you across. But Mike. Anyone who helps you is putting their own head in the noose. You understand that.”

“I understand. Just tell me where to go.”

She gave him new coordinates: an abandoned fire service station, twenty miles north. Noon tomorrow. If her contact agreed, that was where he would meet them.

Mike ended the call and sat in the dark, the dog’s warmth pressed against his side, the rain drumming on the hollow log above them.

Twenty miles across mountains, with hunters on their trail and a price on both their heads.

Impossible. But impossible was all they had left.