Sherlock was ninety-five percent certain that whoever had taken John meant for him to find them. The trail was far too obvious, especially for one that meandered through London like this one did. Though the winding trail did make it a bit more difficult for him to deduce precisely where they had taken John.
He'd just narrowed the location down to an area filled with abandoned and empty warehouses, any of which they could be using to hide John, when his phone beeped. He opened the video file absently, then froze when he heard the sound of John in what appeared to be a blind panic. He looked down at the screen, unable for a long moment to look away from the image of John locked in a monstrosity of a chair, blood staining his neck and dripping slowly from his fingers where his mindless thrashing against the metal cuffs and collar had broken the skin.
Sherlock tried to force himself to focus on something other than John's obvious suffering, tried to look for anything that might help him find John. A small part of his brain absently made a note of the strange word John kept mouthing, while the rest of his attention was fixed on the small room John was being kept in.
In the end, though, he could see nothing that would help him. Nothing at all. And then the video feed abruptly cut off.
He tried frantically to track the message back to the sender, pulling out every single trick he could think of and developing a few new ones when those didn't work. But no matter what he tried, nothing got him any closer to whoever had sent the video.
Sherlock snarled, the hand not holding his phone coming up to grasp at his hair. "There's nothing. Absolutely nothing. Useless." He bit back the urge to fling the phone at the nearest wall, gritted his teeth, and opened up a new text message.
He absolutely hated the idea of calling on Mycroft for help, but he couldn't think of any other course of action. Then, the instant before he began typing, his eyes widened as his brain finally provided him with the answer he'd been looking for.
On the ground, near John's feet where it had most likely fallen out of one of the kidnapper's pockets, had been a small slip of paper. A small slip of paper with a partial address written in blue ink. An address that was right in the middle of the block of warehouses he'd already tracked John to.
Sherlock grinned sharply, shoving his phone back into his pocket. There was no need for Mycroft just yet after all. Maybe if he was feeling generous, he'd text his brother later to help with the inevitable clean-up.
Assuming, of course, that he left anything to clean up. Considering the condition John appeared to be in on the video, Sherlock thought he might just tear the men to shreds and burn the warehouse down around their ears. He didn't normally care about such over the top violence, but in this case he thought he might make an exception.
After all, he'd already made so many exceptions for John. One more wouldn't hurt.
He made good time, arriving at the warehouse in less than ten minutes. He slipped quietly around the side of the building, stopping once to peer through one of the dingy windows. There was no sign of John, which was as expected, but there were three men who were almost certainly hired thugs lounging around near the metal door in the back wall while one man in a dark suit stood nearby, glaring down at his watch.
Given the men's positions near the metal door and the relative dimensions of the building Sherlock was almost completely positive that John's prison was behind the door. All he had to do was take care of the men guarding it, convince the man in the suit that it would be in his best interests to confess his entire plot and get John out. And all without John's very handy gun, which one of the thugs had stuck in the waistband of his trousers.
He glanced around, looking for anything he could use as a weapon. After a moment, he noticed something and smiled.
This was going to be interesting.