by Nico Rosso
A welder hissed and spattered outside as Hector and Thom prepped the bench seats. They muttered behind their masks and dragged their materials around, but they did solid work at the end. Arash punched the last hole in the floor panel and stepped out of the van with his tools. “Next?”
“Can you weld?” Ellie had been hovering close to keep things moving and checked over a list on her phone.
“I get by.” He wasn’t a master, but he knew enough for repairs.
“No.” Hector stopped welding and lifted his helmet. “No, he can’t. Only I weld.”
Thom yanked up his mask with a pout. “Hey, I’m gonna—”
“You’re not.” Hector turned on him. “None of you jokers are qualified. You’ll lay down a bad bead, then as soon as we take a hard turn, everything goes to hell.” He pointed with his gloved hand to Ellie. “No one welds but me.”
“Fine. They prep, you weld.” She waved Arash toward a tall stack of black-painted sheet steel with a sketched diagram taped to the top. “Lay the pieces out in this order on those sawhorses.”
“But don’t clamp anything down.” Hector lowered his mask and resumed welding. Two of the bench seats had already been completed. Arash saw that Hector had attached steel rings to the metal frames on each side. Perfect for shackles. Arash’s stomach dropped and swirled with sickening acid. Whoever was being transported, they weren’t VIPs.
He tried to hide his expression with the effort of organizing the sheet steel. Most of it was solid, but there was a perimeter of open grate around it. The dimensions were perfect for creating a partition between whoever was in the seats and the front of the van. He swallowed the rising bile and asked Ellie, “So you know what this gig is?” Any details would help him plan how to take down Olesk and the STR. Multiple drivers in multiple vans would complicate things, but that also meant they might be thinned out and could be taken on one at a time.
“I do.” She remained cagey. “Right now the gig is laying this work out.”
He double-checked the diagram and saw that the pieces were all in place. “Angle grinder?”
Hector stopped welding but kept his mask down. “What are you going to mess up?”
Arash balled a fist, then released it. How long was he going to have to dance with these tarantulas before he could step on them? At least he didn’t have to play nice. He moved toward Hector. “I was going to grind the paint off where the welds are supposed to go, but if you want to do garbage work, feel free.”
Hector tipped his mask up and pointed at Arash with the welding gun. “I never do garbage work.”
“Then you don’t weld through paint.” Arash didn’t back down. “Do you?” The muscles in Hector’s neck jumped and his jaw flexed. Thom stood at the ready next to him, his mouth moving but not forming words. Arash would go for Hector first. Thom looked like he hit hard, but he didn’t have too much meat on his bones and probably couldn’t take too many punches. The pressure built and Arash was so ready to break bones.
“If we don’t get this work done on time,” Ellie sliced through the tension with her dagger-sharp voice, “the gig fails. No one gets paid. The lucky ones might get dead. And the unlucky ones spend the rest of their lives looking over their shoulder.”
Those were higher stakes than anything he’d heard of from the STR. Marcos’s death was definitely unusual for the driving crew. The client for this gig created a brutal ethic. Arash shook out his arms to loosen them and turned to Ellie. “Angle grinder?”
“You’ll find all that in the shop.” She tipped her head to the second barn.
He walked that way, longing for the moment when his boots crunching on dirt was the only sound in the world. Like he was walking away from the smoking wreck of Olesk and his gang. In Arash’s imagination, another set of footsteps joined him. Stephanie, clear from danger and finally safe, strode with him.
The electric gnashing of the welder behind him erased the victorious image from Arash’s mind. There was no safety. He was stuck pretending to be part of the gang while building rolling prisons for people he didn’t know. Stephanie was out in the unknown, where he couldn’t help her.
* * *
STEPHANIE KNEW CRIME. She’d grown up in it, had seen the unmarked envelopes passed to her father, the unexpected meetings he had to take in the back of the restaurant during dinner, the stress that went beyond normal life and into the territory of betrayal, and the consequences of the law. Sitting in the front seat of Grant’s sedan, waiting for him to finish the second of this morning’s business meetings, she wondered how many people walking down this sidewalk or driving on this street recognized what was going on right next to them. She saw it. Even if she hadn’t been driving for one of the worst criminal organizations in the nation that day, she would’ve known something was wrong by the way they circled blocks and doubled back, throwing any potential tails before pulling up to nondescript brick buildings with empty storefronts and a dental office.
But no one looked twice at her, and she knew there’d been no tails on the vehicle. She leaned back casually and scrolled over her phone. Anyone, including Grant Hemmings, would think she was looking at social media pictures of food. But it was code, in public sight. Frontier Justice had set up several fake accounts where they could place messages. Each member had been assigned a stand-in. Because Mariana Balducci’s apple orchard was where the original Frontier Justice and this new iteration had started, her code image was apples. Ty had picked potatoes, and Vincent went with grapes. Of course Javier was a banana. But none of these showed up on the feed of the app. There was only one image from a fake account, of peaches, the code she’d picked to identify herself. The comment below read, “Winter is getting me down. I don’t know where to find any peaches.”
They didn’t know where she was. And she couldn’t tell them. If someone got into her phone and found she’d responded to this post with her location, they’d know she was double-dealing.
Grant came out of the dentist’s office and checked over the sidewalk before stepping toward the car. He seemed preoccupied, and she imagined this meeting kept building the details for the coming gig. She took her time shutting down the app and stowing her phone so she didn’t look hurried and suspicious. “Where to next?” she asked as he climbed into the back seat.
He wasn’t done processing his thoughts and took out his phone and typed without answering. After a few moments, he tossed his phone next to him and looked at her through the rearview mirror. “I’m starving.”
She started the car and pulled out into the flow of traffic. “Any place in mind?” Her own blood sugar was plunging, but she couldn’t let it affect her performance on the job. The idea of driving aimlessly through a city she didn’t know in search of a place that would satisfy the sociopath in the back seat ground her patience to a razor’s edge.
Grant rubbed his hands together. “Sonny’s Steak and Seafood.” He rattled off the address. “Always hit them up when I’m in town.”
She plugged the address into her phone at the next stoplight, then wove her way through town in an unpredictable route. Grant was back on his phone, face blank. There was so much information she had to get to Frontier Justice, including this restaurant now, but she had to wait with her teeth grinding.
After a few minutes and zero tails or suspicious eyes on them, she arrived at the low building with a discreet sign carved into a piece of weathered wood. The place looked like it had been built in the sixties. A pitched roof lay over a lava-stone facade with no windows. A single large lantern with amber glass swung gently in the breeze near the thick wood doors. Grant leaned forward with a fifty-dollar bill between his fingers. “You can take the car to get your own lunch, but get it to go and stick close.”
“You’ve got it.” She took the money and gave him a little salute with it. He nodded with a smirk, got out of the car and slid quickly into the restaurant. Eluding Arash at the mall
long enough to get the burner phone and send a couple messages had barely worked. Her cover story had held up for him, but she knew Grant wouldn’t tolerate any variance from his sphere of safety. Until she could figure out some other way to contact Frontier Justice, she had to act the part of the perfect criminal syndicate driver.
She pulled onto the street and drove in expanding rings around the steakhouse until she found a strip mall with something other than a chain restaurant. The spiced aromas from an empanada place led her from the parking lot and through the front doors. There were a couple occupied tall round tables, but it was clear from the wide counter and mass of people waiting that most of the business was takeout.
A dark-haired Latina woman behind the register smiled warmly when Stephanie approached. “Welcome in.” Stephanie knew that the woman probably said it to most people, but it felt so genuine that tears nearly welled in Stephanie’s eyes. All of her recent interactions had been so hazardous that she’d forgotten what it was like to simply make eye contact with another human and exchange smiles. The times she’d found that with Arash had been tinged with too much danger to feed her soul the way this casual interaction had. The woman continued, “What can I get for you?”
Stephanie stared at the handwritten menu above the counter and nearly told her to get in touch with Frontier Justice and tell them that Grant Hemmings of the Seventh Syndicate is in Reno while the STR are northeast of the city on a compound getting ready for the big gig. “One beef, one chicken and one chard to go.”
“Excellent.” The woman rang her up and pointed to the refrigerator case on the side wall. “Drink?” Stephanie made her selection and picked up two cellophane bags of dulce de leche cookies. The woman smiled knowingly and came up with a final total. The fifty-dollar bill more than covered it and Stephanie soon had a handful of change. A few of the bills went into the tip jar, the rest into her jacket pocket.
The lunch crowd continued behind Stephanie and she moved into the mix of people waiting for their orders. The numbers were called out and the group ebbed and flowed for a few minutes until she was up. The woman behind the counter had dealt with at least half a dozen people by the time Stephanie left. Their brief and basic interaction had probably been forgotten. No one in the place would remember Stephanie if she disappeared at the end of the day. Hell, she might not even make it through the next two hours.
Cold wind cut her outside. The heat from the to-go container in her hands was the only remnant of the positive feelings she’d gathered in the restaurant. She got into the sedan, started it and didn’t move. It had nearly a full tank of gas and plenty of power. Standing on the throttle would rocket her out of Reno. But she had to stay. Her mission wasn’t over. And no matter how many times she told herself he was just another crook in the gang, she couldn’t leave without knowing if the heart she saw in Arash was real.
* * *
HE WAS BUILDING a cage. The bench seats with their additional shackle points had been bolted down to the floor panels, and Arash now positioned one of the steel walls just behind the cab of the van. There was no door in the wall. Whoever went into this van was trapped.
The metal was still warm from Hector’s welds. He and Arash had stayed out of each other’s way for most of the build, but there had been plenty of hard looks from Thom.
The others didn’t seem to be bothered by the implications of what they constructed. It was just a job to them, like adding a tow hitch on a pickup truck or lowered struts on a street cruiser. Arash hadn’t forgotten what Olesk had said about someone growing a conscience. Marcos had learned what this gig was, and he couldn’t stomach it. But no one walked away from anything this big. Arash had to keep his ethic to himself in order to stay on with the STR, and it was eating away at his sanity.
The impact driver rattled in his hand. Each bolt down made the cage more complete. The wall was strong enough to hold back a person throwing themselves at it. Arash eyed the open side doors of the van and felt his breath grow faster. As if he was sealed in and running out of air. But he kept shooting the bolts through the flanges Hector had welded in. The panic ratcheted higher with each knock of the driver. He would have to warn Stephanie about this space when she got back.
If she got back.
He finished securing the front wall and hopped out of the van, chest heaving. Stephanie might already know about the cage in the van. If he showed her his feelings about it, she could rat him out to Olesk. Though he still didn’t know how her hints at an ethic lined up with any of this. Could she really be blinded by the cash? But how clean was he? Throughout the day he’d done perfect work securing the benches and the walls. No one was getting out of those vans because of what he had already done. Was this the price of his revenge?
Chapter Ten
The brief peace Stephanie had created while eating the empanadas and hoarding the feeling from the restaurant was shattered when Grant Hemmings skipped out of the steakhouse. She’d parked at the curb where she’d dropped him off and he slipped easily into the back seat. His eyes swam slightly and he brought the sharp aroma of gin with him. A loose grin looked more like a sneer. “Best steak in town,” he slurred. “You eat?”
“I did, thank you.” She pulled the bills from her jacket pocket. “Your change.”
Grant leaned forward, his eyes sliding from the money to her hand, then down her arm and to her chest. He licked his lips. “Keep it. You weren’t going to give all of it to me anyway.” He was right; she’d skimmed ten off the top. His gaze lingered too long on her body, then moved to her face. “Do you play?” She knew his leer, had seen it on countless men. Like he was untouchable and could touch anything or anyone he wanted. Like every woman in the world wanted him.
“I drive.” She gave him nothing. If she’d released her revulsion and anger, it would’ve been in a swift blow to his throat.
He blew out a disappointed breath and she smelled the pickled olives of his gimlets. “I’ll bet you’re a great driver.” Sulking, he leaned back into the seat and thankfully away from her.
“I am. Don’t worry.” She threw the car in gear to indicate it was time to move on. “You’re getting what you paid for.”
“Then drive.” He waved his hand with disappointment. She pulled onto the street and checked in the rearview mirror to see Grant staring out the side window, eyelids low and head rocking from side to side. Whether or not he was on time to his next appointment wasn’t her problem, so she took the car deeper into the city, conscious of doubling back and turning unexpectedly at times to shake any potential tails.
After seven blocks of silence, Grant took out his phone and rattled off an address. She plugged it into her nav and headed that way. “We’re late,” he growled, surly. “Hurry up.” So his drunk lunch had become her responsibility to fix.
“I’m to wait outside?” She urged the car faster and neared the destination.
“Yeah,” he spat. “You wait outside and then you drive me to the next one. That’s what you’re paid to do, right?”
“You paid for the best and you got the best.” The more sullen he became, the more cool water she drew from her well. She pulled up to the destination and remained facing forward. Grant organized himself, took a deep breath that didn’t brighten his face and stepped out, still showing some of the effects of the booze. He didn’t bother saying anything before slamming the car door and walking into the two-story business building with a smoked glass facade.
Another business meeting, another address she needed to relay to Frontier Justice. The Seventh Syndicate had kept their information regarding the human trafficking airtight. No leaks had hit her network or Vincent’s FBI contacts. Infiltrating the STR had already given Stephanie more intel than anyone had been able to collect. But it didn’t do any good if she couldn’t get the word out. There wasn’t even a sketchy-looking pay phone within view. Someone in this town must know where those nearly extinct phones were, but sh
e was at a loss unless on her home turf in San Francisco.
She turned the ring around her finger and breathed to slow time. Right now her job was driving Grant and collecting as many details as she could. He returned to the car a few minutes later. Whatever had happened in the meeting had erased his smug grin and replaced it with a sober, dark look on his face.
“I can’t be late to this next meeting. We’re about an hour away.” He read off an address in Incline Village, a very expensive neighborhood she knew on the north shore of Lake Tahoe. Friends of her family had multimillion-dollar second homes there that stood empty for most of the year.
“I’ll get you there.” She hit the gas and aimed for the highway south. Grant’s new quiet persisted. He just watched the passing scenery, and she imagined that he’d been dressed down for showing up to the meeting with a buzz. She made a definite note that whoever held an office in the glass building outranked Grant.
They quickly blew out of the city and the mountains churned around them. As she drove she organized her information by importance, so if she had a limited opportunity to get the word out, she’d relay the hottest intel first. Frontier Justice would have a lot to work with. But she remained in the dark. Especially with Arash. She’d given his name to Vincent and Ty when she’d reached out with the burner phone, but she hadn’t been able to receive anything they might’ve found. She didn’t need a dossier on Olesk and the others to know which side they were on. A profile on Arash was necessary. Yes, because she’d kissed him. But also because she still couldn’t place how his morality and sensibility fit in with the gang. Which was why she was able to kiss him in the first place. And damn it, it was still moving her, like a wave that had receded to gather strength before slamming back.
