Lone Star (Dartmoor Book 7)

by Lauren Gilley

  A pained looked crossed Gwen’s face, screwed it up into something tortured and ugly, then she made a frustrated sound through her teeth and slammed her hands down into her lap, palms open, so they made a loud smack against her denim-covered thighs. “Ohmygod, okay, look.” She glanced toward the door, fear sparking in her eyes. When she turned back to them, she pitched forward in her chair and nearly fell out of it, her voice low and hushed and shaking. “The girls aren’t coming across the border.”

  Jenny could feel her brows scaling her forehead. Judging by her tone, Eden was equally shocked.

  “They’re American, okay? He’s kidnapping American girls and selling them.”

  “What–” Eden started.

  Jenny heard two very different sounds: hurried, booted footfalls moving down the hall. And a roar – soft but growing louder, quickly. An engine. A truck – closer, getting closer, too close.

  Jenny stood.

  Gwen said, “I’m sorry,” and ducked her head.

  The door banged open, and standing between the jambs was one of the two kids from the gas station. Jesse, she thought. He held a gun, its muzzle trained on her.

  ~*~

  “I never saw the girls, man,” Benny said, relaxed now, talking so quickly it made note-taking difficult. “Some of the guys, they would come into the club when I was working, and some of ‘em were real shitheads. This one guy – Carlos Something, I think? Whatever. He’d always come sit right next to me, and lean over and whisper in my ear, like. It was creepy.”

  “I bet,” Axelle deadpanned.

  He went on, oblivious. “He kept saying that if I thought the girls in the club would good, I should see the ones he could get me. I was like, ‘Dude, are you a pimp?’ And he was like–”

  Rapid footfalls from the back hallway caught Michelle’s attention. When she lifted her head, and saw who was approaching, time seemed to slow. To stretch out like taffy. Later, when she remembered these next few moments, all of it would be a shaky blur. But the heat of it all, the cascading tumble of details stood out, each one distinct, razor-edged and perfect.

  Eric, from the gas station, stalked forward from the mouth of the hallway, lifting a gun as he did so, leveling it on the back of Benny’s head. His face was dark with anger, brows drawn low, mouth a grim line. Not just angry, but murderous.

  Beside her, Axelle gasped, and sat up straight.

  Michelle sucked in a breath. “Look–” a warning, an alarm, a call for help. The first note of it lifted Albie’s head, caught Jackal’s attention, had Talis pushing away from his post against the back of the sofa.

  “–out!”

  She lunged to the side a fraction of a second before Eric fired.

  Benny was grinning when it happened, when the bullet entered the back of his skull, one last glimpse of that sideways smirk that he must have thought women found alluring. One last smile for a pretty girl he was trying to manipulate, and then his face erupted in a shower of red.

  Michelle closed her eyes; felt the hot, wet spray of blood and brain stripe up the side of her face, and then she was falling. Hit the floor hard on her left shoulder, the breath knocked out of her. She heard two thumps, even as the crack of the gunshot echoed inside her head.

  Heard the scrape of chairs, and a half-dozen wordless, furious shouts.

  “Drop the gun!” Albie barked. “Drop it now!”

  It landed on the hardwood with a clatter.

  Michelle cracked her eyes opened – the right was gummy with blood, her vision clouded by it. With her left she saw Benny’s lower half beneath the table; saw his boots, and his jeans, and the piss darkening the fabric, its ammonia stench burning her nose. Beyond she saw other scuffling boots, as Albie and Talis and Jackal raced to apprehend Eric.

  She craned her neck and saw Axelle, stomach-down on the floor, but alive, her head lifted, her gaze searching and frantic, gore splattered across her cheek.

  Michelle opened her mouth to say her name, and that was when she heard gunshots from outside the clubhouse, a quick volley. Heard a loud, rushing, roaring sound, getting louder, louder, louder–

  And then, just like Benny’s face – the wall exploded.

  ~*~

  Gwen staggered up and out of the chair. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said, voice wavering and tear-choked. She went to Jesse, who caught her around the waist, and shoved her back behind him, pushed her back out into the hallway.

  Jenny sat rooted, gaze trained on the gun in his hand, disbelief and fury fighting for supremacy in her chest. How in the hell was this happening? How dare that stupid little shit threaten her!

  Beside her, Eden sat stiff and erect, hands white-knuckled on the pad of paper, fingers twitching. She wanted to reach for a gun, Jenny figured, because that was her first instinct: grab a weapon and point it back. Nevermind if she got shot in the process: a threat like this was intolerable.

  “What are you doing?” Eden asked, voice only a little tight.

  Jesse shifted the gun’s aim toward her, and then back, swapping it between them, as he edged backward out of the room. Gwen disappeared.

  “Was this the plan from the beginning?” Eden asked. “Were you plants the whole time? All of you?”

  “No.” Jenny’s pulse throbbed in her ears, her throat, her wrists. “Nobody’s that slick. They lied to us, though. They called the cartel for help.”

  “Loyal to them,” Eden said. “Why? Are they that frightening?”

  “Yes,” Jenny said, just as Jesse said it, too.

  His brows shot up, startled, and then he scowled, an overdone, ridiculous expression; a child trying to look tough, to convince them that he was angry instead of petrified.

  “They won’t keep you alive,” Eden warned. “You’re disposable.”

  “Don’t care.”

  A shot rang out.

  All of Jenny’s muscles tensed at once, and Jesse’s eyes bugged. It had come from the common room. Followed by shouts, and a stampede of feet.

  “Shit,” he said, and ducked out the door, and out of sight.

  Eden was on her feet in an instant, hand going inside her jacket. She drew a gun and rushed for the door. Jenny leaped up to follow, empty-handed, but thrumming with energy.

  They’d just reached the door when they heard the crash. Heard and felt; it traveled up through the soles of her boots, and rattled around in her back teeth.

  “What the hell?” Eden snarled, and grasped at the doorframe to steady herself before dashing out.

  Jenny felt sweat bloom at her temples and under her arms; her lungs squeezed tight, and her next breath was hard. Adrenaline urged her on. Jesse wasn’t in sight, but she and Eden pelted down the hallway as more gunshots erupted in the common room, one after the next, from multiple guns, an uneven volley of cracks; she heard glass shattering, heard shouts and cries. It sounded like the world was ending.

  They reached the end of the hall, barreled around the corner…

  And skidded to a halt.

  The room was chaos. The room was destroyed. Boards, and cinderblocks, and hunks of sheetrock littered the floor and the tabletops; foam and pink fiberglass insulation was strewn across the boards like cotton candy. It looked like a tornado had hit the side of the clubhouse and punched a massive hole in the wall, scattering furniture and Lean Dogs alike.

  Not a tornado, she saw, but a truck, one that went screeching backward in reverse, sheetrock and plywood sliding off its hood and landing on top of a crumpled human form.

  The gunshots came from Albie, and Jackal, on their feet, though Albie’s face was bloodied, aimed at the windshield of the truck – but glancing off, not penetrating the glass. Talis was down, his eyes shut. Catcher knelt on the floor, face slicked with fresh blood, holding an equally-bloody Cletus in his arms, staring at him with blank shock.

  “No!” Albie shouted, running, scrambling and slipping on debris. “No!”

  But the truck was well away. She heard gears grind, and tires squeal, and th
e engine roar, and knew it was gone, rocketing off down the road.

  Albie stumbled through the hole it had left in the wall, a jagged, gaping thing already trying to collapse in on itself, studs clattering to the floor in the truck’s absence, more insulation sifting slowly down like snow.

  Jenny closed her eyes a moment – one long blink – and hoped the scene would be different when she opened them. That this was all a hallucination. But it was still there, in all its horror, and no matter how awful, she was going to have do something about it.

  “Oh – oh my–” She heard Darla say frantically, as she came running from the kitchen, and then the words choked off into a low scream.

  Jenny turned, and caught her by the shoulders. “Darla.” Voice sharp and commanding enough to catch and hold her gaze, despite the ugliness all around them. Darla’s eyes already brimmed with tears, an instant reaction. “Darla, listen. I don’t know who’s hurt, and who’s dead” – she had to swallow after the last word, gorge rising at the idea – “but we have to take charge. We have to be the tough ones here.”

  Behind her, someone groaned – that was at least one alive.

  “Darla.”

  Darla sucked in a deep, unsteady breath, her lips quivering, but she put her head back and nodded. “Okay. Yeah, okay, you’re right.” Sniffed hard, once, and then waved Jenny away so she could get to work. “One of you boys on your feet, call an ambulance.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” someone said – a Russian accent, that was Victor, then.

  Jenny turned just as Albie came back in through the opening in the wall, supporting a limping Pup, who had an arm flung over Albie’s shoulders.

  “I was on duty outside,” Pup said. “I shot right at ‘em, but they didn’t slow down. I had to dive outta the way.” He looked freshly bruised, and dazed.

  But beside him, Albie looked unhinged. His gaze sparked, white-rimmed and panicked, furious in a visible way that none of the Green stock ever were. His gaze came to Jenny, and he gestured over his shoulder with his gun. All the rest of it – Eden kneeling to check Cletus’s pulse, Jackal and Victor talking into phones, Talis easing upright with Darla’s hand at the back of his head – faded into a blur of colors and background noises.

  “They took them,” he said.

  Her heart lurched. “Who?” But she knew, without even scanning the floor again, exactly who he meant.

  He cast a wild glance around the room, like he was searching for a way that it was false, hoping that he hadn’t seen what really happened. She watched him take one of those slow blinks, too, eyes glazed and terrible when they opened. “Chelle and Axe. They took them.”

  Forty-Two

  Gringo frowned at his phone as he pulled it away from his ear. He’d called Cowboy twice now, and both times had gotten voicemail. He checked the call log, and his text streams, and tried a third time. Voicemail again.

  He tucked his phone away, still frowning.

  He didn’t mind being on guard duty – it was considerably less work than whatever was happening right now at the clubhouse. Considerably less interesting, too. His grandfather had always told him not to “borrow trouble,” whenever he claimed to be bored as a kid. “Say you’re bored, and somebody’ll find you something to do,” he’d cautioned, and then stuck a rake or a broom or a dust cloth in his hand and sicced him on chores. “The second God finds out you’re bored, he’ll have a laugh at your expense,” Grandpa would say.

  Gringo wasn’t sure that was how God worked – he hadn’t been on speaking terms with the Big Man in years – but he did believe in bad luck. In jinxes. So he tried not to feel too disappointed that he was stuck here babysitting the infirm.

  He was lounging across three chairs in a small family waiting room. Jinx and Melanie Menendez were on the same floor, on opposite ends of this hall. He’d been watching daytime TV and eating too much junk out of the vending machines, bored out of his skull, and probably “borrowing trouble” just for thinking that.

  The courtroom drama – someone had stolen his neighbor’s chickens and refused to give them back – went to commercial break and he pushed to his feet, stretching with a wince, his spine popping in several places. Might as well go down and see what Jinx was up to.

  Jinx was watching the same show, sitting propped up in bed, incongruous with his beard, and his tats, his growing-out undercut and his hospital gown with the little blue diamonds printed on it. He motioned toward the TV with the remote when Gringo entered. “Who steals chickens?”

  “That’s nothing.” Gringo dragged the visitor chair closer to the bed and dropped into it. That was the thing about sitting: the more you did of it, the more it seemed to be the only thing you could do. “Last episode, some guy was sleeping with his mother-in-law, and she drugged him and stole his fucking sperm.”

  “I saw that,” Jinx said, mouth twitching, looking caught between disbelief, disgust, and humor.

  Gringo noticed a groove between his brows, a tightness around his eyes. “You doing alright? They giving you enough morphine?”

  “I’m not taking the morphine. They’re giving me Tylenol.”

  “Aw, dude, don’t ever turn down morphine.”

  Jinx shook his head. “Nah. I don’t wanna be unconscious. Gotta stay sharp.”

  “Sharp for what?” Gringo leaned forward and reached out with a forefinger to poke his hip – and got batted away before he could make contact. “We’re gonna have to get you one of those walkers with the wheels on it, like my grandmother uses.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “You been on your feet yet?” he asked, more serious this time. If he felt bored and stir-crazy from an afternoon in a waiting room, what must it be like for someone like Jinx?

  “Yeah, to go to the bathroom.” Jinx glanced down at his blanket-covered knees, expression stony. “I wouldn’t let them leave the catheter in.”

  “Shit, yeah. How’d it go? Do you need a walker?”

  “No,” he said, a lie, because there was one over against the far wall.

  Gringo tilted his head, seeking his friend’s gaze, and Jinx finally rolled his eyes.

  “The fracture was on the left side. They said I can’t put any weight on that leg for six weeks.”

  “Shit. That sucks, dude.”

  “Yeah. What’s going on at home?”

  Gringo shrugged. “Candy was gonna go talk to the feds this morning. The Chupacabra guy – Luis – called. He and Candy are supposed to meet up in the morning.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He wants to get everything all lined up today so he’s ready.”

  Jinx nodded, his gaze drawing inward, expression troubled – regretful. “I should be there.”

  “Nah, man, you should stay here and eat Jell-O.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Yeah.” Gringo was sympathetic – God knew he wouldn’t have wanted to be in that bed, in that gown, with a leg he couldn’t put his weight on – but not overly so. Not considering. “Maybe you shouldn’t have gone off doing shit behind Candy’s back, and you wouldn’t be laid up.”

  Jinx’s face smoothed a moment. Absolute shock.

  Gringo was a little shocked himself; he wasn’t the brother who dispensed wisdom. Not ever.

  “I know why you didn’t like Pacer,” Gringo went on, “and, hell, I don’t even have a good reason, but I didn’t really like him either. He was a dumbass. But you let that old grudge make you stupid.”

  Jinx scowled. “I wasn’t the only one who went to Sandoval’s.”

  “Yeah. But you didn’t have to go along with them.”

  Jinx gave him a look.

  “Okay, so I’m real bad at this whole devil’s advocate thing. I’ve never done it before. What I mean is: you can’t be there now, tomorrow, but you can support the boss man from now on.”

  “This really ain’t your look.”

  “Tell me about it.” Gringo pushed a hand back through his hair and stood. “I’m freaking myself out here. Being reason
able and shit.”

  That earned a reluctant grin from Jinx.

  “Shit, I better go down and see if there’s any hot nurses to hit on.”

  That earned a chuckle. Success.

  Someone rapped on the door.

  “Ooh, maybe they’re coming to me,” Gringo joked.

  But when the door swung open, it revealed a tall, broad-shouldered, muscled man in scrubs. He had an ID clipped to his pocket, and wore gloves, carried a little tray with paper pill cups.

  But.

  Gringo knew an immediate, instinctual bolt of apprehension, tight in his belly, tingling in his fingertips. He didn’t kid himself by thinking he was as savvy as Fox, or cold as Talis, or effective with his fists as Candy. But something about this moment screamed wrong to him, and he listened.

  The man – the nurse – wore his hair shaved close to his head; he had a scar on one cheek, and his nose looked like it had been broken at least once. His neck spoke of weightlifting – lots of it. And his shoes, Gringo noted, as the door shut, and the nurse turned toward them, weren’t the usual Crocs or sneakers of every other nurse he’d seen. They were boots. Good, broken-in work boots that had been in dirt recently.

  Oh, shit, he thought.

  ~*~

  Tenny had been asleep for an hour or so. Reese had sat silent watch, occasionally checking the time on his phone, grateful for the quiet. It had given him time to think, to reflect on the conversation they’d had.

  It wasn’t hate that simmered in his breast now – at least not his own understanding of that emotion. No flaring lights and sirens in his mind, an internal snarl, a fury that left him wanting to lash out. He felt…calm. Peaceful. Clear-eyed and sharp. Mercy had said what Tenny had then echoed, that Fox was testing him. That was easier to swallow than the alternative, than the idea of Fox not caring for his own brother.

  Perhaps the problem all along had been about Ten not understanding family. The idea that he himself knew something that Tenny didn’t was a buoy. Maybe he was a person. Maybe he’d been learning that for a while now.