Then the car was jumping forward, tires screeching, and it sped away with the man’s feet still dangling out of the open door.
Melanie must have dragged him inside, because no part of him was visible by the time the car whipped around the corner and the door slammed shut on its own.
Reese stood a moment, catching his breath, listening to the motor of the Mercedes roar as it drew farther and farther away, out of sight, and then, a few beats later, out of hearing range. He inhaled, and exhaled, and inhaled, and exhaled, and realized, finally, that he was a jumble of emotions inside, fractious and quivery and feeling a dozen different things at once, too tangled to parse at the moment. He waited for the cold dispassion that had been his constant companion to descend, but when it didn’t, he finally turned and headed back inside.
Perhaps Agent Maddox could be of some help in escaping.
Forty-Three
There was a hole. In the wall. Its edges jagged, the studs snapped off like broken teeth, exposed wires trailing like snakes over the debris-littered hardwood.
To be fair, it hadn’t been the sturdiest of walls. A bit of cinderblock around the foundation, but mostly just sheetrock, insulation, and inexpensive wood siding. A man couldn’t have run through it, but a truck – especially one with a big brush guard or hunting grill on the front – could have done it, easy. And it had. It had punched right through, like a fist through wet tissue paper. Broken some tables. Destroyed the big flat-screen TV. Sent the couch flying. There had been glasses and coffee mugs on some of the tables, and their shattered fragments glinted along the floor, where sunlight flooded in through the opening where the wall had been only an hour ago, when he left for the precinct.
It was funny what a person noticed, in moments of crisis: the finer details that the eyes caught upon, and which captured the attention. Amidst the detritus on the floor, Candy’s gaze landed on a pencil, a basic, yellow, No. 2 like he’d used at school as a kid. It lay under a table, the table where Benny’s corpse was draped, his head a ruin like a split melon, blood and tea comingled on the tabletop.
There were blood flecks on the pencil, tiny droplets.
“…Candy. Candy. Derek.”
He blinked. Jenny stood in front of him, her hands on his biceps – clutching hard, nails digging in, bright spots of pain that cut through the haze that had engulfed him the moment Jenny said Michelle’s gone.
He lifted his head and scanned the room, the contained chaos of it. He didn’t remember walking inside, wasn’t sure if the paramedics had already been inside, tending to the wounded – his wounded brothers – or if they’d arrived while he’d stood there, staring, sound coming to him in muted swells like he was underwater.
Cletus was being strapped down to a stretcher. Another paramedic shined a penlight in Talis’s eyes, asking him questions Candy couldn’t hear the answers to. He noted Cantrell, with a start; the agent was picking his way carefully through the debris, wearing sterile gloves and murmuring to himself as he surveyed the damage. Fox was talking to Eden, who was bent at the waist, examining a long gash at somebody’s hairline. One of the Cali boys; Tee, he realized, belatedly.
“Derek,” Jenny repeated, and he looked down into her worried face. Her eyes gleamed, shiny with checked tears, but she was composed, brave-faced. Unlike him, she’d taken command of the situation, wasn’t panicking.
“Can you hear me?” she asked.
His mouth had gone so dry that he had to swallow a few times and wet his lips before he could answer. “Yeah.”
Jenny’s brows knitted, and he read it as doubt. “Candy,” she said, gentler now that she had his attention. “We’re going to get her back. It’ll be okay.”
It’ll be okay. That was what you said when somebody was dying in the hospital; when the business went belly-up; when there was no hope left, you said it’ll be okay, because empty platitudes were the best a person could offer.
If the Chupacabras had Michelle, it wouldn’t be okay. She’d be laid out under a starry sky, staked to the ground–
The image filled his mind, so sudden, so exact, that his stomach heaved. He clenched his teeth tight against the urge to retch.
Jenny’s hands tightened on his arms, and the pain of her sharp nails was the good kind, the focusing kind. He didn’t realize he’d bowed his head until she was leaning in close, her hair feathery against his chin.
“Listen to me,” she said, fast and low, no louder than this small, sheltering place between them. “I know this is terrible, and I know you’re scared – we’re all scared. But you’re the president, and we need you to lead. You can’t fall apart on us, Derek, not now.”
It was exactly the sort of buck up, cowboy line their dad or Crockett would have used. Shit’s bad, so step up.
He took a deep breath, and lifted his head. He couldn’t fight the fear, but he could channel the anger. The fury. Let it run loose to keep the fear from choking him.
Jenny stepped back, though she still touched him. “Okay?”
Not even a little bit. “Tell me what happened.”
She nodded, the faintest grim smile tweaking her mouth. Good job.
When Candy got hold of Luis, there wouldn’t be enough of him left for the feds to ID him. Not even dental records.
~*~
“Where’s Albie?”
Eden wore a pair of sterile gloves and pressed a butterfly bandage over the split at Tee’s hairline with one deft movement while she pinched the skin with her other hand. She straightened. “That should do it,” she told him, and snapped the gloves off.
“Where’s Albie?” Fox repeated. His voice sounded very flat to his own ears – too flat. His heart didn’t race, and his stomach didn’t roll, but there was a faint whining in his ears; a catch at the bottom of every breath. They’d taken Michelle, and that was intolerable. Was something he was going to fix. But he couldn’t fix it without a plan. Without knowing all the particulars.
Eden finally turned toward him – he’d very nearly grabbed her and demanded that she look at him – and he saw the wildness in her eyes, warring grief and terror and shame.
He felt a tug in his gut, and squashed it, fast and hard. No time for that. No time for worrying about how she felt about any of this.
“They took Axelle, too,” she said. “He went after them.”
Of course he did. “Fucking idiot,” Fox muttered, and turned for the door, flicking his sunglasses down off his forehead and back into place.
“Charlie,” Eden protested.
“I’ll be back.”
Two ambulances sat slanted across the parking lot out front, but it was obvious where the truck had backed away from the ruined wall, turned, and spun out toward the highway. Deep ruts like fresh wounds in the sandy spoil. The front fender of one of the flatbeds had been clipped, bits of shattered headlight glinting on the ground.
A fed wearing white gloves was pacing along the length of the track, one of Cantrell’s young helpers – the blond from the precinct. She swung around when she heard Fox’s footfalls crunching on the gravel, brows drawn low over the rims of her sunglasses. “Don’t walk on the evidence,” she snapped.
Fox swung a leg over his bike and clipped on his helmet. “Wouldn’t dream of it, love.” He cranked the Harley, and gunned it down the path the truck had left, kicking up a plume of dust, and hit the highway in the middle of two wide-set dirt tracks laid thick on the asphalt.
It gave him a direction, if nothing else. He opened up the throttle, leaned low over the handlebars, and flew.
The dirt trail ended after half a mile, as he’d known it would. But the road was a long, straight stretch here, shimmering with heat mirages ahead despite the cool. He didn’t check the speedometer; no local cop could have caught him had they been lying in wait anyway.
Albie, you fucking git, he thought, teeth gritted against the stinging wind in his face. What will you do by yourself? Take down a whole bloody truck alone?
A turnoff loomed ahead, the bur
ned-out shell of an old shop on one corner. He remembered the intersection from his time living in Amarillo. Straight ahead would take him into downtown, but the left turn would take him the long way, through neighborhoods with more warehouses and machine shops than homes.
Any decision would be a gamble. One wrong step could cost him precious time.
He took the turn.
Roared down a bare stretch of road, and then signposts started to flash past, speed limits that he ignored, two cross-walks that he blew through. He passed a gas station, and a strip mall with dusty signage he couldn’t read. An apartment block, low-slung single story connected villas with flat roofs, and a plaster life-size horse holding up the sign.
The road curved, and forced him through a sequence of four-way stops that he pushed through, horns blaring, tires squealing. Warehouses reared up on either side. A three-way stop, and a wide, very visible parking lot in front of a warehouse with three huge roll-top doors open to the road. A bike parked haphazardly, and a man in leather and denim holding a gun on a smock-wearing man with his hands in the air.
Albie.
Fox nearly laid his bike down making the turn into the shop lot. Was off of it before the engine died. “Albie.” A sharp bark, an order.
Albie flinched, but didn’t lower his gun. “I have them,” he said through his teeth. “Help me.”
Fox stepped up beside him and took stock of the situation. The man in the smock was middle-aged, heavyset, with close-cropped gray hair and smudges of grease on his fingers. The stitching on the breast pocket read Ray, and his expression was one of unmistakable terror. Over his shoulder, through the open roll-top door, Albie glimpsed a jacked-up Ram with mud tires and a tool box. A younger man in a matching smock stood at the rear of the truck, a tire iron in his hand, his eyes wide and face pale.
“Albie,” Fox repeated.
When he got no answer, he took a closer look at his brother.
Albie was shaking. His face gleamed pale and sweaty in the sunlight, his jaw clenched tight, fine tremors cycling through every part of him. The muzzle of the gun vibrated faintly. His eyes – blue and cold in this moment – reminded Fox of Devin’s. Of his own.
“I don’t think it’s them, mate,” Fox said. His own voice came out calm; he felt calm. So long as someone needed him to be the one in charge, the voice of reason, the steady hand, there was no limit to the panic he could suppress.
Albie bared his teeth, chest heaving as he breathed. “It is. I followed them.”
“I don’t–”
“It’s them!”
“Please,” the man named Ray said, voice trembling. “I-I-I don’t know what he’s talking about. He just pulled a gun on me.”
“Dad,” the younger man called from the garage door.
“Do you mind if I have a look at your truck?” Fox asked. He showed his open palms. “No gun.” Not one visible. “Just a look.”
Ray swallowed hard and nodded.
“I’m going to go look at the truck,” Fox told Albie. “Don’t do anything.”
Albie didn’t acknowledge him.
“Easy, easy,” Fox said to the younger man as he approached. His smock read Tyler. “Don’t get any ideas about that.” He gestured to the tire iron and gave the kid a wide berth as he walked up the side of the truck.
“What’s his problem?” Tyler demanded. He was as scared as his father, but trying to cover it with useless bluster – the kind that led to rash decisions like taking a swing at someone. For Tyler’s sake, Fox hoped he didn’t make that mistake. “We didn’t do anything!”
“I know,” Fox said. The truck was an older model, with an extended cab, and suicide rear doors. He opened the front door – nothing but empty leather bucket seats and two massive gas station soda cups – and then the rear. More leather, a blanket, a tool box. “He’s had a rough morning.”
Fox turned to face him. “We’re looking for a truck. Something big, with a back seat, or maybe a camper shell on the bed – something with room for cargo. A brush guard. Big mud tires.” He framed the width of the tracks back at the clubhouse between two hands.
Tyler stared at him, breathing hard, wary, his gaze flicking out through the door, toward Albie, and his father.
“Have you seen another truck this morning? On this road?”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
Fox walked back out into the parking lot. “Ray, have you seen a truck similar to yours on the road this morning?”
“It’s Texas,” Ray said, staring fixedly at the muzzle of Albie’s gun. “There’s trucks like ours all over the place.”
“I’m looking for one big and powerful enough to drive through the wall of a house and back out again without too much damage. One with room for cargo. One–”
“Shit.” Ray’s eyes widened and rolled toward Fox, though he was careful not to turn his head. “There was one that passed us on our way in. Blew right past. I saw it in the rearview as it came by, and it had dust and plaster and shit all over the windshield. It was caught in the grill – and, shit, yeah, it had a brush guard. A big one. Like one you’d put on to go mudding.
“Hey, Ty, you remember that truck?”
“Describe it to me,” Fox said. “In better detail.”
“Shit, yeah, it was – lemme think. It was a Chevy – yeah. A new one. Black. Lift kit. Had those wide side mirrors, aftermarket chrome, like you’d use if you were pulling a camper or something. Black brush guard. Tinted windows. Camper shell on the back.”
“Wonderful,” Fox deadpanned. “It passed you?”
“Yeah. Going eighty, at least. Headed this way. Don’t know where it went, though.”
“That’s alright, we’ll find it.” Fox stepped in front of him, then, facing his brother. “Albie, were you listening?”
Albie grimaced. His gaze was trained – it was fixed. He had Ray in his sights, and all logic had abandoned him. He wanted answers; he wanted blood, and he wasn’t going to be picky about trivial details like innocent bystanders.
Fox had never seen him like this, and, frankly, it was pitiful.
“I looked in the truck.” He took a step forward. “And the girls weren’t there. They were never there.” Another step. “Where would they have put them? There wasn’t time.” Another step. “Did you hear what he said about the other truck? That was our boys. They’ve gone past here.” He reached up and curled his hand around the barrel of the gun. “We’re wasting time.”
The last was what finally seemed to penetrate. Albie blinked a few times, and his gaze sharpened; the harsh line of his mouth slackened.
“Albert,” Fox said, and he wasn’t a parent, but he’d heard enough parents speak to children to know that was how he sounded now. “Give me the gun.”
Albie blinked again, and his grip loosed just enough for Fox to wrench the pistol away. He tucked it into the back of his own waistband and then stepped forward and took Albie by the wrists. Walked him forcibly back toward the bikes.
“Sorry about that!” He called over his shoulder. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t call the police.”
Behind him, Ray said, “Shit, we’re Lean Dogs fans. Normally.” He muttered something unintelligible after.
Fox hadn’t been thinking about their cuts, plain as day. He wondered if anyone else had witnessed this little spectacle. The last thing the Dogs needed was bad press and a rumor mill amidst all this upheaval.
Priorities, a small voice chimed in the back of his head. He’d never been very good with those.
They reached the bikes, and Fox gave Albie a hard shake. “Snap out of it.”
Albie glared at him, and ripped out of his hold. But the next second he turned, and dropped his head, hands going to his hips. To keep them from shaking, Fox knew. To give them something solid to grab onto. He could see the tremors in Albie’s shoulders; hear them in his shuddering breaths.
“I was in the room,” he said in a choked voice. “Charlie, I was there with them, and I couldn’t get to them.”
“There was a truck driving through the wall,” Fox said. “No one could have gotten to them.”
Albie shot a glittering, hateful look over his shoulder. “You could have.”
Fox didn’t counter him; probably he could have. But he did put a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “So let’s go find them.”
Albie took a huge, unsteady breath, and nodded.
Forty-Four
“Do you have a way to contact Luis?” Cantrell asked. He looked more exhausted and lined than he had only a couple hours ago at the precinct. “Did you try calling back the number he used to reach you?”
“It was a blocked number,” Candy said, his gaze on the wrecked common room. “That won’t matter. If this is a ransom situation, he’ll make contact with us.”
“And if it isn’t?”
Candy shot him a glare.
Cantrell met it, not without sympathy, and then stepped away when his cell rang.
Colin approached, and Candy turned to face him, momentarily startled when he saw that Colin was carrying Jack. It was all-hands-on-deck, though, with no one to spare for babysitting. Oh, God, TJ…
“He’s down for his nap,” Colin said, before Candy could ask. “I just left him. Kid could sleep through anything, just like you.” A smile flickered and died. “What are we doing? What do you need?”
He took a deep breath, and tried not to think of Michelle, his little baby thing, laid out like a star. “I don’t–”
“Snow.” It was Cantrell, cellphone held out from his ear, expression freshly shocked. “It’s the guy I had on hospital watch. Maddox. Your boys there were attacked, and the perps got away with Melanie Menendez.”
Candy was fast losing his ability to absorb information.
“It was them,” Blue said, shaking his head, voice grim. “Shit. They orchestrated this job and that one at the same time, while you were outta the house, Candy.”
“Eric and Jesse,” he said, his tone calm – authoritative – his brain scrambling to keep up. “The cartel was waiting for the call, and one of them made it. We had moles under our roof the whole time.”
Lone Star (Dartmoor Book 7) Page 39
