Renegade Protector

by Nico Rosso

  She spit ironically, “Thanks for letting me make my own choices.”

  The world was slipping from Ty’s grasp and he had no idea how to hold on. His ancestor had stood on this land and helped create a group to protect people against impossible odds, but would he have known what to do now? Ty could only tell her, “I never wanted to take anything from you.”

  Mariana stood as rooted as one of her trees. “Get off my property.”

  It felt like the blood completely drained from Ty, leaving him bone cold.

  Vincent spoke up carefully. “The threat is still out there.”

  Mariana burned him with her eyes. “I have a dog and a rifle. And I have a phone to call the real police if anything happens.”

  Before Vincent could say anything else, Stephanie put her hand on his arm and urged him toward the cars. They got in, started their engines and waited. Mariana did not move. Ty knew there was nothing else he could do. He’d threatened the very thing she’d been defending all along. He walked to his car. Mariana watched him, expression hard. This woman, whom he’d held so close, was now so far away.

  He climbed into his car and drove down the road, leading the way for Stephanie and Vincent. Mariana and her house grew smaller in his rearview mirror. The road twisted, and when the property came back into view, Mariana was gone. Each breath racked Ty with pain, as if his ribs had been crushed and the jagged points tore him apart from the inside. Mariana was gone.

  Chapter Twelve

  Rage burned Mariana numb. She had to grip the anger tight to her center, because if she let it slip, the pain would be too great. Ty had hidden himself from her. While he was nestling close in her life, making love to her, part of him was betraying her trust. He wanted her house. Everyone wanted it.

  She carried the grocery bags down the hallway to the kitchen, floorboards creaking with every step. So what if Frontier Justice had been founded under this roof? That didn’t give any of them the right to come back to claim it. And if her family had helped create the group, then she had the authority to tell them all to disappear.

  The bags splayed out on the island, spilling some of their contents. Had her parents never told her about Frontier Justice because she hadn’t been ready to listen, or had they not known, either? A series of Spanish curse words she’d heard her mother use when frustrated ran through her mind. Mariana voiced them in the kitchen, but they didn’t relieve the fury and agony that gripped her. The shouts only served to scare Toro, who slunk to the other side of the island with his tail low.

  The groceries were getting warm, but she couldn’t put anything away until she’d erased the evidence from last night. She swept the crumbs from the cutting board and stashed it in the sink. She slid the bread knife back into the block and she braced her hands on the counter for support. The house and the orchard outside seemed to be spinning around her. Ty’s face was inescapable. The last thing she’d seen before falling asleep and the first vision of the day. And she saw him, racked with pain as he tried to explain himself to her. A part of her had wanted to reach out to him, but that sympathetic urge was overshadowed by her nearly blinding torment.

  She barely paid attention to where the groceries went. The confrontation with Ty kept circling again and again as she picked apart every word. Her eyes burned with tears. She’d just found him, and now he was probably lost forever. But she hadn’t known all of him in the first place. Was he fighting to save her house for himself, or for her? It didn’t matter. Did it? He was gone. She was alone again.

  Toro growled and hurried out the dog door at the back of the kitchen. Her chest tightened with the thought of Ty coming back. The unresolved mistrust and hurt outweighed any unfortunate excitement to see him again. She swung out the side door and stalked around the porch to the front of the house.

  Her high vantage revealed no car coming up the road. Toro barked. He was behind the house. Ice ran up her spine. She hoped he was just aggravated at a deer in the back orchard, but it was the wrong time of day for them to be moving through.

  The rifle was upstairs in her bedroom closet. She walked carefully to where Toro kept barking, and hoped she wouldn’t need the gun. The dog poised, hackles raised and stance wide. His focus was up the hill, along the fire road between the sections of trees she and Ty had worked in the day before. She couldn’t see anything worth barking at. “Toro.” She tried to call him back. The usually obedient dog wouldn’t budge.

  Between the dog’s warning vocalizations, a buzzing sound grew from the back part of the property. The trees weren’t flowering, though, and Sydney’s bees would have no reason to swarm there. As the sound grew closer, variances emerged, rising and falling in pitch. It wasn’t natural. It was mechanical.

  Her legs were running before she knew where she was going. Muscles burned as she pushed up the hill. Right toward whatever was coming. Toro sped next to her. She pulled up just short of the crest and crept forward. The buzzing was closer. She peeked just over the ridge. Four men dressed in black on motocross motorcycles sped toward her property. They swung over the fire road as it emerged from a stand of trees and powered into the short valley before the hill she stood on. Their black shining helmets made them seem more like poisonous beetles than human beings.

  “Toro, come,” she whispered and ran as fast as she could back toward the house. Her phone was in the kitchen. The rifle was upstairs. As she sped down the hill, she saw a car on the road leading to her property. It wasn’t Ty or any of the others who’d been there that day.

  The sound of engines grew louder over her shoulders. She lost sight of the car ahead when she reached the house and burst in through the side door to the kitchen. Snatching up her phone, she sped through the hallway and up the stairs. Luckily, Toro stuck with her into the bedroom instead of trying to take on any of the men who were coming.

  She grabbed the rifle and immediately levered a cartridge into the chamber. Her front window showed the car had passed the fence line of her property and continued toward the house. Rushing across the room to the back window, she saw no sign of the motorcycle men on the hill, but their engines were yelling.

  Standing in the middle of the room, she tried to keep an eye on both the front and back windows. Who would get there first? Her heart pounded. Panic tried to freeze her. But she would not go down without a fight. Frontier Justice had been founded in her damn house.

  She held the rifle in one hand and dialed 911 with the other. Before the operator answered, the black sedan screeched to a stop near the front of her house. The doors all opened and four men got out. Each one held a pistol at the ready.

  “Nine-one-one. What’s your emergency?” The woman was measured and calm.

  Mariana put the phone on the floor and opened the front window. “This is Mariana Balducci at the end of Oak Valley Road. There are at least four men on my property...” She leaned her rifle out the window and was quickly spotted by the men in the front. They retreated behind the car’s open doors. Three of them pointed their pistols at her. One spoke into a walkie-talkie.

  The operator’s voice was tinny and small. “Ma’am? Ma’am, are you there? Can you speak?”

  Motorcycle engines screamed out behind Mariana. Crouching, she sped to the back window in time to see the four riders just start to come down the hill. But the men in the front were already out of their car and could get to her house much faster. She returned to that window to see them stepping out from the safety of their car and moving forward.

  Her throat clenched in fear. She lifted the rifle to her shoulder and rested the barrel on the sill of the open window. The men spotted her and again hurried back. Mariana pulled the trigger and sent a bullet at the front of the car. It struck the windshield and pinged off without breaking through.

  Bulletproof.

  The motorcycles growled closer at her back.

  She forced herself to speak, if the 911 operator could h
ear her choked voice. “Please send help.” But there was no way anyone would show up in time. Mariana had only the bullets in the rifle, and the ones from the box in the closet.

  One of the men below sneaked above his car window to point his pistol at her. She fired at him, hoping to at least discourage him or throw his aim off. Her bullet struck the car door with a thud. The man ducked, but recovered quickly and readied to shoot.

  A strained gasp filled her lungs. She’d been so focused on the men below that a new car on the road toward her house had sped close, unnoticed. It was Ty’s car. Maybe he’d pulled off on a side street and hidden in a stand of trees instead of leaving. She’d turned to walk into her house before he’d disappeared. Watching him drive all the way into the distance would’ve torn her apart.

  A shot rang out and the top corner of her window frame splintered. The men at the car were too occupied with her to see Ty coming. He was only a few seconds away. Another bullet smashed a pane of glass. She shot down at the car, hoping they wouldn’t turn to see Ty.

  Two blasts sounded from behind her. Bullets whizzed through the back window and slammed into the plaster ceiling. The men on the motorcycles were firing at her.

  The initial rush of relief at seeing Ty coming was smothered by a wave of fear. If she had to hold off the riders in the back, she couldn’t give him any help at the front. She glanced through the broken rear window and saw the motorcycle men had stopped toward the top edge of the orchard to fire from there. All the wires that she and Ty had set would be useless if they didn’t venture farther down.

  One of the riders must have seen her and fired another shot through the window. That one had just streaked over her head when two more smashed through the window at the front. Certain death crisscrossed her bedroom.

  She threw the rug from beside the bed over the broken glass at the front window and knelt on it to aim down. The men took cover, one of them speaking again into his walkie-talkie. Ty’s car sped up behind them on the last rise to her house. He didn’t let up and the car sailed off the ground for a few feet before slamming into the rear of the black sedan.

  Metal crushed. Glass and plastic exploded from the impact. The sedan slid forward and Ty’s car listed to one side. His airbag deployed, so she couldn’t see him. Terror clutched her throat. The man closest to the crash lay on the ground, unconscious. The other three had scattered away from the car, but slowly gathered themselves.

  One of them swung his pistol around toward Ty’s car. She quickly cocked her rifle again and fired at the man. Her shot missed, kicking up a puff of dirt a few feet from the man, but it was enough to send him running for cover. He made it one step when another blast came from below and spun him to the ground.

  Ty emerged from his car, firing his pistol at the men. She was able to breathe again. He moved with lethal precision. Two shots, then he slid to cover behind his car. The first man he had hit lay curled on the ground, clutching at his side. His fallen pistol was too far for him to reach.

  She levered another round into the chamber and scanned for the other men at the side of their car. Between her and Ty, they might be able to hold them off.

  A barrage from the back hill changed her mind and sent her sprawling to the floor. The riders had adjusted their aim, and the bullets pierced the window and smacked into the wall opposite. If Mariana had been standing there, she would’ve been dead.

  Toro cowered in the corner, probably the safest part of the room. But she couldn’t hide. Coiling up to a crouch, she braced her rifle on the front window again. Ty peeked up from his cover behind his car and pointed toward the back of her house. “Hold them off!” he shouted, then took aim at one of the men who tried to shift positions at the sedan.

  The man shot wildly at Ty, who remained cool and returned fire to send the man scrambling again for safety. Ty yelled up to her, “The orchard!” He seemed to have the men at the front pinned, but she nearly locked up at the thought of leaving him alone.

  But another fan of bullets came from the back, through the window and into the wall, this time closer to her. If the riders weren’t stopped, they’d riddle her bedroom from their vantage. She crawled to the back window, grabbing a pillow off the bed on the way. Sweeping back and forth with the pillow, she cleared enough broken glass to give her a spot to fire from.

  The men were close enough that she could see some kind of walkie-talkie attached to the side of their helmets. They were communicating and coordinating their fire. All four of them aimed at once. She gritted her teeth and fired four shots as fast as she could. Her intent was to send a bullet at each rider, but by the time she got to the fourth, her aim was so far off the round didn’t even hit the hill behind her house.

  The riders, though, took her counterattack very seriously. Their engines revved high and they sped into the deeper cover of the orchard. She tried to track them with the front sight of the rifle, but they wove too quickly through the trees.

  Until one of them hit a wire. The front of the motorcycle abruptly stopped and the back end rose up, pitching the man over the handlebars and into the dirt. He rolled, body twisted with pain, at the base of a tree. The others turned to see what happened and throttled back on their bikes. They picked their way more carefully through the orchard.

  One man abandoned his motorcycle completely and took cover behind a tree. Another rider was flushed onto the main path down the middle of the orchard, just like Ty had planned. The bike made a larger target and she let a bullet fly at it. She was rewarded with a metallic ping, but couldn’t tell if the machine was damaged. The man sped the bike back into the orchard but hit a wire and lost his balance.

  She shot again at the motorcycle, this time producing a broken whirring sound that rose in pitch, then abruptly died. The rider scurried back from the useless bike. Mariana chased him with a shot. His yelp of pain was muffled in his helmet. The man leaped behind a tree, dragging a wounded leg behind him. Her stomach flipped over. She’d been pushed to this violence and hated that she had to cause this harm.

  The other rider who’d abandoned his motorcycle fired at her. Wood splinters rained down from the window frame. She shifted her aim to him and pulled the trigger. Click. The rifle was empty.

  * * *

  TY FOUGHT TO keep panic from climbing too high in his throat. The two men were still crouching on the other side of the bulletproof car. He could hold them off for now, but if they coordinated an attack from both sides, he’d have to pick one of them and be exposed to the other.

  Worse than that, the sound of Mariana’s rifle from the second floor had gone silent. Pistol fire continued crackling on the back hill. The bullets hit her house and smashed windows. Had she been hit?

  He wouldn’t think it possible. He couldn’t imagine her hurt and bleeding. Ty hated that his instinct to not leave sight of Mariana’s property had been right. The right thing to do would’ve been to clear out and respect her space. The Hanley Group didn’t care about any of his personal problems, though, and he couldn’t have just disappeared, abandoning her to fight alone. He’d known the choice to hide on a side street had been correct when he’d spotted the black sedan speeding up toward the orchard.

  Two of those four men were out of the fight for now. The others were blocking his way into the house and to Mariana. She could hate Ty. He could live with that. If she wanted him to walk away forever, he would. After he knew she was safe.

  He focused his fear and anger on the two men. They were barely visible by the nose of the sedan. Ty was all the way at the back of his car, which leaned on the rear bumper of the black car. The impact had closed the sedan’s back two doors, but the front ones were still open. He recoiled, then broke cover and fired at the men to keep their heads down. Releasing the power in his legs, he sprinted to the open driver’s-side door of the sedan.

  One of the men stood and shot at Ty, who quickly ducked. The bulletproof window took one of th
e rounds, the other skipped off the roof of the car. Ty righted himself and fired back. The man fell, dead. Before Ty could line up his sights on the other man, he fled up the stairs of the front porch and hid himself at the corner of the house.

  The rifle remained silent from the bedroom. There was still one man between Ty and Mariana.

  * * *

  MARIANA’S HEART SEIZED tight and she sprawled on the floor. Pushing the empty rifle ahead of her, she crawled toward the closet, hissing every curse word she knew in Spanish and English. A new volley of bullets from the back hill chased her. Some streaked from the rear window and out the front. As she passed her phone, she heard the operator still trying. “Ma’am. Ma’am, are you hurt? The police are on their way.”

  Mariana barked back, “And an ambulance.”

  To get to the box of shells on the shelf, Mariana would have to stand. She waited until another shot smacked into the back of her house, then forced herself up. A pair of shoes and an old throw pillow tumbled down around her as she searched the shelf. Her pulse thundered in her ears. Finally, she found the box and got back down on the ground.

  Shaking fingers dumped the shells from the box and tried to load them. The first two spun out of her grip. She managed to get one in, and established a rhythm for the rest. The shooting intensified at the front of her house, then grew quiet.

  Dread knifed at her. Ty was down there. She clutched the rifle and peeked out the front window. “Dios,” she breathed out. Ty stood behind the driver’s-side door of the black sedan, aiming toward the side of her house.

  He caught sight of her and tapped his chest with relief. “You good?” he called up.

  “Fine,” she answered. “You?”

  “Perfect.” He tensed, as if seeing something ahead. Past him, she spotted another car coming up the road. Vincent’s SUV sped closer, before the police were even in sight. Gunfire crackled from the back hill and punched into her house. Ty pointed in that direction. “Get them!”