The Truth

by Heather Slade

  “Thank you,” she whispered. “I don’t understand, though.”

  “Which part?”

  “Why do I need to be protected. I’m nobody. I’m nothing.” She’d continue, but she was back to feeling sorry for herself, and after what he’d just told her, she had no right to.

  “To a lot of people, you’re everything.” His tone of voice had changed so drastically, she was stunned. Instead of sounding angry, he was sad.

  “Why are you here?”

  “I’m taking Mercer’s place.” He laughed. “Well, not in that way. I’m your new lead.”

  She had no idea what that meant.

  “Oh, back to your other question, the one about your friends. They’re your friends and that’s it. We may know everything there is to know about them, straight down to their favorite breakfast cereal, but they know nothing about you other than what they’ve learned from spending the last fourteen years with you.”

  “Thank, God,” she mumbled.

  “Mercer’s the real deal too, sweetheart.”

  The real deal? What did that mean? She shook her head, too conflicted to be able to sort through her feelings.

  “He loves you, and while he’d kick my ass across this fine country of ours for saying so, I’m tellin’ you anyway. And you know what else? Doc loved your mother too. Wanna know how I know that?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. “I was there. That’s how I know.”

  The tears were back, and Quinn had no idea what to say.

  “Every single thing that woman ever did was for you, Skipper. Not because of you.”

  “What did you call me?”

  Razor laughed. “Not the most original code name, I’ll admit, but I didn’t come up with it.”

  “Why Skipper?”

  “You’re gonna hate this.” He was still smiling which made it so hard to be mad at him.

  “That hasn’t stopped you so far.”

  Razor laughed harder. “Damn, you remind me of her sometimes. Anyway, your mother’s code name is Barbie.”

  “Barbie and Skipper?”

  Razor cringed. “Yep.”

  “Skipper is Barbie’s sister, not her daughter.”

  “No shit? I am gonna have fun telling Paps that.”

  “Who’s Paps?”

  Razor’s expression changed again. He was no longer laughing. “Out of all of us, he’s the one who has taken care of you and your mother more than anyone else. Even Mercer.”

  Something occurred to her. Was that what Tom had almost called her?

  “What now?” he asked.

  She hated how easily he read her. “Tom.”

  “Yep. Tom too. And Vinnie.” Razor pulled out his phone and looked at the screen. “Shit,” he said under his breath.

  “What?”

  For a moment it looked as though he was trying to decide what to tell her. “Butler Ranch is on fire.”

  “Oh, my God,” she gasped and jumped up from the sofa. “Is everyone okay? What should we do?”

  “We sit tight, Skipper.”

  “Don’t you need to leave?”

  He shook his head. “No, that would be the last thing I’d do in this situation.”

  15

  Calder’s connection to Johnny Vatos was driving Mercer crazy. There was something there, he just couldn’t put his finger on what it was. No matter how hard he tried to focus on sorting through the shit-ton of crap that had been hidden in the floorboards of Leech’s cabin, his mind kept drifting back to two things: how Quinn was, and what Calder and Vatos were up to. Both ate away at him.

  “Hey, Eighty-eight.” Paps joined him in the kitchen. “Find anything?”

  “Haven’t scratched the surface.” Mercer pointed to the box sitting at his feet. “Who’s on Vatos?”

  “Right now? Max. Why?”

  Mercer pulled out his phone. “Where are they?” he asked out loud, but didn’t expect Paps to answer, he was sending his own message to Max. At the same time, Paps was pulling up the operative’s tracking report.

  Mercer stared at his phone, waiting for a response, but when none came, he looked at Paps.

  Paps stood. “He’s at Butler Ranch. Let’s go.”

  They took one truck instead of Mercer taking the bike, since it was after dark. Neither spoke on the way. Mercer continued to check his phone, but so far, Max hadn’t responded. “I don’t like this,” he muttered when they pulled up on the side of the road outside the ranch’s perimeter. “Coordinates?”

  Paps sent them to Mercer’s phone, and both men jumped out of the truck.

  They were past the first set of vineyards on the north side of the ranch when they smelled smoke.

  “Call it in,” Mercer yelled and ran.

  By the time he reached the fire, it had spread to the point where there was nothing he could do.

  “Body!” Paps yelled, running from the other direction. He pointed and Mercer saw it too.

  Paps got there first and pulled the body away from the flames. “It’s Max. I’ve got a pulse,” he yelled.

  “I’ve got him,” yelled Mercer, who picked Max up and threw him over his shoulder. “You go ahead and get the truck as close as you can.” Paps was already out of earshot by the time Mercer finished his sentence.

  He drove through an open gate and met Mercer and Max part-way in.

  “He hasn’t gained consciousness,” Mercer told him as he laid the operative on the back seat.

  When they heard sirens in the distance, Paps pulled the truck out on the road, and went in the opposite direction.

  Once in the truck, the first call Mercer made was to Laird Butler. The fire was still quite a distance from the main ranch buildings, including the houses, but he told them they should evacuate anyway. Mercer knew he and Sorcha were the only two on the property; the rest of the family had been reported together at Stave, Alex Avila and Peyton Wolf’s place in Cambria, which he told Laird.

  “Is anyone else there? Any vineyard workers? Anyone else?”

  Laird said there wasn’t anyone else he was aware of, and that he’d stop and get Lucia on their way to Cambria.

  “Where are they going?” Paps asked when Mercer hung up.

  “Alex’s place at the beach.”

  Paps nodded and Mercer sent another message, this time to Razor.

  They heard Max cough and sputter in the back seat. “What the hell happened?” he groaned.

  “We found you passed out near the edge of a fire,” Paps told him.

  “Vatos,” Max groaned. “He started it. When I tried to put it out, someone knocked me out.” He rubbed his head.

  “Someone? Not Vatos?” Mercer asked.

  “It wasn’t him. Someone nailed me from behind.” Max rubbed the back of his head with his hand. When he looked at it, there was blood on it, but not much. Head wounds were notoriously bloody, so if that’s all there was, he wasn’t going to bleed out.

  “How do you feel?” Mercer asked when Max sat up.

  “Head hurts. Otherwise okay.”

  Mercer looked at Paps who seemed as concerned as he felt. If Calder was the person who whacked Max, then he knew someone had been tailing either him or Vatos.

  “Where’re we headed?” Mercer asked.

  “Alex’s.”

  “Why?”

  “Sorcha’s there.”

  “And?”

  “She has medical training.”

  That answered one question. If they were going to Alex’s place to have Sorcha take a look at Max’s injuries, that had to mean she was well aware of why the K19 team was here.

  “¡Dios mío!” Lucia Avila gasped when they came inside.

  While Max was the only one of the three hurt, he and Paps were covered in soot, grime, and dirt.

  Sorcha Butler grabbed Max’s hand and pulled him into the bathroom. “Come with me.”

  “What happened?” Lucia asked.

  Mercer filled her in as minimally as he could, while Paps and Laird went outside to talk.

&n
bsp; “You tell him, he tells her, and she tells me,” Lucia told Mercer.

  “Oh, yeah?” Mercer knew better. There were too many lives at stake for Burns Butler to be that sloppy.

  “I’ll check on the fire,” Paps said when they came back inside.

  “Come with me,” Laird said to Mercer.

  They went down the hallway and into the bedroom, where Laird filled Mercer in on everything he and Quinn had talked about that afternoon, and told him that she wasn’t planning to leave for New York right away. That part Mercer already knew, Razor had told him.

  “Do you have ongoing access to her phone?” Laird asked.

  Mercer nodded. “Affirmative.”

  “Have Razor take a look at what’s on it.”

  “What are you thinking?” Mercer asked.

  “She came back empty-handed.”

  “Right.”

  —:—

  “What’s happening?” Quinn asked Razor, who had been checking his phone non-stop since the first report came in.

  “The Butlers have been evacuated, and there are several crews working on containing the fire.”

  “Don’t make me ask you,” Quinn said a few minutes later.

  “Eighty-eight is fine. He and Paps are here, actually.”

  “Here?”

  “Relax, Skipper. Here in town.”

  Razor was still studying his phone. “Yeah,” he said absentmindedly, not in answer to anything she’d said. He stood and grabbed her hand. “Let’s take a ride.”

  “What? Wait. Where are we going?”

  Razor led her through a door and into the garage. “Get in the back seat, and lay on the floor,” he barked at her.

  “Now!” he yelled when she hesitated.

  “What’s happening?” she asked after they’d been on the road for more than fifteen minutes.

  “I’m hungry.”

  Quinn waited for Razor to say more, but he didn’t.

  “I’m getting car sick,” she told him.

  “You can get up now.”

  She sat up and held her stomach. This wasn’t going to help. “Can I sit up there?” she asked.

  “If you can climb over the seat.”

  She did, and then put her seatbelt on. “Are you going to tell me what this is all about?”

  “Nope.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “South.”

  Quinn rolled her eyes, but didn’t ask any other questions. She was beginning to grasp the severity of what Laird Butler had told her this afternoon, and what Razor told her tonight. She was in danger, and they were keeping her safe. Instead of being a pain in the ass, from now on, she’d try hard to do whatever they told her to do.

  “Can I ask you a question?” she said later. “It isn’t about where we’re going.”

  “You can ask.”

  “But it doesn’t mean you’ll answer, right?”

  Razor smiled for the first time since the call came in about the fire.

  “Mercer is Eighty-eight, right?”

  “Yep.”

  “Why do you call him that?”

  Razor didn’t answer for long enough that Quinn figured he wasn’t going to. She turned her head and looked out at the moonlight on the Pacific Ocean. It reminded her of that night in Southampton, when she’d been sitting by the water, looking at a similar moonlight, wondering who had sent her roses for her birthday.

  “He calls me precious,” she murmured, remembering how safe she’d felt with him, even though it had puzzled her at the time.

  “Doc was the first to call him Eighty-eight.”

  Quinn stayed quiet, hoping Razor would continue.

  “What do you know about the planet Mercury?” he asked a few minutes later.

  She shrugged. “Not a lot that I remember.”

  “It’s the closest planet to the sun, and the smallest in our solar system.”

  “It has the shortest orbit,” she added.

  “Exactly.”

  “Eighty-eight days.”

  Razor nodded.

  “Is that it?”

  “Nope.”

  Oh, Lord, he was going to make her figure it out.

  “Can I use my phone?” she asked.

  “You don’t have it.”

  Quinn felt her pockets and then looked over the seat and to the floor. She didn’t have her phone or her bag. They’d left so quickly she hadn’t even thought to grab it.

  “It hasn’t worked since you landed at the airport.”

  “Why not?”

  Razor didn’t answer, so she didn’t ask any more questions, as hard as it was for her not to.

  “What else does Mercury refer to?” Razor asked after a long period of silence.

  “The element.”

  He nodded. “What else?”

  “The Greek god.”

  “Bingo.”

  “You say that, but I don’t know how it relates. Is Mercer a Greek god? Is he Greek?”

  Razor smiled at her again. “Hermes is the Roman equivalent to Mercury.”

  Quinn rolled her eyes again. “While this is really fun, I’m not getting it, Razor.”

  “Hermes was considered the messenger of the gods. He also guided evil souls to the underworld.”

  “Mercer guides souls to the underworld?”

  Razor didn’t have to nod for Quinn to know she was right. He didn’t just guide them to the underworld, he protected her from those evil souls.

  “Doc picked him. Not me and not Paps. He picked Mercer.”

  “To protect me?”

  “Yep. Before he left on his last mission, Doc made Mercer promise that he’d never let anything happen to you.”

  Quinn rested her head against the SUV’s window as more tears streamed down her cheeks. “Thank you, Razor,” she whispered.

  Razor pulled off the highway in Santa Barbara. Quinn wanted to ask why, but didn’t. She’d already asked too many questions for one day, and it had wrung her out. At this point she didn’t care.

  “Let’s go,” he said when he pulled into the parking lot of a grocery store. She got out and followed him.

  “What do you want?” he asked once they were inside.

  “For what?”

  “To eat, Skipper. Jeez. Eighty-eight said you were smart.”

  “Peanut butter and jelly.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh. My. God.” Quinn stopped in the middle of the aisle and put her hands on her hips.

  “What?”

  She got closer to him and whispered, “You won’t tell me where we’re going or what we’re doing. You asked me what I wanted, and I said the first thing that came to mind. I want a damn peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Is that okay?”

  Razor held up his hands. “Sure is.” He didn’t ask any more questions while they were in the store, but filled the cart with enough food to last them a week.

  They didn’t get back on the highway, and as dark as it was on the back roads, Quinn had no idea where they were, until they pulled up to a gate and waited for it to open.

  “I used to live here,” she gasped.

  Razor nodded and pulled through. The lights of the SUV shone on the garage of the house, and she saw him standing in the driveway, hands at his sides, not taking his eyes off hers. Her Mr. Mercer.

  —:—

  It had been Paps’ decision to alert Razor to get Quinn out of town. The tail said Calder was headed to the coast, and while there was no reason for them to suspect he knew anything about her, if he started paying attention, by now he’d know he had a tail, and he would immediately deduce that Paps and Razor were behind it.

  Worse would be the possibility he’d figured they were onto him shortly after he showed up in Paso Robles, back in June. If that was the case, Quinn being here put her in the exact danger they’d been protecting her from for the last twenty-one years.

  Doc’s fear, and theirs too, had always been what a psychopath like Calder might do if he found out Lena had a daughter w
ho was born ten months after he’d raped her. He’d also know there was a chance the child was Doc’s too, which put Quinn in the same amount of danger, or worse.

  “By the way, Razor is transporting Skipper to Casa Carrizo,” Paps had told him.

  “She doesn’t want anything to do with me.”

  “Go anyway. It’s about protecting her, Eighty-eight. Don’t lose sight of that.”

  “Yes, sir,” he answered.

  “Stay away from Calder, too. You come face to face with him; you get the hell out.”

  Paps was right. The way he felt right now, if he and Rory Calder were in the same place at the same time, he’d kill him without thinking twice about it. And then any hope they had that he’d somehow lead them to Doc and Leech, would be lost.

  An hour and a half later, Mercer stood in the driveway of the house where Quinn and Lena had lived right after she was born.

  While her mother hadn’t lived in it for several years, she hadn’t actually sold it, like she’d told Maddox she had. As with her parents’ estate, it wasn’t Lena’s to sell. It had belonged to Kade.

  When he saw the SUV pull in the gate, Mercer wondered if she’d remember anything about it.

  He could see her clearly through the windshield, and once she saw him, her eyes didn’t waver from his.

  He had a lot to talk to her about, and after they were finished, her opinion of him may not change at all. He had to try though. He couldn’t stay away from her, and it was time he accepted it as fact.

  He slowly walked over to where Razor had parked, and waited for Quinn to open her door. She stared at him through the glass, and he waited.

  “It’s unlocked,” Razor, who was carrying bags of groceries into the house, shouted to him.

  Mercer put his hand on the door at the same time Quinn opened it. She slid out as much as climbed, and landed in his arms. He stroked her hair with one hand while the other held her close to him. Her head rested against his chest, and he could feel the dampness from her tears seep into his shirt. He didn’t know how long they stood where they were; he only knew he wouldn’t move as long as she was still crying.

  He looked up at the house and noticed Razor on the second story, opening windows and turning on lights. Warmth exuded from the Spanish Colonial Revival house now that it was lit from inside. The exterior was white stucco with dark brown shutters and a red tile roof. Balconies with wrought iron railings extended from every upstairs room, where Razor had thrown doors open to air it out. Massive palm trees, which looked old enough to have been planted before the house was built, stretched high above the roof line, and bright pink bougainvillea grew up the side walls of the five car garage.