Hoosier frisked him thoroughly and then stepped back and nodded. “Okay, then. I’m ready to talk if you are.”
“Yes. I’m curious what you’ll offer me that brings you peace.”
Ronin saw Hoosier’s fist twitch at those words, but when Zapata swept his hand in an after you gesture, the President stepped forward, putting his back to his enemy, and walked into the house. The Horde followed, letting Zapata’s men come in behind them.
The Horde had left Big Nate outside; Zapata had held one of his men back to stand guard with him.
The inside of the derelict house had been gutted of all its valuable appointments. Many of the interior walls had simply been torn down, leaving the main room showing living room, kitchen, dining room, all without substantial division. With all the vandalism, it was even more open than its design. Many of the walls that did exist had been torn open so that thieves could get to the wiring and guts inside. The house seemed almost transparent.
Meeting like this, in an out-of-the-way, forgotten place, had advantages and disadvantages. The key advantage was that it was out of the way and forgotten: the chances of them being observed were small, and if anything went wrong and violence ensued, they would likely be able to clean it up without notice—and there could be no collateral loss of life, if there were no collateral lives anywhere near.
The primary disadvantage was that such a remote location made violence easier, because they were unlikely to be observed and would likely have the leisure to clean up after it. A more prominent location would, theoretically, have discouraged violence.
For this meet, the advantages appeared to favor Zapata, which he likely realized—he had sent men to survey the site and had approved. He was the outsider in California, the one without coverage by friendly law enforcement. He needed to stay under the radar, so he might think that a more public location would have given the Horde protection.
But the Horde hadn’t been willing to risk more innocents. And they wanted privacy. Zapata thinking that they’d put themselves at further disadvantage worked for them as well.
The only furniture in the house was two mismatched straight-back chairs and a battered folding card table. As if he were the king of this crumbling castle, Zapata made another ushering sweep of his hand, indicating that Hoosier should choose a chair and sit.
He chose the chair without a padded seat, and Zapata, smiling, sat in the other.
Then, as if they were all following a choreography—and the Horde were—the other men in the house arrayed themselves around their respective leaders.
Dora Vega had been a small, beautiful, elegant woman, who looked better suited to working in an executive office suite, or planning luncheons for the ladies at the country club. Ronin hadn’t seen her often, but he’d always been struck by how out of place in their world she’d seemed. But she had made their world her place, molded it to her way.
Until it had snapped back into its more natural shape and killed her with its recoil.
Emilio Zapata looked like a cartel lord. He wore his lack of restraint all over. He was ugly, his dark eyes small and suspicious, and his face rough and scarred, like its creator had taken a weed-whacker to a hunk of raw clay. His hands had done a lifetime of violence. He had the wide girth of a man who denied himself nothing. On his wrist he wore a gold watch with a thick band made of diamonds.
He linked his hands over his belly and smiled at Hoosier. “So, Hoosier. Tell me what you can offer me that is worth all your lives.”
Hoosier smoothed his hand over his long beard. That was all—a habitual gesture he probably made fifty times every day.
But this time, it was a signal.
Muse, Ronin, and Connor, strategically positioned and waiting for that signal, moved. Connor stomped hard on a floorboard, which then flipped up, exposing a small cache of weapons. Ronin dropped into a crouch next to the doorless coat closet and pulled a false wall free for more weapons. Muse had a similar cache in what had been made to look like a piece of gutted wall. They had stashed enough weapons in this house so that every Horde in it could have two. Big Nate knew to dive for the weapons outside and kill the Zapata fucker at the sound of the first shot.
The Zapata men inside had not given up all of their weapons, they all had ankle holsters, but the Horde had expected as much. As Ronin, Muse, and Connor all got off the first shots almost simultaneously and then threw those weapons to the brother nearest them and dived for more, the room became a storm of blood and metal.
No one in the house wore armor; it would have sent the wrong message to wear armor to a peace talk, and even Zapata had acknowledged that. There was little cover in the vandalized house, and bullets flew wildly and at close range. They needed to get outside.
Ronin wanted to get outside so he could get to his blades, too. In these close quarters, guns were particularly stupid weapons.
Apparently having a similar idea, one of the Zapata men jumped through the broken window at the front of the house, and that started a chaotic move by the warring men toward the exits. As Ronin prepared to leap out the door and over the porch, he did a quick check of what he could see: there were at least eight bodies on the floor, turning the faded wood a dark red. None of them were Horde.
One of them was Emilio Zapata. Bart was standing over him, his gun still pointed at the body. At the edge of one of the few corners in the big space, Ronin caught sight of a sliver of black. He yelled, “BART! YOUR SIX!” then jumped to the side and shot, catching the hand of the man who’d been aiming a small back-up revolver at Bart.
Bart spun, aimed, and shot, and the man fell forward into the pool of blood his head started making before he landed. Then Bart met Ronin’s eyes and nodded.
As he nodded back and then turned to complete his original intention to jump outside, Ronin realized that they had already won. Zapata was dead. They had achieved their goal and made themselves and their family safe again.
As so often happened, the battle continued raging even after the war was over. The ground outside the old farmhouse was muddy with blood, and the air thundered with gunfire. Ronin dived for his daishō, leaving their scabbards in the dwindling pile of weapons, and turned, hunting for enemies to kill.
He’d just come up behind one of Zapata’s men and sliced open his back when he saw Connor on the ground. As Ronin finished his target, he took a couple of quick steps in that direction, thinking the SAA was injured and meaning to pull him to cover. Then Connor pushed a body off of him and rolled to his knees.
He was injured, bleeding freely from a head wound, but Ronin could see it was a swelling gash, not a bullet wound. Before he got to his feet, Connor paused to wipe blood out of his eyes.
What happened next sped by so quickly that Ronin, even with his wide awareness and tight focus, would never be able to see the events in a coherent order. They seemed to happen all at once, in a flash. And seemed to take forever, too.
Connor wiped blood from his eyes and flicked it away with disdain. He reached for his dropped gun and stood.
Hoosier yelled, “SON! LOOK SH—” as he, septuagenarian though he was, ran and leapt completely off the ground like he meant to fly toward his son.
Connor turned toward his father’s voice, lifting his weapon as he did so. Ronin looked past Hoosier, trying to understand. He would later be sure that he and Connor both, at the same time, saw the man—he would turn out to be the last standing of Zapata’s men—aimed at Connor. Armed with his blades now and not a gun, Ronin was too far away to use them. He stood powerless as Hoosier threw himself between his son and the man aimed to kill him.
Hoosier fell heavily to the ground; he’d taken at least two bullets. Connor roared and fired on full auto, taking down the man in a convulsing heap.
Then he tore over to his father and skidded to his knees. Ronin leapt forward and ran to them, too. He knelt at Hoosier’s head.
“Dad! Dad! What the fuck!” Connor rolled his father onto his back, and Ronin lifted his head and
rested it on his knees. Hoosier was conscious and seemed stunned. His shirt was red and wet just above his waist. Gutshot.
The world had gone quiet except for Connor’s yelling. The battle, and the war, was over, and the Horde had won.
Drawn to the scene by Connor’s voice, all the Horde gathered—all of them; they were all on their feet, many bloodied but none down. Only Hoosier.
“Jesus FUCK! Get a fucking ambulance! Get the van! J.R.! We gotta get him to a hospital! NOW! FUCK! NOW!” Connor raged, sobbing.
J.R., their medic, knelt at Hoosier’s side and ripped open his clothes. The bullets had entered close to each other, just below his navel. J.R. looked over his shoulder. “Nate! My kit! In the van!” He turned to Connor. “If we can slow the blood, we can get him to the hospital. But an ambulance is gonna take too long. We gotta take him.”
Connor nodded. “Okay. Okay. Hold on, Dad. It’s gonna be okay. We got this. No sweat.”
Hoosier gasped and lifted his arm, then dropped his hand over his son’s. “No, son. No. Clubhouse. Get me to the…clubhouse.”
As Connor gaped at his father, J.R. cut in. “Hooj, I am not equipped to deal with this, and you don’t have time to waste. You need the hospital.”
Focusing on his son, Hoosier shook his head. “Connor. Can’t feel my legs. I can’t…be a…a…invalid again. I’m done, son. Let me be done.”
“Fuck you, Dad! NO! Fuck you! Mom needs you! I need you! We all need you!”
He shook his head again, and this time he turned to J.R. “Can you keep me goin’ long enough…to see my wife?”
J.R. studied Hoosier for a couple of seconds, then turned to Connor, who gave him such a look of vile murder that J.R. looked quickly away. He seemed to think, then heaved a breath and turned back to Hoosier. “Gut wounds can take a long time to kill you. Couple of hours. If we move now and have Beebs waiting for us at the clubhouse, then yeah. You’ll probably still be going when we get there. But, Prez, you are going to hurt like a mofo.”
“Dad, please.” Connor wasn’t shouting anymore, and he wasn’t crying. He’d sat back on his heels and was staring at his father in stunned disbelief.
Hoosier patted his son’s hand. “What did you think, Connor? I was gonna…retire and…take up golf? I rode a long road. Time to pull off.”
“But Mom…”
“Your mother is a…strong woman. She…knows about this life. And she knows what I…want. Get me to her so I can…say goodbye.”
Connor dropped his head. Then, after only a second or two, he faced his father again and nodded. “Okay, Dad. Okay. I love you.” The words came out twisted as tears beset Connor again. “I’m sorry I’ve been such a dick.”
“No. You were right. I should’ve heard you. You’re a…principled man, son. I couldn’t be…prouder of who you are. You’re the…best thing your mother and I…ever did.” Hoosier groaned, and his eyes fluttered shut. Then he snapped abruptly back to consciousness and clutched his son’s hand. “Get me to your mother. Don’t you fuckin’ let me die without saying goodbye.”
~oOo~
The youngest of the Horde—Fargo, Keanu, and Big Nate—said their goodbyes at the scene, then stayed behind to clean up and dispose of the bodies and the Suburbans. Every single Zapata man, including Emilio Zapata, was dead.
Aside from some flesh wounds, the Horde had suffered a single loss, but it was the most devastating loss they could have suffered. Not only their leader, but their father. Ronin was the next oldest member of the charter, and he was twenty years younger than Hoosier.
It was not an exaggeration at all to call Hoosier their father, and not merely because he was old enough to be father, or even grandfather, to them all, but because he had always led them in that way. He sat at the head of the table in the Keep and at the head of the dinner table, too. He was their moral center, their wisdom, the keeper of their lore and history, the nexus of their bond to each other. What were they without Hoosier?
When they arrived at the clubhouse, an hour after he’d been shot, Hoosier was still alive and still conscious, but, as they carried him as gently as they could through the Hall, he looked bad. His skin had gone as white as his beard and had taken on a shiny, waxy sheen. Despite being numb from the hips down, he was in obvious agony, yet he remained stoic, barely grunting as they lifted him and carried him. J.R. got him settled and then went out to the Hall to mend the wounded and to manage club girls Maria and Fawn as they administered first aid, too.
They had left their women and children at Bart’s, under the protection of a recently richer Sheriff Montoya and his most reliable deputies. As they carried Hoosier into his office, Bibi, Faith and Pilar were waiting. Ronin supposed the other women had stayed with the children. It made sense; the women closest to Hoosier had come to say goodbye.
Like the other Horde, Ronin sat in the Hall and waited. Others of the regular club girls were there, too, ready to be of service but knowing better than to push up on anyone. Terry, the only Prospect on his feet, stood behind the bar and rubbed the same spot with a towel, over and over. No one called for a drink.
Bibi went into the office with Connor. After a few minutes, Connor came out and waved Pilar in. A few minutes more, and Pilar stepped down the corridor and called for Demon and Faith.
When they came out, Demon was holding Faith tight to his chest. He led her to a sofa, and Bart and Sherlock jumped up and out of the way, giving them the seat. Demon pulled Faith onto his lap.
Pilar came out, alone, a few minutes after that. She stood, alone, against a wall and stared at her boots.
Ronin was surprised when Connor came out alone not long after that. His face frantic with grief, he went straight to his wife and grabbed her, dropping his head to her shoulder. Ronin wasn’t surprised at all to see his back shake, and he looked away.
The Hall remained in silent stasis for another fifteen minutes or more, and then Bibi came down the corridor from his office. She stopped at the entrance to the Hall and crossed her arms over her chest. Her eyes were vivid red, and her makeup was smeared, but she was calm.
Pilar patted Connor, who turned around. Bibi met her son’s eyes and nodded. “He’s gone.”
Then she swayed. Ronin, sitting closest to her, saw what was happening, and he jumped off the barstool and lunged for her, catching her as she fell.
Slack in his arms, she twisted his shirt in her fists and sobbed.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I love you. I’m with you. Remember that.
Throughout the day, Lorraine repeatedly opened and read the note Ronin had left before he’d disappeared from her bed. Three sentences. Eight words. They carried an ominous weight, as if he were saying goodbye—again. But this time for good.
Nothing in those eight words directly indicated that he was leaving; in fact, on their face they reaffirmed his love and commitment. Yet she couldn’t shake her certainty that they were his final words to her.
That sense of finality was so strong that she could not make herself call him. As often as she pulled the plain piece of paper from her pocket, unfolded it, and read those eight words, she also pulled her phone out and stared at his number, her finger hovering over the call button.
A call could clarify her feeling, either bring her unfounded certainty into reality or expose her worry as foolishness. But she was too afraid.
One other possibility loomed, one that reconciled the tension between his expression of commitment and her sense of his farewell: he had left her to go off and die.
And she knew, without knowing, that that was what he’d done. He’d gone off to war.
Just as he had twenty-five years ago. Then, he’d given her a ring. Now, he’d left her a note.
Sitting in her bedroom, dressed for work, today in nice jeans and a paisley peasant blouse, she pulled on a pair of comfortable boots with good soles for the kitchen. Then she stood and went to her jewelry chest—a tall, narrow piece of furniture that had been an early gift from Douglas. She opened th
e bottom drawer and reached to the back, bringing forward a wine-colored velvet cube. The hinged lid creaked as she lifted it.
As jewelry went, it wasn’t much; they hadn’t had any money in those days. But she’d loved it. An Art-Deco style, white gold band, latticed and sprinkled with tiny diamonds—chips, really. Eddie had bought it at a pawn shop in Medford; the shop’s name was stamped in gilt inside the lid of the velvet box.
She opened the top drawer of the chest, which had been fitted with velvet rolls to hold rings. In the center of the drawer nested the engagement ring Douglas had bought her: a four-carat, oval-cut diamond solitaire surrounded by emeralds, in a platinum setting.
Those rings were metaphors, Lorraine thought. Of the girl she’d been, and of the wife she’d become. Eddie’s girl, Douglas’s wife. Who was she now? Ronin’s woman? And who was that?
Ronin’s woman was the one who waited when her man went off to fight.
Calm & Storm (The Night Horde SoCal Book 6) Page 23
