Mattey shook his head no. “We just wanted to stop you from getting hurt.”
“But . . . what the hell?” Jojo’s voice caught. “Jane could be killed. And they’re still waiting around for some warrant? I think you’re right, Cade . . . we have to do something.”
I pointed to Mattey. “He’s gonna rat us out and blow our cover.”
“Come on, Cade,” Mattey said. “All I’ve ever wanted is to do what would protect us all. We did it my way . . . and here we are. Now . . . fine. Let’s try it yours.”
“We want to help,” Jojo said. “We need to help. This isn’t just about Jane and Savannah. It’s about what they did to Sophia too. Who knows what you were both thinking hiding Jane in a frickin’ barn, but here we are. How about you hash out your feelings some other day when she’s not two minutes from getting carved up by the cartel?”
Mattey and I looked at each other. He gave a little nod of acceptance. I did the same.
“We’ve gotta have each other’s backs,” I said. “By the time the feds get through the red tape it’ll be too late.”
“Let’s go,” Mattey said.
I jogged along beside them, and once the factory was in view they ditched the bikes.
“How are we going to get inside?” Jojo asked.
“I have an idea.” I led them along the dry riverbed, hidden from sight by the crusted mud embankment, down to the pipe that ran under the highway. It had led me to Jane’s bag of money. Let it lead me to Jane.
“Are we going in there?” Jojo asked.
“Trust me,” I said. “It’s going to take us right where we need to be.”
“To the other side of the interstate?” Mattey was remembering our boats.
“To Maddison Electric.”
He and Jojo tentatively stepped into the muddy water. “Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
The noise of the cars passing overhead groaned through the tunnel as we sloshed underneath the highway. On the other side of the grate was Maddison Electric. Now we just had to get the grate off.
“Help me push.”
We rattled and pushed the grate together as hard as we could. Nothing.
“Try this.” Mattey fished a thick branch from the water. I wedged it at the bottom of the grate and cranked down on it as hard as I could while they pushed.
“It’s getting loose! Don’t stop now.”
We pushed with every bit of strength we had, and just as the branch bent and splintered, the grate came loose with a whine. We lowered the heavy metal as quietly as we could to the ground. Sure enough, the storm drain opened up to a drainage ditch on the factory’s property like I remembered noticing.
Out of breath and with hands stinging, we hunkered down, backs against the slimy curve of the pipe.
“Now what?” Mattey asked.
I peeked out the opening. Half of the building we were closest to was so old the roof was in pieces. Scaffolding stuck out against the sky.
“Let’s try to get up on the roof? To see where they might be. And get a picture. We have to get a picture to show the feds.”
“Look.” Jojo pointed. A mountain of wires and trash reached almost to the top of the building at the far end of the lot. “Think we can climb up it?”
“It’s our best bet.”
I went first, running low, as fast as I could to the base of the heap.
Then Jojo.
Then Mattey.
It was tough to find steady footing. Boxes and cords slid and tangled around our feet, but the three of us managed to reach the top and step onto the roof. We crept like spiders across the web of splintered wood and flaps of tar paper to the center of the roof. I peered through a rotted hole. It was dark and quiet below. No sign of life. Jojo pointed to a broken skylight a little farther down, and we crawled across the slippery beams until we reached it. When we peeked inside there, two stories below, clear as day, were two cartel guys pacing, guns at their shoulders.
Mattey leaned over and snapped some pictures on his phone. He motioned for us to retreat. But we still had no sign of Jane or Savannah. It wasn’t enough.
I pointed us ahead. He pointed us back. I pointed forward again, more insistent.
That’s when the shots rang out.
No, no, no. We pushed ourselves backward toward the heap of garbage, trying to stay low. But when I kicked my legs over the edge of the roof to make the leap down, I realized the source of the gunfire was right below us. A guy armed with a massive black gun was starting toward us.
I scrambled back and grabbed a long cord from the top of the pile of debris. I quickly looped one end to a broken ventilation pipe jutting out of the side of the building and fed the other through the scaffolding into a dark hall of the warehouse below. It was our only option.
“Go down it! Hurry!”
Mattey took a deep breath and let his feet dangle for a moment before lowering himself down the cord hand over hand. Jojo followed. I kept an eye on the guy crossing the lot. He had reached the garbage pile and was starting to scramble up it.
That’s when the cord snapped.
Jojo tumbled the last few feet down but managed to stand up.
I was trapped on the roof.
“Run!” I yelled down to Mattey and Jojo, then bolted across the beams of roof. I scrambled behind a cluster of smokestacks, reaching out for balance. My fingers wrapped around a bar. The rungs of a ladder! The smokestack had a ladder. I shimmied down it as fast as I could into the thin space between two buildings.
My head went to football, the heat of the game, the drills hardwired in my brain. Blood alley, head to head, one person tries to tackle you, then two try to slam you. This was my blood alley. I tore down that narrow alley faster than I’d ever run across a football field and slid across the gravel as I took the corner. I scrambled on my hands and knees toward an old delivery truck, pulling myself under the belly, where I hunkered down behind the wheels.
I could see the pipe we came through in the distance. We had to get back there.
When there was no sign of movement, I took a deep breath and ran for it, praying that Mattey and Jojo had gotten out of the empty room in the warehouse below and had already made it back through. But when I came out the other side of the highway, there was only dirt and dry blades of grass, the sound of my own breath.
I was alone.
My heart hammered.
They weren’t there.
All of my friends were trapped inside Maddison Electric, along with the pictures I needed to prove it to anyone who could help me.
I lay with my face in the mud. Every second that passed was a countdown to the end of Jane. Savannah. Mattey. Jojo. And that was the end of everything.
An engine rumbled. I cautiously peeked over the edge of the embankment and saw . . . my truck?
Behind the wheel was my dad, about to turn down the road leading to the main entrance.
“Stop!” I jumped up and waved him over to the side, running to the truck and frantically filling him in.
“Dad! Mattey and Jojo are inside. The cartel is there. I was right. I know they have Jane and Savannah.”
“Boy, you are out of your damn mind, sneaking off.” He jumped out. “I told the feds you had to have come here on your own.”
“If you think I’m gonna wait for them, you’re out of your damn mind!”
“I said I told the feds. I didn’t say I was gonna wait for them. You’re my son, for God’s sake—you think I’m not gonna come after you?”
I stopped pacing and turned to face my dad. He returned my gaze in a steady way I hadn’t seen in who knows how long.
“Cartel ran off with the woman I love. They’re not gonna get my boy.” He spun around and started pulling out every gun he owned from the back of the truck. “Mattey. Jojo. Savannah. Jane. All those k
ids are in there? Let’s go get ’em out.”
“How?”
My dad snorted. “I called in some reinforcements.”
While it was no surprise Tanner had plenty of people with an ax to grind with the cartel, I didn’t expect that when my Dad said, Let’s go get them, they would say, Sign me up without a second thought. But this was a testament to their anger, sure and steady—a line of cars was pulling in behind our truck, filled with the people who had become symbols of the cartel’s deadly reach in this tiny town.
First were the old postmaster’s two sons. Next, Lola’s sister Brenna, her cousin, and his best friend. Then my dad’s old buddy Tommy Mack, whose company cleaned up more corpses and crime scenes because of the cartels than anyone should in a lifetime, including the one in our house. Two of his guys had hopped in the back of the truck with him, because why not? Enough was enough. And then there was the Moraleses’ neighbor whose cousin, the doctor, got killed, along with a bunch of guys I didn’t even recognize. People’s brothers. Neighbors.
This wasn’t just about me rescuing my friends. It was about Tanner saving itself.
I looked at the factory. The smokestacks seemed to puff an almost violet haze. I looked back at everyone gathering in the field, silent and focused like a tribe heading to war. People made phone calls. Our reinforcements had reinforcements. We were a vigilante military parade. What search warrant? Tanner doesn’t wait around. We protect our own. No one else will.
Lola’s sister stepped up. Brenna served three tours of duty, two in Iraq, one in Afghanistan, worked private security now, and had access to some serious guns. She naturally took charge, splitting everyone into search parties and making sure each group had enough firepower and manpower.
I led them to the pipe under the highway. My dad went ahead of me. Brenna and Tommy Mack covered my back, weapons drawn, protecting me as I showed everyone the way in. We crept single file back through the pipe. Low. Silent. My heart had never pounded harder. Brenna led our group around the left side of the building. Tommy Mack’s crew headed to the right in a long loop to come in the back.
Brenna’s arm went up. We froze against the side of the wall. She pointed to her eyes and then up. We looked where she told us. A man stood on the roof, facing away, on guard. He started to turn, finishing his scan of the area.
Go, go, Brenna gestured for us to cut across the alley and hide under the roof’s overhang so the guard couldn’t see us, and we ducked beneath the shadow of the corrugated metal without a second to spare.
I dug my heels into the crumbling cinder blocks and pulled myself up to a narrow window. I could only get a good enough hold on the windowsill to do a quick chin-up and glance inside, but what I saw was enough: the two men I had spotted from the roof leaning against a storage container, guns against their shoulders, and what looked like more men in the far corner.
We had people on all four sides of the building. Our group continued forward until we got to a supply entrance. Everyone looked at Brenna. She nodded and crossed herself.
“Here we go,” my dad muttered, and kicked down the door.
JANE
Gunfire broke out far away. Then it got closer. It had to be Grande’s guys, surrounding us and taking back their territory. I willed myself to die in a cartel shootout instead of the murder Lobenzo had planned for me.
“Mira!” Alamo spotted a group of intruders.
He ducked into the shadows as another group of people burst through a side door. A spray of bullets erupted. Savannah screamed. I rolled over on my shoulder.
“Get lower,” I yelled.
Savannah tipped over sideways too, and I kicked my legs to slide to her. The gunfire didn’t slow. It was the wild, continuous spray of serious automatic weapons. I flattened myself out the best I could. Alamo unloaded his gun in an arc in front of him, but it was no match for the firepower coming at him.
The carbon clouds from the shoot-out seemed to take on a purple hue as a group approached, guarding in a tight unit, heading purposefully for us. As they got closer and I began to make out faces, the fear that Grande’s retaliation would be unleashed on us dissolved into disbelief.
“Jane!” the people were yelling. “Savannah!”
One voice rang out clear above the others, and I shrieked his name in response.
“Cade!”
A voice can pull you toward it at warp speed. A voice can bring you to your knees.
“Get the girls out of here!” Lobenzo yelled, and someone hauled us to our feet and uncuffed us from the shipping container.
“Move!” Lobenzo shouted.
Lobenzo’s men came from the dark corridors of crates and containers behind us, from the walls themselves, it seemed. Their rapid gunfire choked out in hard-edged g’s: g-g-g-g-g-g. And then other sounds, different guns. Ka-ka-ka. Pop, pop. Everything was just noises to me. I couldn’t conceive that bullets were actually raining in every direction.
I had to get to Cade. I had to . . . but Lobenzo had me at gunpoint. Moving in absolutely the opposite direction of where your body is screaming to go is like running with bones that have gone to jelly, the weird slow motion of an astronaut bouncing around a shuttle. The gun forced me toward the elevator. The entrance hissed smoke, and we all started coughing. A strange, purplish cloud seeped out, a cloud from hell, like the breath of a devil sucking us back into the tunnel.
LOBENZO
Purple smoke clouded the air. I tried to clear the space in front of me with my arms. A peasant uprising doesn’t take down a king. The village burns. Heads on stakes mark the misstep of ever believing good holds a candle to greed. Greed is my gasoline, and this inferno was blazing. I pushed ahead. What was it, this smoke? I could barely see.
Like heaven, hell is a kingdom, and the devil reigns there as God. There should be no question who has the upper hand in the corners and crevices of this revolting small town, USA.
The fact that we were under siege not by the feds but by a scattered amateur army should have been laughable. But their numbers—and their guns—were a surprise. Surprises must be met with surprises. I would disappear back through the tunnel with the girls. It would be like we were never here. They would fight ghosts. I was an apparition. And I would haunt this town. I would claim its sad streets and stagnating businesses. I would steal its children and control its leaders. Every step I was forced to take back down that tunnel was a life I would own. I will be back, I promised. I will be the locusts and the plague, the ocean waves that close in over your heads.
This tunnel was lost. Everything we had been working for, finished. But I would come back stronger with my pack of wolves to take Tanner down. You do not cross the Wolf Cub. I fight fire with more fire.
“Burn the warehouse behind us,” I choked out. “Burn it to the ground, and make sure they’re all trapped inside.”
JANE
The elevator sank us back into a deeper level of hell, back to how it was always going to end: my blood on their hands. This was the life I built. This was the death I would meet.
Each minute that passed might as well have been a mile between Tanner and us. We were disappearing back to Mexico, too many steps ahead to be stopped. Lobenzo and his men ran, and we ran with them, our breaths heavy, the uneven rhythm a rhythm of its own, jagged with our hurried footsteps and the tunnel’s own clicks and hisses. My eyes burned. The smoke thickened. I couldn’t get a breath in.
The lights flickered. The fans whispered the dank air down the tunnel.
Savannah choked. Even Lobenzo succumbed to a dry, hacking cough as he continued to push us forward into the violet smoke. It streamed past us, back into the warehouse. What was it? Some sort of gas leak? A chemical from the factory?
“Keep moving!” Lobenzo shouted. “Or I’ll shoot you right here.”
A massive boom rang out overhead from the direction of the warehouse. A low rumble rolled through the t
unnel. Rocks and soil rained down on us. I dove out of the way, grabbing Savannah.
When we sat up . . . we were alone, a wall of dirt and stone separating us from Lobenzo and his men. But before we could even begin to hope, another explosion shook the tunnel even harder. The purple smoke persisted, and a frightening heat coursed through the limited air. Boom, boom, boom. Three more explosions overhead. The wooden support beams creaked and snapped, tumbling in spears around us, cutting me off from Savannah.
We were going to be buried alive.
CADE
With only empty rope and chains to tell me Jane and Savannah had ever been there, I wondered if I imagined them across the warehouse, ghosts in a strange purple smoke seeping from the elevator across the room. My father’s voice cut through the throbbing of my own pulse in my head. He was yelling at me to get down.
Lobenzo’s men had stopped shooting at us, instead turning their attention to huge petroleum tanks stored against the wall and spraying them with bullets. Bullets rang out. Sparks flew.
And then a massive blast as one of the tanks blew up in the hail of gunfire.
Searing heat shot through the air, stinging my skin, making my eyes burn. Flames raced out and up the walls. The room pulsed with the blast.
My father reached me, pulled me up, and tried to drag me to the doors. “We need to get out now!”
My leg was going numb, my left arm hanging. It felt like a fire poker was shoved through me. Brenna and Tommy Mack raced to gather our group and get us out.
“What about Jojo and Mattey?” I hollered. “We can’t leave without them.”
Sirens wailed outside.
“The feds are here,” my dad said. “You’re gonna have to leave it to them. You need help, Cade. You’re shot. Keep moving.”
More huge booms tore from behind us as gas tank after gas tank started going off like bombs.
“Get down!”
Heat hit our backs.
Then we were blown off our feet and onto the ground.
Hide with Me Page 25
