Sabotage: A Vigilante Justice Novel

by Kristin Harte

Jinx. Free and clear of the club. I owed her that. Big-time. This hadn’t been what we’d come for, but it would take a huge stress from my shoulders and give Jinx options. Fuck me, Deacon had just worked some major magic on his tangent, and there was no way we could turn down that offer. So long as Cartel played it honorably.

  “And you make sure Edge knows she’s off-limits?” I asked, leaning forward. Seeing a way to make amends for at least one of my biggest regrets. “Because we’re not making a single move if that chain isn’t broken. No Soul Suckers coming for her and no Black Angels either. The girl has to be completely free.”

  “I’ll lay down the law with the club—no one will get a pass if they go near her. That includes Edge and the Vegas boys.”

  Deacon looked my way, likely weighing the options but leaving the final decision up to me. I knew Cartel better, knew his tricks. The responsibility of keeping us safe and deciding if the warlord could be trusted would fall on my shoulders.

  I had to take the shot. “If Sniper’s in, we’re good.”

  Deacon shrugged as if we were talking about trading a used car instead of a human being. “Sure. I’ve got nothing better to do. I’ll even take care of it today if you can get me the details.”

  Cartel’s eyebrow jumped, the only tell of his surprise. “You work fast.”

  “I want these fuckers out of my town,” Deacon said, his voice gritty and dark. “If cutting down a couple of them helps move that along? So be it.”

  The warlord nodded. “Fine, but Parris brings me the proof.”

  Which meant there would be other jobs to deal with once this was done. More club business to do before I could cut myself free.

  “Agreed,” I said, knowing I’d likely regret that decision along the way. “But any Black Angel comes for Jinx, and they’re dead. Period.”

  Cartel practically growled. “I don’t like threats, Parris.”

  “And I don’t like men who can’t keep their word. You say she’ll be Justice’s free and clear, then she’d better be Justice’s.”

  Cartel sat back again, looking from me to Deacon. Likely still trying to spin the web that could trap us. “Done. You deal with this problem, and I’ll put my own word up that the girl is yours and safe from our crew.”

  “From all Black Angels,” I said, spotting a trap in his offer. “I don’t want some fucker from Oregon showing up because you decided to play a battle of words.”

  Cartel put his hands up, that oily smile back. “No games, Parris. She’s off-limits to all Black Angels, not just the Vegas crew.”

  I nodded once to Cartel, catching Deacon’s eye and letting him know this was on. Two dead bikers for one girl. Not what we’d planned, but I couldn’t pass up this opportunity. I owed Jinx, and this was the first step in paying that debt.

  Deacon held a hand across the table, shaking Cartel’s when he extended it. “Send everything you’ve got on the marks to Parris. I’ll put a plan together.”

  The warlord looked impressed. “You really are in quite the hurry.”

  “Jinx’s freedom is worth the rush.”

  “Understood.” Cartel sat back, watching as we slid out of the booth. Not that he was quite ready to let us out of his web just yet. “Before you go…I heard a dead sheriff was found at the Rock Falls Soul Suckers clubhouse. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”

  Deacon shrugged, completely nonchalant. “Only what I saw on the news.”

  The warlord’s nod screamed his disbelief. “Could have sworn I heard different.”

  But Deacon was a cagey motherfucker when he wanted to be. He was also sarcastic as hell. “Maybe your ears need cleaning.”

  Cartel laughed, shaking his head as if truly entertained by the barkeep. “You are a good one, Sniper. Come see me when you’re done with this project. I may have more opportunities for you.”

  “The only opportunities I want to hear about are ones that take the Soul Suckers out of Justice. Black Angels, too.” He grinned, showing far too many teeth. “Unless you want missing bikers in your ranks.”

  We didn’t give Cartel the chance to reply, walking out of the restaurant instead. My phone pinged before I reached my bike, a dossier on the two Soul Suckers including locations, pictures, and every bit of pertinent info showing up in my email. Cartel was not fucking around.

  “You sure you’re up to this?” I asked as soon as we made it to Deacon’s truck. Needing to know this was what we were doing. We, as in me and him—a mission without his usual partner of Alder Kennard.

  Deacon didn’t even falter. “Do I have you as backup?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then I’ve got this.”

  “And that sheriff he was talking about?”

  “Don’t know nothing about that.” Deacon grinned a wolfish sort of smile. One that made his lie that much weaker.

  “You’re a good liar, barkeep.”

  “I’m a better sniper.” He paused, fiddling with his keys before frowning. “What’s this about Jinx’s mom?”

  Fuck. “I put in a call that Edge and his buddy Ravel were coming in hot on Jinx’s mom—I wanted to get her out of the club and away from them.”

  “But they got to her first.”

  “Ravel did. He used her addiction against her.” He also took out a hell of a lot of anger on her, something I wasn’t supposed to know about. It’s amazing what witnesses will say when you’ve got their head in a vise. “She didn’t make it out.”

  “Jinx know?”

  “No, but she has her suspicions.”

  “She’s a smart girl.”

  “Yeah. She is.” And a free one…soon. Real fucking soon. My payment to her for my failing her mom.

  Deacon wasn’t done yet, though. “So when we’re done with these two child-sellers, do we take out Cartel?”

  That one pulled a laugh from me for sure. Simple, easy—murder the warlord and call it a day. “Damn, son. You’re not as clean as I thought.”

  “I have no idea what made you think I was.” The sniper hopped into his truck, leaving the door open to finish the conversation. Looking so much like the soldier he was. Ready to go to war, calm about it. Knowing he had the skills to come out alive. The man was a wall of warrior, a strategist laying the groundwork to pull off whatever mission came his way. If anyone could take out Cartel, I had a feeling it was Deacon Manns. Unfortunately, dropping the warlord could cause more problems than not.

  “Another time, old man,” I said, bumping my knuckles against his before heading for my bike. “Let’s focus on one murder at a time.”

  “Suit yourself,” he said with a shrug. “Lead the way, Marine. We’ve got some planning to do.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  PARRIS

  DEACON MANNS PLANNED a mission like no one else I’d ever met. Fast but specific, incredibly detailed, and yet with room to make adjustments should things go sideways. The man was a major asset for me. He was also a giant pain in my ass.

  “If I were baseball commissioner, the first thing I’d change is that damn designated hitter rule. It’s ridiculous.” Deacon couldn’t be seen—he was stationed too high up in a tree at the back of the property where the two Soul Sucker marks were staying—but I couldn’t possibly lose track of him because he kept talking. Endlessly. “Then I’d start looking at ways to bring down the price of tickets. It shouldn’t cost a mortgage payment to take your boy to a game, right?”

  My boy. Just the thought of the kid made my heart lurch a little bit. Beckett might like to see a game. Maybe I could take him and Mercy to Denver for a long weekend, get Beckett his own hotel room—one of those ones with a door connecting to ours. That way, I could spend my day showing that little boy how much fun baseball games could be and spoiling him rotten with sweets and souvenirs. And at night, I could spoil his mommy with my hands and tongue and cock. Make her quiver all over until she begged me to stop. Yeah, I’d be planning that out for sure. Once I got this shit out of the way and could go back to
being a nomad.

  Deacon, meanwhile, was still stuck on his dream of somehow becoming the commissioner of Major League Baseball. “Yeah, costs are too high. I think the player contracts could also use a little adjusting. Free agency—”

  “For fuck’s sake,” I said, unable to listen to another rant. “Are you like this when you work with Alder?”

  “Not really, no. I tend to talk a lot more with him.”

  I suddenly had a newfound respect for the elder Kennard. I was about to say so, but a car turned onto the road leading to the cabin we were staking out. Time to get down to business.

  “Incoming,” I said, lowering my voice now that we had company.

  Deacon also grew quieter, his words clipped and his voice hard. “Roger that. Red sedan rolling up.”

  I looked through my binoculars, watching as the car came to a stop and two men stepped out. They each wore a Soul Suckers jacket, the club emblem plain as day on the back. What I couldn’t see were the names on the front.

  “Visual confirmation on Soul Suckers members, but no names yet.”

  “Roger that,” Deacon replied. “No visual here.”

  Fuck. We had to be sure these were the right guys—the ones Cartel had fingered for trafficking kids. The ones we would kill in payment for Jinx’s freedom. If they were the wrong men, we’d just be murdering Soul Suckers without reason.

  I had to be sure. “I’m moving in.”

  “Veer slightly east. The cover is better than in the other direction.”

  “Got it. Try not to shoot me.”

  “I make no promises.”

  I chuckled softly, creeping through the woods at a fast pace. Heading for the cabin.

  “I got one inside the house,” Deacon said, huffing into the microphone. “Bastard ran in like he was about to shit his pants.”

  “Let’s hope he comes back out. Otherwise, this is going to get messy.” Because house cleanup hadn’t been on our agenda. I wanted this done in a particular way—outside, no waiting, no staking out as these two fuckers jacked off in the house or whatever they had plans for. Get in, get out, leave no trace. That was our plan. And it would work if we could just get sight of the name tags on the jackets and the shitter would come back out of the house.

  “Yo, Bama,” one guy yelled, and I grinned. Sometimes fate handed you a gift.

  “Confirmed target—Bama.” I slowed my pace, moving under the boughs of a heavy pine tree as I brought my binoculars up. “Light-haired mark standing at the rear of the car yelled the name.”

  “I heard it. Bama is coming back out. We need confirmation of blondie over there.”

  Yeah, we did. And I had a feeling the only way we were going to get it was for me to out myself.

  “Cover me. I’m rushing the targets.”

  “Try not to get shot.”

  “Always the goal.” I raised my weapon—a nice, semiautomatic tactical rifle—and raced forward, aiming straight at the blond guy by the trunk.

  “Back up,” I yelled, taking him by surprise and not giving him a second to even think. “Back the fuck up, and drop to your knees.”

  Blondie turned, and I finally got to see that handy-dandy name badge. Grudge. Exactly the person I was looking for.

  “Targets confirmed,” I said, knowing Deacon could still hear every word through his receiver. “Fire when ready.”

  “What the hell is this?” Grudge said, his hands up and his eyes wild. “Bama.”

  But Bama was already on the ground, blood spreading from what looked like a single gunshot wound to the head. Even I was surprised by that—Deacon was fast and accurate, but also sneaky as fuck. He’d likely shot the man while I’d been running up on Grudge, taking advantage of our distraction and my noise to hide the guy’s fall, though he also had to have a suppressor on his weapon. No way could me yelling cover the sound of a gun firing.

  My admiration for the Special Forces sniper grew more every minute.

  I walked up on Grudge, knowing he’d be dead already if Deacon had wanted to take that shot. Feeling as if I should bear some of the weight of this mission along with him.

  “You know why we’re here?”

  Grudge shook his head, still staring at his fallen buddy. I tapped his chin with the end of my rifle until he tore his eyes from the body and met my gaze. Pale, shaky, terrified—exactly how I wanted him.

  So I crouched down, keeping my gun on him as I put on what my former teammates had called my killer face. “You fucked with the wrong town. The wrong kids.”

  Grudge’s eyes went wide, as if he was only just realizing what he could have possibly done that was bad enough to deserve death. As if he’d had to dig through tons of offenses to come up with one that crossed the line. The thought made me sick to my stomach, not that I would ever let on to that.

  The Soul Sucker began to tremble all over. “I didn’t set the mark.”

  I bumped his chin with my rifle. Harder this time. “Who did?”

  Not that it mattered, but having something like another name to hunt down might entice Cartel. Might give me more negotiating room.

  Grudge licked his lips and swallowed hard before saying the one name I hadn’t expected. “The Wolf.”

  Wolf. The same man I’d been hunting for years. The one who’d killed my sister. My own ghost on the wind.

  This mission had just turned into an opportunity. “Where is Wolf now?”

  “Last I heard, he was in Texas.”

  “That’s all you know? Texas is a big state, motherfucker.”

  “San Antonio,” he yelped. “He’s got a house there.”

  Which was all the information I needed. “Thanks for the tip.”

  And then I shot him.

  I had Grudge dragged halfway to where Bama’s body lay when Deacon finally joined me. He surveyed the scene with a frown on his face and a tight grip on his rifle.

  “Everything okay there, Deacon?”

  He lifted a shoulder in a lazy sort of shrug, his lip curling a bit. “I never wanted to be a soldier for hire.”

  Not many people did, but sometimes you took the opportunities that were available. “You’ve killed before and gotten paid for it.”

  “Not like this.”

  I dumped the second body on the first, rising to my full height to look over at the sniper. “The military paid you money to kill people. You and Alder have killed since then, too.”

  “One was for our country’s safety and the other for personal protection.”

  “Killing in exchange for safety is the same as killing for money—different prize. Besides, this isn’t for money. It’s for Jinx’s safety.”

  “True.” He took a deep breath and blew it out. “And the kids.”

  My gut clenched, and the world swam with red again. The kids. The ones these fuckers had taken from their families. This kill was definitely about the kids—if these two would have gotten anywhere near Beckett, if they would have set their sights on him while I wasn’t there to keep him safe, if they’d have taken him…

  I wanted to kill them all over again just for the possibility that they were such a threat to that boy.

  Deacon tugged my thoughts from the brink of rage with the logistics of disposal, though. “We should load these guys into their own trunk and drive them out of here.”

  Destroy the evidence, hide the bodies, move on with life. Those words were practically a mantra.

  “Yeah. That sounds good.” I lifted Grudge’s feet while Deacon handled his shoulders. It took us a few minutes and some serious Tetris skills to get both bodies shoved into the trunk of the sedan, but eventually, we did. The lid shut and everything.

  “I’ll drive this one,” I said, knowing the risk would be on me should the cops pull us over. “You lead the way.”

  “Sounds like a—”

  But he didn’t get to finish his statement because right then, the rumble of a bike engine coming up the hill broke the silence around us. Deacon moved to the front of the car where h
is long-range rifle sat, pulling a handgun out along the way but holding it low. Armed but not obvious. I had no qualms about making sure whoever was coming our way knew I was packing. I hopped onto the trunk, lazily pointed my gun down the driveway with one hand, and waited.

  As soon as the biker turned into the drive, I knew things were about to go sideways. I recognized the man—Tiny, the enforcer for the Vegas chapter of the Black Angels. Though why he’d be coming to see a couple of child-stealing Soul Suckers, I had no idea.

  The big man rolled to a stop, planting his feet on the ground as he killed the engine, but not dismounting his ride. He removed his helmet slowly, looking over Deacon and me with a slight smirk on his face. As if he knew shit we didn’t. Which I sincerely doubted considering there were two dead bodies under my ass.

  “What’s doing, Parris?”

  I shrugged, keeping my gun pointed his way and not even attempting to hide it. “Nothing. What’s brought you up this way?”

  “Just checking on some friends of mine. Maybe you’ve seen them—two Soul Suckers named Grudge and Bama.”

  I shook my head, keeping my eyes firmly locked on his. “Can’t say that I have.”

  “This is where they’ve been staying.”

  “Wouldn’t know anything about that. My friend and I came up here to do some hiking and haven’t seen anyone else.”

  Tiny’s smirk grew. “Hiking.”

  “Yup. Hiking.” With guns. No way did he buy that bullshit line, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to try to sell it. “Good for the soul and all that.”

  Tiny nodded slowly and deliberately, as if actually thinking over my words even as his eyes strayed to where Deacon stood beside the sedan. “You’re the barkeep.”

  “Sure am.” Deacon strode forward, stopping when he reached my side. Rifle in hand. “Though the bar’s closed for now. I’m remodeling.”

  Tiny didn’t seem surprised. “Too bad. I was hoping to find a place to throw a party.”

  As if anyone would just let him come strolling into Justice like that. “Maybe you should stick to Rock Falls.”