Her Mountain Brothers

by Crowne, K. C.

  “Do you ever think about coming back home for good?” Wyatt asked me.

  His question caught me off guard. Had anyone asked me the same question a couple weeks prior, I’d have said “No way in hell. Too many bad memories.” But now that I’d been back, the idea didn’t seem so bad.

  It almost sounded nice.

  “I dunno. We’ll see what happens,” I mumbled.

  Ryder stopped the truck and looked down at the phone, verifying the location. Wyatt leaned forward, groaning as he did so. I placed my hand on his back, rubbing it gently, trying to soothe him.

  “I think this is it,” he said.

  “What is it?” I asked, leaning forward to stare out the front window. “Looks like a bunch of storage units.”

  “At the end of the message there’s the letter B,” Wyatt said. “I believe we’re supposed to find unit B.”

  “And do what when we find it?” I asked.

  None of us had really thought that far ahead. Ryder opened the car door and climbed out, slamming the door as he walked toward the units. Wyatt and I shared a look before I hopped out, followed by Wyatt.

  “Ryder, we need a plan. We can’t just walk right up in here,” I told him.

  “And why not?” he asked, never slowing his pace.

  “Because someone might be watching us,” I said. “They might be protecting this place.”

  Ryder didn’t stop, and I had to speed up to catch him. Wyatt was a tad bit slower due to the pain in his shoulder, but he caught up eventually. Ryder finally stopped right outside of unit B.

  Like most storage facilities, there was a garage door. It was a dusty, white-grey color with a bright yellow B painted on the front of it. There was also a regular door off to one side, but no windows, and I was betting the doors were locked.

  “What now?” I asked, glaring at Ryder. “We’re probably on camera, you know.”

  Ryder didn’t answer me. He first tried the regular door, as if thinking it might be unlocked. When it didn’t open, he pulled out a gun I hadn’t realized he was carrying on him.

  “What the fuck, Ryder?” Wyatt said.

  Before either of us could say or do anything else, Ryder shot the lock on the garage door, causing it to explode into a million pieces. He put the gun away and breezed over to the door, pulling it up without any hesitation. Once he was standing in the open doorway, he shot a look over his shoulder at us. “You coming or not? I doubt we have much time.”

  He was right. The cops may or may not be called. In parts of Los Angeles, the sound of gunshots blended in with the cars backfiring, the illegal fireworks, and just the general noise of the city. But the cops weren’t my concern, even if we were breaking and entering.

  As soon as we entered, he pulled the garage door shut and we were inside, surrounded by complete darkness.

  Wyatt

  All three of us were feeling along the wall for some sort of light switch. Even as my eyes adjust to the darkness, it was hard to see anything clearly. It looked like a bunch of filing cabinets filled one wall of the unit, but without any light, we wouldn’t get anywhere. Ryder had fucked up by simply shooting the lock; now we were on borrowed time. My brother was never one to think clearly, especially when upset - which he still was. It wasn’t an excuse to act rashly, however, and his move put us in some danger.

  “I think I found it,” Hazel said, her voice coming from the middle of the unit. “But I can’t reach it, can one of you help me?”

  I was the first to get to her. WIthout thinking, I lifted her off the ground. Bad idea. Pain shot through my shoulder and it took everything in me not to drop her. I must have made some sort of sound because Hazel said, “Wyatt, don’t hurt yourself.”

  I put her back down and decided on the next course of action, reaching the damn switch myself. It was hanging from a light bulb in the middle of the room. Just a dangling light with a string to pull, nothing more. As soon as I yanked the chain, light filled the room. It wasn’t much light, but it would have to do.

  “Where should we start?” Hazel asked, looking at the wall of filing cabinets.

  Ryder didn’t hesitate; he walked right over and pulled on one. When it didn’t open, he reached for his gun. Hazel hurried to him, grabbing his arm. “No. We can’t risk it, Ryder. We’re already likely to get caught.”

  I stayed out of it. The look he gave Hazel would have been enough to make weaker women back away, but Hazel stood tall. She took the gun from Ryder’s hand as he shot daggers at her.

  “We need to be smart about this, not just use force,” she said.

  “How else do you plan on getting these open?” he asked. “Unless you happen to know how to pick locks.”

  “Maybe we don’t need to open them,” she said. Her eyes fell on something in the far corner of the room. A box. Someone had just put a lone box in the corner, as if it had been forgotten about all this time. Hazel walked over, and I followed. Ryder stayed near the filing cabinets, scowling, his arms crossed in front of his chest.

  I knelt beside Hazel as she opened the box.

  “What is this?” I asked, picking up a sapphire necklace. The gemstone was huge, almost too large to be real, but it was heavy. It looked pretty damn real to me, and if it was, it had to be the most expensive piece of jewelry I’d ever held.

  “I recognize that,” Hazel said. “Give me a second.”

  She pulled out her phone, and thanks to the wonders of technology, she pulled up Google Images of celebrities on the red carpet at some fancy event.

  “Is that—”

  “It’s Daphne Lambert,” she said, finishing my sentence. “Wearing that necklace.”

  I’d heard about the death of Daphne Lambert. You would have had to be living under a rock not to know about it. She was a modern-day Black Dahlia, a rising star whose life had been cut too short. She was found dead in her apartment with pill bottles at her side. Many people assumed it was suicide, but her family insisted Daphne was in the prime of her career, happy and carefree, and that she was not suicidal. They also mentioned that she’d had a large bump on her head which they believed proved there was foul play of some sort. There’d also been no history of mental illness or drug abuse, but the coroner ruled it a suicide nonetheless, writing the lump on her head off as happening from a fall as she was found on her bathroom floor.

  Hazel looked even more determined now. She laid Ryder’s gun on the ground beside her and put her phone away, digging through the box like a kid with an Easter basket full of treats.

  “Someone’s coming,” Ryder said, speaking low.

  “Just one more second,” Hazel said. “I think I found something.”

  Her voice was cut off by a gunshot. I grabbed Ryder’s gun and turned toward where the shots were coming from. The garage door hadn’t opened yet, but as soon as it did, we were likely to all be in trouble.

  Ryder grabbed his knife from the sheath, and I felt like an ass for having his gun when he needed it the most, but neither one of us had time to talk, much less exchange weapons. The garage door opened, and I expected gunfire.

  I shouted, “Get down!” to Hazel just as one man walked into the garage. One man with an automatic weapon pointed directly at Hazel.

  I did the only thing I could in that moment. I dove for her, taking her down to the ground, my shoulder smashing against the concrete floor. Hazel’s scream was drowned out as the gun went off, littering the back wall with a spray of bullets, right above where her head had just been.

  “Wyatt, my gun!” Ryder shouted.

  There was no time. I rolled over onto my back, still covering Hazel as much as I could, and pointed the gun at the man. I had one shot. With my right arm out of commission, it wasn’t going to be easy, but I only had a split second to act. I squeezed the trigger, aiming for the chest. The man moved out of the way, the bullet didn’t even graze him, and he was already reloaded. Shit.

  I aimed again, but when I pulled the trigger, nothing happened. I was out of ammo. I hadn
’t reloaded after the shootout at the house and now Ryder had the ammo on him. I was literally staring into the eyes of death.

  Everything else seemed to happen in slow motion: the man raised the gun toward me, and while I covered Hazel and waited for the spray of bullets with my eyes closed, nothing happened.

  Instead, there was a sound unlike anything I’d ever heard before. I opened my eyes in time to see Ryder behind the man, the man was on the ground, blood dripping from Ryder’s knife and the man’s throat as a sickening gurgling escaped his lips.

  There was no time to see if the man was dead or alive, or to ask Ryder how he managed to sneak up on him. I grabbed Hazel’s hand, yanking her up.

  “We have to go. There will be more,” Ryder called out.

  “Just give me a second,” Hazel said, running to the box. She lifted it, using her knees since it was obviously pretty heavy.

  “Leave it, there’s no time,” Ryder scolded.

  “I got it,” she said.

  She clearly had it, but it’s heft would prohibit her from running. Maybe it was all the adrenaline coursing through my veins, but I no longer felt any pain in my shoulder. I grabbed the box from her hands and yelled, “Go, now, I’ll catch up.”

  She hesitated, but I was right behind her. Once she realized I wasn’t slowed down, she ran to the truck. Other cars were pulling in at the entrance. There was one way in and one way out, and thankfully, no one had blocked the exit yet.

  Ryder hopped in the driver’s seat and Hazel and I climbed in the back as the truck started moving. He hit the gas and peeled out of there as about five black cars stopped at the storage unit. Two followed us.

  “We have to lose them,” Ryder muttered. “And fast.”

  “We’re in Los Angeles,” Hazel said. “Just head back toward Sunset. It’ll be too busy for them to shoot without anyone noticing, and we’ll try to lose them once we hop on the freeway.”

  “How did we get so lucky back there?” I asked, still in shock over how close we’d come to death.

  “Because that guy wasn’t a professional,” Hazel replied.

  Ryder turned onto Sunset Boulevard, and she was right - the guys were still on our tails, but they weren’t shooting, they were merely following us.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “Because I know who he is,” she admitted softly. “His name is Hank Cromwell, and he’s a producer.”

  “A movie producer?” I asked, keeping an eye on the two cars following us. It slowly dwindled down to one. We lost the second car thanks to Ryder’s spastic driving and weaving in and out of traffic. “How’d he get caught up in all this?”

  “I don’t know,” Hazel said. “But I have a feeling it has to do with what’s in that box.”

  I’d forgotten all about the box until she’d mentioned it. It was sitting on the seat beside me, and she began to dig through it again. Ryder cursed under his breath.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “I can’t seem to lose this asshole,” he said.

  I turned to see that the car we thought we’d lost was now back behind us. “We’re coming up to the freeway now. Let’s hope we lose him there.”

  “Yeah, let’s hope,” Ryder grumbled. “Then what?”

  “Find a hotel out of town. We need to see what’s in the box and regroup and think about what we’re going to do next.”

  “Sounds like a plan, boss,” Ryder said dryly.

  There was some contention there, but I wasn’t about to argue with my brother while being tailed by the fucking mob. He could pout all he wanted, but as long as he lost the guys following us, I’d forgive him for being a dick. I was in no shape to drive. My wound had opened again.

  Hazel got to work cleaning me up, taking my shirt off, and I closed my eyes. I trusted in Ryder to get us lost. I trusted Hazel in caring for my arm. I was as relaxed as I could be, all things considered.

  Or maybe I was just in shock. All these years as a PI, and I’d never had someone point a gun directly at me. In the last twenty-four hours, it had happened twice. I’d also never watched a man bleed the way old Hank did back there. Ryder didn’t cut all the way through; the man might live, but he might not. Not only were we guilty of breaking and entering, but potentially manslaughter as well. Sure, it was self-defense, but would the judge see it that way? We’d broken into the storage unit. Hank might have been defending himself from us. It could be spun a hundred different ways, and we weren’t always the good guys in the end of the story.

  “Whatever’s in that box better be worth it,” I muttered.

  “Oh, I’m sure it is,” Hazel said, dabbing at my arm with a napkin. I flinched and she apologized. “I’m pretty sure, from what I can tell, it links Hank Cromwell to the death of Daphne Lambert.”

  My eyes widened, and I stared at her in shock. “And what does any of this have to do with Boone and the Mob?”

  “Well, I don’t know about the mafia connection yet, but Boone worked with Hank on a film not too long ago, one that also starred Daphne. Daphne and Hank were pretty close, and Boone was friendly with both of them, so there’s your connection.”

  “And Boone led us to the proof so we could nail this Cromwell asshole?” I asked.

  “Looks like it to me,” Hazel said, holding the napkin against my flesh and staring deep into my eyes. I could drown in the depths of her baby blues and die a happy man, I thought. She gave me a sweet smile before looking out the back window of the truck.

  “Are they still behind us?” I asked.

  “I think Ryder might have lost them,” she said softly.

  “Yeah, I lost them about a mile back. Not that anyone was paying attention,” Ryder growled.

  My brother glanced back at us and noticed Hazel’s hand resting on my chest. Ryder scowled before turning his attention back to the road. My brother had many demons, but jealousy wasn’t usually one of them. Of course, a woman like Hazel did strange things to a man, made you feel all kinds of emotions you weren’t familiar with. I didn’t blame him for feeling the way he did. I wouldn’t have liked being accused of threatening to rape a woman either, and to imagine Hazel believing that about me? I’d have lost my shit too.

  One way or another, we’d have to get things straightened out with Ryder. Hazel and I had gotten closer, but I knew she still had feelings for my brother. Not many things in this world could tear my brother and me apart, but Hazel was a special case.

  Hazel

  The sun had already set, and we were several hours away from Los Angeles in the Central Valley of California, a town that smelled like a pig farm. Few people realized that outside of L.A. lies a lot of farming communities, and we’d ended up in one of those, in a hotel that was even shittier than the last one. It was small, with only about eight rooms or so, all of them with doors to the outside. We’d have preferred a private entrance, but beggars can’t be choosers.

  “We only have one room left,” the old man at the counter informed us.

  I found it hard to believe that anyone was staying in such a shithole, but I kept that thought to myself. There’d been a lot of diesel trucks in the parking lot, so people passing through from L.A. to San Francisco likely faced the same choice we did. Keep driving and hope to find something better or call it a night and take whatever you could get.

  Needless to say, we took the room.

  Wyatt stayed in the truck. We didn’t want to raise any suspicion with the amount of blood on his shirt. Ryder stayed with him. Once I had the key, I returned to the truck.

  “Last room at the end,” I said, climbing into the backseat. “Which means we can hide the truck around back.”

  Ryder started the engine and drove around back, parking near the tree line, far away from any roads. He still wasn’t talking much, but I figured as soon as we got into our room, all hell would break loose. Either that or we’d all pass out from exhaustion. Either one was possible, and personally, I favored the latter.

  “I’ll run into town
and get Wyatt a new shirt,” Ryder offered, staying in the truck. He stared straight ahead.

  “No, not tonight,” Wyatt said. “Just in case they’ve made it this far, it’s best to stay out of sight.”

  I got out of the truck while Ryder scowled, still not moving from the front seat. I felt bad for everything that had happened, but we didn’t have time for his shit. The mafia was after us, Wyatt was hurt, and Boone was still missing. Oh, and we might have killed someone.

  Wyatt got out with me, and I handed him the key to the room. “Go on. We’ll meet you there in a sec.”

  Wyatt didn’t argue. He shot a look toward Ryder and shook his head, then headed to the hotel room.

  I climbed in the front seat with him. “Listen, I know you’re upset with me, and I understand why,” I said, staring at my hands. “But that was a long time ago. I was young and stupid, and I was taught to always believe someone when they say they’ve been assaulted.”

  “And you should,” Ryder said, his voice rough. He was still staring straight ahead. “You really should believe a woman when they say a man’s done them wrong, I absolutely believe that. Nine times out of ten, hell, probably ten times out of ten, they’re telling the truth.”

  I was taken aback, speechless for the first time in my life. He basically agreed with me, seemed to understand my rationale, yet, he was still angry. It didn’t make sense to me.

  Ryder ran a hand through his thick, shaggy hair, finally turning toward me. “I’m not mad at you, Hazel. I know it seems that way, and I’ll be honest, I want to be mad at you because I’d rather be mad than admit to being hurt, but it’s not your fault we lost the last several years of our lives together. It’s Lila’s, and I’ll never be able to forgive her. I can’t even fathom why she’d do that,” he said, throwing his hands down on the steering wheel and gripping it tightly.