by Krista Wolf
“Chevy pickup,” said Maddox, peering through the view-piece. He’d already changed over to a night-vision setting. “Brown. Maybe blue.”
Kane and I huddled on the cold ridge, just next to him and slightly behind. The truck drew slowly closer. When it got beneath the rock outcropping it stopped, and the doors opened.
“Three men,” said Maddox. “All of them armed.” His voice went lower. “They’re scanning around. Stay absolutely still.”
Seconds passed, with only the slow click of the binoculars to mark the passing of time. And then:
“They’re unloading something,” Maddox went on. “Four packages. Now six…”
I was trying not to shiver. At first I thought my body was coming alive with the thrill of danger, the rush of adrenaline, but I quickly came to realize something entirely different:
It was fucking freezing outside.
“Get in the truck,” Kane urged me.
“No, I’m good.”
“At least you’ll be out of the wind.”
“I said I’m good.”
He could argue all he wanted. I wasn’t missing this for anything.
“You’re shaking like a dog shitting razor blades.”
I squeezed my jaw tight to keep my teeth from chattering. “Fuck you.”
Kane flashed me a rare, half-smile. “Later,” the big SEAL huffed.
Maddox kept watching, kept counting. He reached thirty eight packages and stopped.
“Alright, here comes someone else.”
We all watched together as a second vehicle arrived, this time from the north. Either it was the same SUV as before, or a very similar model. It was the same color. It was bound to be from the motor pool.
“They’re all together now,” confirmed Maddox. “They’re talking.”
Shutting up became a team effort, as we all held our breath and strained to hear. Voices drifted up from the little canyon. Even a peal of deep, menacing laughter.
Eventually the SUV’s back door opened and a man got out. He looked significantly larger than the rest. He also carried himself very differently.
Kane, who was looking through his own set of binoculars, suddenly stiffened.
“That him?”
Maddox held up one hand. He used it to make the ‘affirmative’ symbol.
“Good enough.”
Kane twisted at the waist… and suddenly came back with a long, beige sniper rifle. It was sleek and corrugated, with a sinister-looking scope mounted along the entire top length.
“Wait, no!”
Maddox whirled at the sound of my voice. His hand shot out and grabbed the barrel just as Kane was setting up his aim.
“Bro, wait!” he hissed. “What are you doing?”
“Exactly what needs to be done.”
Maddox slid down, until he and his comrade were face to face. He shook his head, but Kane’s lips curled back in a snarl.
“Let. Go.”
“What about Austin?”
“Austin’s a big boy,” Kane seethed. “He can take care of himself.”
“But we promised not to make any moves without him.”
Kane slid the bolt back then jammed it forward, chambering a round.
“Kane!” Maddox hissed. “C’mon man, this is crazy! You can’t kill Dietz, we haven’t even—”
“As far as I’m concerned, he’s already dead.”
Things were going bad, and very quickly too. Kane’s eyes were murderous. They told me that if Maddox didn’t let go of the rifle soon, he was going to snap his fingers off the barrel one by one.
“What about her?” Maddox pleaded.
Kane froze for a moment, then his gaze shifted reluctantly toward me.
“We can’t do this now,” said Maddox. “Not with her here, and not without Austin.”
“There are only five of them,” growled Kane. “I’m pretty sure can get them all.”
“Six,” said Maddox. “One more just got out of that SUV.” Slowly he took his hand from the weapon’s barrel. “And yeah, maybe you can get them all. Or maybe you can’t. Maybe one of those vehicles gets away.” He shrugged. “Even if you drill them all dead, we learn absolutely nothing.”
Something in the back of Kane’s eyes shifted. I could see it reflected in the moonlight.
“We’ll get Dietz,” Maddox assured him, “just not right now. It’s too big a risk.”
I let out a long, relieved breath as the tension went out of Kane’s shoulders. He slid the bolt backward. Popped the round out.
By the time he’d the folded the rifle away, the business in the canyon had finished. The vehicles drove off in different directions, the rumble of tires on gravel fading slowly away.
“It was the right call,” said Maddox, patting his shoulder. “We’ll get a better opportunity.”
But Kane didn’t seem all that convinced.
“I wonder if Connor waited too long,” the big man said ominously. “Hoping for a better opportunity himself.”
Fifty-Four
DALLAS
We waited five minutes after the last sign of their taillights. Ten minutes after that, we’d made our way down the hill and were standing beneath the rocky outcropping.
“This is the spot,” pointed Maddox.
The tire-tracks were faint; so much so that you had to know they were there to even see them. The ground all around the entire area was packed hard, like cement.
“Look around,” I said. “Maybe they left something behind.”
“Probably not,” said Kane.
“Why?”
“That was a simple exchange,” he said. “They met out here for anonymity, so they wouldn’t be seen.”
“Then why were they unloading stuff?”
Kane looked back at me and shrugged. “Product for money?” he guessed. “They buyer had to count it. Had to see what they were getting.”
“Yeah, but their truck had a bed,” I said. “And a tailgate.”
“So?”
“So why would they unload everything onto the ground?”
We all looked down at the same time. That part was weird, I could tell by the fact neither of them had an actual answer.
“And that first truck,” I said. “We saw its reverse lights. It actually backed up to something.”
Kane and Maddox gave each other a ‘holy shit’ look. I felt another swell of pride.
All those episodes of Columbo… finally paying off.
“Where was the first truck parked?” Maddox demanded.
The three of us shuffled around, sweeping our flashlights. It took some doing, but eventually we found one set of tracks that was deeper than the others, like it was doubled over. It also ended abruptly.
“Here.”
Kane knelt and began poking the ground. So did Maddox. So did I.
Five minutes passed. Ten. We were on our hands and knees, smoothing through the hard-packed gravel. Knocking on the desert earth with our bare fists, which were starting to get chewed up.
“I was looking more at their faces,” said Maddox. “Trying to recognize someone. I wasn’t really looking down at—”
He stopped talking as his whole body froze. Then he looked up.
“What?”
Maddox lifted his hand from the dirt. Clenched in his fist was a short length of sand-colored rope.
“Damn.”
Kane came over, and the two of them grabbed it. The pulled together, hard, and suddenly the entire desert floor shifted.
Or at least, a five-by-five foot section of it.
Holy fucking shit!
It was a hole. Carved into the sandstone, chipped into the clay, it was about three feet deep with squared off corners.
“You gotta be fucking kidding me.”
Maddox was holding his hair back from falling over his eyes. Down in the hole were a few dozen packages, all wrapped in brown paper. They were stacked neatly, like bricks, all tied off with butcher’s twine.
“What is it?” I asked, knowing the answe
r.
“Drugs.”
“You sure? Maybe it’s money.”
Kane huffed disgustedly. “It’s never money,” he spat. “It’s always drugs.”
“I can’t believe this,” Maddox was saying. “What do we do now?”
“We leave it.”
Kane and I muttered the same sentence at the same time. We looked up at each other in acknowledgment.
“For now, anyway,” he added.
A scratching noise floated in from off in the distance — a critter maybe, or an echo from further away. It lent a sudden urgency to the overall mood.
“I can’t believe we found this,” said Maddox.
“We didn’t find shit,” said Kane. He nodded my way. “She found it.”
“Whatever.” Maddox turned to face me. “Shit Dallas,” he swore. “I could kiss you right now.”
“Later,” I shot back, and Kane nodded his agreement.
“After we bury this back up exactly the way we found it.”
Fifty-Five
DALLAS
The television played, but none of us were really watching it anymore. It was some obscure drama whose plot required total attention, not the restless wanderings of three tired minds.
“Another beer?” asked Maddox.
Kane and I shook our heads. We’d already had a couple, but it didn’t seem to dull the edge. We were still too wired, too strung out. The adrenaline still hadn’t made its way out of our bodies.
So we sat there in the wee hours of the morning, stretched out on the couch together. Austin wasn’t coming home. He’d called to establish that even before we’d left for the desert; apparently his ‘guy’ still needed more time.
I was, as usual, thinking about Connor. But Maddox and Kane…
They were thinking about Dietz.
I’d tried getting them to talk about it, to tell me more about this guy who possibly betrayed my brother. Yet every story, every tale — it only seemed to make them more tense, more wound-up and angry. And not just at Dietz, but at themselves too.
It was something I was unfortunately familiar with: survivor’s guilt. The constant wracking of your brain, thinking about what you could’ve done differently. How if you could only go back to this day, or that day, you could somehow make everything right again.
The whole thing was a rabbit hole without a bottom.
Maddox returned, sinking heavily into his end of the sofa. Seated between them, I stretched myself out… and laid my body across both of theirs.
“C’mere.”
My arm went up, my hand sifting through Maddox’s hair. I pulled him down to me and kissed him, driving my tongue into mouth, demonstrating an emotional need to be close, to be with him, even in this one, small way.
Then he kissed me back… and I knew what I had to do.
I sat up and placed my hand on his wonderful chest. Then I pushed him back against the couch, and slid to the floor.
“Relax,” I smiled, unbuckling his belt while Kane looked on. I put a hand on each of them. “The both of you.”
In the slow, flickering darkness, I massaged two growing bulges from my position on the floor. It was hot, just seeing them slumped there. Watching the tension go out of their big strong bodies, as the restlessness shifted over to curiosity and then flat-out arousal. They were both hard by the time I got Maddox’s pants down around his ankles. I pulled his cock free through the hole in his boxers… then leaned forward to swallow him whole.
Mmmmmm…
He was a mixture of musk, and salt, and sweat. Manly but not unpleasant. I bobbed up and down on him, enjoying my second favorite part of any blowjob: the feeling of a man growing stiff and hard in my mouth.
My eyes wandered over to Kane. I shot my gaze down to his crotch, which I was still touching and rubbing. He took the hint and unbuckled his own belt.
Through clenched teeth, Maddox let out a long, heated sigh. His thighs parted. His hand went to my head, rubbing me gently as I sucked him off.
Then I switched to Kane, who already had his cock out.
Jesus, Dallas.
It was pretty amazing, how powerful I could feel from my knees. How I was in total control over these two unstoppable men; the immovable object trapped between the irresistible force of their hard, shredded bodies. I blew one while stroking the other, switching back and forth whenever I wanted.
Then I got nasty, too.
I’d wink at Maddox while blowing Kane. Look up into Kane’s eyes while sticking my tongue out and licking up and down the length of his friend’s cock. Back and forth, back and forth, stroking and sucking them until each of their already considerable erections were hard enough to pound nails.
Or preferably, pound me.
As wonderful as that sounded, I didn’t want to be pounded. It was a late, lazy hour. And hey, I wanted to be the one calling the shots. I wanted to make them come.
Kane moved to rise first, and I anticipated the movement. Before he could leave the couch I was already pressing my hand against his chest, fingers splayed, pushing him back against the cushions.
Then I stood up, slipped out of my bottoms, and sat right down… on Maddox’s glistening, rock-hard dick.
He slid all the way inside me with a grateful sigh.
Two sexy SEAL hands went to my hips. I pushed them away, placing them back on either side of the couch. I could’ve put them on my aching, heaving breasts. Could’ve enjoyed the feel of his fingers rolling my nipples as I glided up and down on him, fucking him deep, rolling into his body on every downstroke.
Instead I threw my arms over his shoulders and fucked him like a needy, greedy whore.
Kane sat there and watched. His eyes traveled hungrily over my body as I screwed his friend, watching my every movement, listening to every whimper and sigh. His hand traveled up and down his own member, the head so swollen and engorged it looked ready to burst.
God…
I couldn’t wait to sit on it. Couldn’t wait to climb in his lap and fuck him next. But not until I had Maddox. Not until I’d done what I set out to achieve.
“FUCK, Dallas…”
It turned out it didn’t take long. Maddox’s ass left the couch as he flooded me with his come, surging upward and into me in the most delicious way. Deep down, I could still feel the pain of Mardi Gras. The soreness of two days of non-stop satisfaction, followed by last night’s amazing tryst in my own bed.
I finally allowed his hands on my body as my first lover finished, his fingers clenching and unclenching against my naked ass as he rode out his last euphoric contractions. Then, still leaking his come, I climbed into Kane’s lap…
… and sank all the way down to the balls on his steel rod of an erection.
Ohhh… ohhh FUCK…
I hadn’t planned on coming myself. I’d been only interested in their pleasure, enjoying the feel of them dragging around inside me.
All of a sudden however, things had changed.
“God, you’re such a fucking mess…”
Kane was kissing my neck, chewing my shoulder. Holding me against him while I rode up and down. I didn’t stop him. Shit, I couldn’t if I wanted to.
Dallas…
My orgasm was gathering like a coming storm. Picking up steam as my lover drilled me from beneath, fucking upwards and into me every bit as much as I was screwing down into him. I had my head lolled back, my face thrown at the ceiling. A mouth closed over mine and then Maddox was kissing me… kissing me even as Kane’s tongue trailed down my neck, as his cock was buried deep in my come-soaked pussy, all warm and wet and dirty and—
“OHHHHHHHHH!”
I screamed the word out loud. Or rather, it was torn from the depths of my throat.
“FUCKKKKK!”
It happened right in the middle of my climax: Kane’s hands screwed into fists, and he unloaded into me. His cock jumped and thumped and pulsed, shooting me full of his seed. Adding his load to Maddox’s, filling me with so much come I could feel it runn
ing down my thighs, his thighs, the couch… everywhere, all at once.
I rolled and thrashed on his cock, swinging my hair back and forth. Somehow still kissing Maddox, who had his arms around me.
My God…
Someone was cupping my breasts beneath my shirt, dragging his calloused hands over my nipples. It could’ve been either of them. It could’ve been both. I was so lost in ecstasy I didn’t care if it was the devil himself… and based on my behavior lately, that was a possibility I wasn’t ruling out.
Delirium and euphoria gave way to pleasure, which gave way to reality. I slid from Kane’s lap, flopping between them. Squeezing my thighs tightly together as they both ran out of me, while my chest heaved with the exertion of fucking them both.
“Tension breaker,” I breathed, smiling as I quoted one of my favorite movies. “Had to be done.”
Fifty-Six
MADDOX
The perimeter alarm chirped sometime around noon.
It was strange, because we hadn’t picked up signs of motion. There was no one outside, nothing to be seen anywhere on the property. After checking the feeds, none of the monitors showed activity on the block either.
KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK.
Kane was already at the door, pistol drawn. I had the safety off on my MP5, just past the south window. In perfect position to back him up.
For a few long seconds we did nothing. Then, just after the second knock came, Kane snuck a peek through the peephole.
“Unfuckingreal.”
He grabbed the handle and flung the door open. Before I even knew what was happening, he’d grabbed the person on our doorstep and heaved him into the house, slamming him against the nearest wall.
“EASY! EASY!”
The man stood on his tiptoes, hands held high over his head. He was big. Big like us. Blond hair, squared shoulders. I couldn’t see his face yet, but Kane’s pistol was jammed so far under his chin his tongue was practically forced out of his mouth.
“Fuckin’ RELAX!” the man snarled.
That voice…
I’d already drawn down on him. Now I stepped in and jabbed my barrel violently into his ribs. He doubled over in pain, and in a flash Kane both kicked the door closed and slammed the man in the jaw with the butt of his Sig Sauer.
