FOURTEEN
REBEL
Cade’s not in the clubhouse. Normally after taking a girl up to my cabin for a couple of hours and then reappearing looking frustrated as fuck, I’d garner a few catcalls from the other Widow Makers, but tonight the mood is overly drunk and sombre. After Bron’s short and simple funeral, no one’s in the mood for jokes. They’re in the mood to get fucked up and fight.
Three chairs and one table have been smashed by the time I manage to make it across the clubhouse bar and up the back stairs to the handful of bedrooms we have set up there. No one lives here permanently. The Widow Makers have either chosen to live in town with their families, or they have rooms in the many outhouses that make up the compound. That’s probably why people think we’re some sort of fucking sex cult. Cade has a place above Dead Man’s Ink in town, but he won’t have gone back there tonight. Not without speaking to me first. He’ll be holed up in the one room that’s permanently reserved for him on the top floor, waiting to spill whatever bullshit lies Maria Rosa told him when I left the two of them alone.
I lay my fist against the last door on the right, not surprised when Cade opens it right away. He must have heard my boots coming down the corridor. A gift from the U.S. Marine Corp: the ability to hear a man sneaking up on you from a mile away.
Semper Fi.
My brother in arms looks absolutely exhausted. He steps back so I can enter the room, which is sparse and OCD neat. He claps me on the back, giving me a tired smile. “You look much better than you did before, man. I think you got out of there at the right time.”
“Did she say anything else?”
He shakes his head. “Nope. She did try and convince me to fuck her, though.”
“What is wrong with that woman? She gets shot and waterboarded, and in the next breath she’s trying to get you to stick your dick in her?” Cade gives me a rueful look that tells me it might have been worse than that. “Jesus. I don’t think I want to know,” I tell him.
“I’m sure you don’t. Come on. Let’s do this.” Cade knows where we have to go next. He knows what has to be done next, too. Raphael Dela Vega has polluted Widow Makers ground for too long already. I won’t have him here, freaking Sophia out, causing trouble amongst the club members. They know Hector Ramirez’s right hand man is in one of the holding cells underneath the barn. It won’t be long before someone’s suggesting we chop the motherfucker’s extremities off and send them back to Ramirez in ziplock baggies.
The guy has got to go. No way are we sending him back to his employer, though. No. No fucking way is that happening. If I’m honest, I’m all for the chopping off extremities and leaving them for Ramirez to find, the same way he did with poor Bronwyn, but we don’t have time for that. Gunshots fired? A convoy of strange, unlicensed, shot-to-hell black cars burning out of town, headed straight for us? It’s a goddamn miracle that Lowell woman isn’t hammering down the gates already. There was nothing to be done about him until dark, though. With a long range scope—paranoid perhaps, but a possibility—it would have been all too easy to spot a couple of guys wrestling with a noncompliant Mexican guy in broad daylight. Now we just have to hope that if Lowell is out there and she’s got people watching us, they don’t have heat imaging or night vision. If they do, we’re gonna be fucked.
There’s a goddamn riot unfolding in the bar downstairs as Cade and me sneak out the back. Normally I’d start knocking heads together, but it’s better for everyone involved if the guys continue raising hell here instead of following us. Outside, the desert air is cold and the sky is an explosion of stars.
Cade jogs across the courtyard—there’s still blood everywhere. I should make Maria Rosa come clean up her fucking mess before I even consider setting her free—and opens the barn door, slipping inside. He holds the door open for me, and then we’re shrouded in pitch-blackness. A pale yellow flame is struck into existence, which sends long fingers of narrow shadows stretching up to the barn rafters. Cade looks like some sort of horror movie character as he holds the tarnished zippo he’s lit up to his face.
“You want me to turn on the overheads?”
“No. Would only draw attention. Dark is better.”
I’m regretting my words two seconds later when Cade is falling over sideways, crashing into me, hissing under his breath. He goes down hard, almost taking me with him. The zippo skitters out of his hand, skidding across the roughcast concrete floor, though the flame remains lit, guttering and then strengthening again.
“What the hell, man?” I grab hold of Cade by the shoulder, trying to pull him up in the half dark. He grunts, and then there’s the sound…the sound of a second person moaning? What? No one else should be in here. No one else should even know we have people in the basement. My hand’s reaching for the gun in my waistband when Cade swears loudly.
“Fuck, no. Damn it, it’s fucking Carnie.”
“Carnie?”
There’s more moaning. Cade gets to his feet, moving his considerable bulk out of the way, and then I can see Carnie too in the meagre light being thrown off by the zippo. Sure enough, he’s flat out on his back, a two-inch long gash along his right temple. His eyelids flicker open, but even from here I can see his eyes themselves are not working properly, don’t seem to be focusing on the men standing over him.
“What happened?” Cade demands. “What the hell are you doing up here, passed out cold, man?” He shakes Carnie hard, which seems to do the trick.
“Uh…I was…fuck. I was…heading down to take some food to Mother and the other one. I opened the padlock on the hatch and he…he sprang out. He had a broken chair leg in his hands. He must have hit me over the head with it.”
When I first walked back into the clubhouse and Cade told me Ryan had been killed, it took me a beat to process what he was saying to me. Took me a minute or two to comprehend what he was telling me. Not so this time. As soon as the words are out of Carnie’s mouth, I’m in fight mode, already predicting what will come next. Dreading it with every fibre of my being.
I grab hold of Carnie by the collar of his cut, pulling him off the ground so my face is in his. “How long? How long ago?” I yell.
“I don’t…I don’t know. What time is it?” Carnie’s still struggling to string words together. Means he was probably hit over the head pretty hard. That also means he could have been out for a considerable amount of time, too. I let go of him and he drops to the ground like a sack of flour.
This cannot be happening. It just can’t. “Fuck!”
Cade draws his gun and sets his jaw. He knows what this means, too. Raphael Dela Vega is an unhinged bastard with no sense of self-preservation. He won’t have fled the compound. Not yet. He’s been fixated on one thing and one thing only for a long time now, and he won’t leave here until he’s gotten what he’s been dreaming about.
He has been dreaming about Sophia.