Kade: Santanas Cuervo MC (5 page)

“How many in your club?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Only twenty-two? From the way you were talking, it sounded much larger.”

“Then it
was
much larger. Over two-hundred.”

“Where’d everybody go?”

Kade looked at his sandwich and placed it on his plate. “Some are dead. A few left. Those who remain, the final twenty-two, are the locals, the men who had put down roots.”

She could sense there was more than he was telling, but decided to let it pass for now. “Where’s home?”

“Rio Bonita.”

“Never heard of it.”

“No reason you should. It’s about an hour north and west of here. A nice little place of about five thousand.”

“And what did Rio Bonita think of what you did?”

“They didn’t know.”

“What do you mean they didn’t know? How could they not know?”

“Because we made sure to keep the drugs away from town. Exchanges were always done out of town, and while I’m sure there were and are drugs in town, they’re brought in from outside because we controlled the transportation of the drugs in this part of the Texas. We made sure there were no dealers in town.”

“I don’t get you at all.”

“What’s to get? Drugs are a nasty business. We don’t want that in our town, so we kept it out as much as possible because we had the means to do so. Still do.”

“So you’re drug runners, were drug runners,” she corrected, “but you didn’t let drugs into
your
town? Kind of a not in my backyard thing?”

Kade shrugged. “The drugs are coming into the country if we move them or not. They were coming in before we took over the transportation, and they’re still coming in now that we’ve stopped. By controlling the flow of drugs, we could steer it around the town, so we did.”

She frowned. This wasn’t anything like she expected. “How are you controlling the drugs now?”

He snorted. “Let’s just say we have a gentleman’s agreement with Cartel and they have picked a different route. Which may be part of the problem. Kelly Oil may be squeezing off one of their supply routes.”

She nodded. “Now I’m starting to see the big picture. Because you were involved in the drug trade, you know what to look for.”

“That, and the fact we controlled Maverick County at one time and we kind of know who looks right and who doesn’t. Plus, as I said, we have some experience protecting high value targets. We’re not exactly popular with the Escorpión Cartel, but if we find out it
is
the Escorpión Cartel that’s causing issues, we may be able to warn them off before someone gets hurt.”

She popped a chip into her mouth and crunched as she thought. “Can we start over?”

“Start over?”

She grinned and stuck her hand across the table. “Hi! I’m Winter. I understand you’re my new security team.”

He chuckled and took her hand. “Nice to meet you, Winter. I’m Kade Goddard. I’m here to help keep you safe while not being a pain in your ass.”

She giggled as she leaned back in her chair. “I’m sorry I came across as such a bitch. I thought Aunt Gail had lost her ever-loving mind, but I’m starting to see the logic in her decision.”

When she smiled her entire face lit up, making her more attractive still. “It’s okay. I know how most people view what we did. I never liked it myself, but that’s behind us now and we are trying to look to the future. That’s why this job is important to us. It may be a way for us to break into a legitimate business and get back on our feet, so we’re vested in keeping you safe. I don’t think your Aunt Gail will give us a positive recommendation if we let you get killed.”

She was taking a sip of her pop when he spoke and had to struggle mightily not to spit it out as she laughed.

“Thumper One, Thumper Three. I have a low pressure light on the vibration hydraulics.” Winter looked up from her computer and gave a listen. “Hang on, I’m going to take a look,” Thumper Three said.

“Uh-oh, that’s not good,” Charlie said softly. There was a long pause as Charlie, Winter and Everly Dickerson watched the radio.

This was their second day in the latest section, five days after they had set up security around Winter, and it was the first break in the routine. Everly, Big Dick to his brothers, was almost glad. This was his first time babysitting, and his second turn in the truck.

Sitting in the recording truck, listening the radio chatter and Winter and Charlie talk about stuff that may as well have been in Manchurian for all the sense it made to him, made his head hurt. He spent most his time wandering around outside because at least then he didn’t have to listen to them discuss things like
non-normal incidence, receive offsets, data migration,
or his current favorite,
deconvolution.
He made the mistake of asking a question, and listening to Winter answer was about as convoluted as it got. After that, he didn’t ask any more questions and decided as hot as it was, he’d rather be out in the field. Out there he could watch the occasional rabbit, which was at least something he understood.

“Charlie? You copy?”

“Charlie here. Go ahead, Greg.”

“We’ve blown a hydraulic line to the vibration plate on Thumper Three. You’ll need to call it in.”

“Roger that,” Charlie said as Winter picked up her phone and started dialing. “We’re calling it in now.”

“Tell him we’ll send the crew van to get them. No point in them sitting out there,” she instructed.

“Winter said to send the crew van so you don’t cook. She’s such a good boss,” Charlie repeated into the mic.

Greg chuckled. “Yes she is, but don’t tell her I said that.”

“Steve! I’ve got a blown vibrator plate hose on a thumper. How soon can you get here and get it replaced?” She listened a moment. “Really? Thanks! I owe you a beer!” She read Steve the coordinates from the computer screen, then turned her attention back to Charlie. “Scratch the crew van. Steve can be here there an hour.”

Charlie keyed the mic. “Scratch the crew van. Steve’s on his way.”

“Damnit. I take back what I said about her being nice, and you can tell her I said that,” Greg said.

Winter grinned as she took the mic from Charlie. “He doesn’t have to. I heard it myself.”

“Winter! What are you doing there?” Greg cried in mock distress.

“Somebody has to keep an eye on your jacklegs.”

“Now you’ve done it. You done gone and hurt Phil’s feelings. There, there…she didn’t mean it.”

Phil’s voice came over the radio, faint and far away. “Momma…”

Winter giggled as she handed the mic back to Charlie. “Those guys are crazy.”

“It comes from driving a truck at one mile an hour, stopping every five feet, for eight hours a day. I’d be crazy, too.”

Big Dick nodded in sympathy. As bad as this was, at least he could get up and move around. Driving a thumper truck sounded like his definition of hell.

She snickered at Big Dick’s pained expression. “Want to go see a thumper?”

A truck was something he could understand. “Sure. We’ll need to pick up Duck.”

“Hold down the fort, Charlie,” she said as she grabbed her sunglasses.

“Holding.”

Winter and Big Dick trotted down the steps then stepped into her Jeep. “You’ll have to direct me. I can never find your hideout.”

“Down the road about a mile, then left at the little tree that’s bent way over. You should be able to follow the tracks after that.”

“It’s amazing to how the net just disappears,” she commented as they bounced along. “I watch through the binoculars as you drive out there. I can see the truck, and watch you walk away from it, then
boop
,
you crouch down and are gone and somebody else appears. I
know
I’m looking right at the hide, but damned if I can see it.”

Big Dick chuckled. “That’s what it does. Turn here,” he said, pointing left.

Winter turned and slowed way down. As rough as the road was, no road was worse, and she had to weave through the scrub brush. She was nearly on the hide before she saw it.
Amazing
,
she thought as she pulled to a stop.

Big Dick opened the passenger door. “Duck! Road trip!” he bellowed.

Pete Waddle’s head appeared from out of the hide. “I was wondering why you were here again so soon, and in Winter’s Jeep,” he said as he crawled out from under the net and stood up.

“A thumper truck broke down and we’re going to go see. I told Winter you could fix anything.”

Duck chuckled. “Yeah, right. Just hand me a pipe wrench,” he said as he squeezed into the backseat. Duck was of average height and slim build, so he fit in the back better than Big Dick who was six-three and built like a linebacker.

“I sense a story here,” Winter said as Big Dick got back into the Jeep.

“No, not really,” Big Dick said with a grin. “Duck is a hell of a plumber, but he doesn’t even change his own oil.”

“Why don’t you fix it?” Duck asked from the back seat. “You’re the mechanic.”

“If it’s just a blown hose, I probably could, if I had a hose.”

Winter was, frankly, amazed by the Santanás Cuervo. Their members were all normal people she wouldn’t have guessed were part of an outlaw club. Kade had his well drilling service and Bickers owned one of the two grocery stores in Rio Bonita. Duck was a plumber and Big Dick was a mechanic. Anders was a welder, Tryst a Diesel engine mechanic and Dugger was a house painter. They also had at least one other mechanic, an over-the-road truck driver, an electrician, a carpenter and a landscaper. Men from all walks of life, and not one of them would she have pegged to be a drug runner in an outlaw club.
But, then, none of these men were actually drug runners and the Santanás Cuervo is no longer an outlaw club according to Kade.

They jounced along the road for a while, Winter consulting a special GPS stuck to the windshield, before she turned off the road and started across country. The dry, hard-baked soil posed no problem for the Jeep, but she had to weave her way among the scrub and stunted trees.

“Jesus,” Big Dick grunted as they banged and bounced. “How much farther?”

“About a mile.”

“Christ. Talk about Nowheresville, Texas.”

“Is that them?” Big Dick asked a moment later as they crested a low hill and the five hulking vehicles appeared.

“That’s them,” she confirmed, adjusting her path.

“Ugly sum-bitches,” Duck muttered from the back seat.

“Are you kidding?” Winter exclaimed. “They’re beautiful and elegant pieces of engineering. When they stop and vibrate, all five trucks are vibrating in sync, making those five trucks operate like one big unit.”

Big Dick chuckled. “They may be elegant pieces of engineering, but they’re still ugly as shit.”

She snickered as they pulled to a stop beside the first in the line of the large pieces of machinery. “Don’t tell Phil that. You’ll hurt his feelings,” she teased.

The hydraulic vibrator truck, or thumper truck as Winter referred to it, was a truck in name only. Twelve feet tall, eight feet wide and twenty feet long, it rolled on four heavily lugged tires that looked like tractor tires, except they were six feet tall and nearly as wide. The trucks looked like they could go anywhere, and when Duck glanced behind the line of trucks, the near-straight path as the trucks muscled aside or flattened the brush gave him no reason to believe they couldn’t. The trucks had a cab in the front for a driver, a giant of an engine mounted on the back, and a complicated series of hoses and hydraulic rams running to a huge plate hung under the center of the truck. They walked to the third truck in the line. There was hydraulic fluid all over the underside of the truck and the top of the plate.

“How does this beast work, anyway?” Big Dick asked.

“You want to show him?” Winter asked one of the men. “This is Greg Bowden, by the way. He’s the site foreman and drives one of my trucks.”

“Everly Dickerson,” Big Dick said as he shook the man’s hand.

Duck took the man’s hand next. “Pete Waddle.”

“Sure,” Greg said before he turned and walked away. They followed him to the first truck and waited as he climbed into the cab.

The big machine turned over then roared to life. “That plate weighs about sixty thousand pounds,” Winter shouted to be heard over the bellowing machine, then gave a signal to Greg. The weight lowered and they heard a deep rumble and felt a vibration beneath their feet before the plate lifted back to its stored position. A moment late the engine fell silent again.

“That’s it?” Duck asked. He’d felt bridges move more when a truck drove over them.

“That’s it. We inject a vibration into the ground. The waves bounce off the strata and the geophones pick them up, and from that we can build a three dimensional map of what is underground. It’s kind of like sonar, but for the earth.”

“And that shows you where the oil and gas are located?” Duck asked.

“It shows us where oil and gas
might
be located.”

“Winter here is working on something that’s going to change the way the oil and gas industry explores, though. Isn’t that right
Doctor
Kelly?” Greg teased.

“How’s that?” Big Dick asked as Winter looked down sheepishly.

“Just a little something I’m working on. It takes the soundings, the same soundings the oil industry has been using for years, and extrapolates out the densities to a much finer level. That gives us a better picture of what’s down there. The geophones have finally gotten good enough that we can capture the data at a granularity where we can actually measure the densities of the voids to determine their contents.”

Big Dick felt his headache coming back. “I’ll take your word for it, Doc.”

“Right now, the drillers get all the glory, but when Winter’s software comes online, it’ll be the sounding crews who actually finds the stuff. Then we’ll be the heroes for a change,” Greg said as he climbed out of the cab.

“What do you mean?” Duck asked.

“Imagine this,” Winter began. “The way it works now is there is a giant warehouse, and somewhere in there is a brick of gold. I tell you it’s somewhere in the left third of the warehouse, and I send you to go find it. You go in and search, and eventually come out with the brick. Who gets the credit for finding it?”

Duck thought a minute. “I guess we both do. You knew it was in the left third, but I had to go in and dig around until I found it.”

“Fair enough,” she said. “But who would you say
found
it?”

“I guess I would say I found it.”

“Okay. Now imagine the same thing, except I tell you which aisle, row, and bin it’s in. Now who gets the credit?”

Duck smiled. “I see. That makes sense I guess.”

“Yeah. Right now the roughnecks give us boomers a train load of shit about how even with all this fancy equipment, they’re
still
the ones who have to find the oil,” Greg explained. “Well, that’s about to change. Winter here, she can practically smell oil. When was the last time you sunk a dry hole?”