Rest & Trust (23 page)

She was too tired to sort out all the reasons that felt scary, so she nodded. “Okay. Be safe.”

“Always. I’m setting the alarm, and I’m leaving the keys to my truck, just in case. You know where the guns are. Just in case.” Before he’d left for South Dakota, he’d taken her to a shooting range and made her learn to shoot. She hadn’t wanted to go, but once she was there, she’d had a blast. It had been pretty sexy, in fact.

He kissed her again, more deeply this time. “Go back to sleep.”

She nodded, still half asleep anyway, and settled back onto the pillows.

~oOo~

When it was nine in the morning and Sherlock still wasn’t home, Sadie began to get fizzy. He hadn’t returned two texts, and she didn’t know what to do. She’d called Bibi, who’d told her everything was fine, but after that it bothered her to know that Bibi knew everything was fine, because Hoosier had told her so, but Sadie didn’t, because Sherlock hadn’t texted her back.

Left to its own devices, her brain wanted to pull apart the insane decision they’d made in the shower—and compounded twice more before they’d slept.

Good God, what if he’d made her pregnant? What then? Was that as crazy as it seemed? She needed him to get back. They needed to talk. With clear heads.

Pacing around his messy house was making her even more crazy.

God, he was such a slob.

And then she knew how she’d burn off the fizz and kill time until he got home and they could talk—after she killed him for not letting her know he was okay.

She spied his truck keys dangling out of the plastic organizer box on the kitchen counter, which didn’t appear to be controlled by any organizing principle at all.

She needed supplies.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

He’d lied to Sadie. He’d told her that his business on this night wasn’t dangerous.

As Connor, Muse, Demon, and Diaz dragged the unconscious bodies of two Latino men into the shop, that thought wended through Sherlock’s head. He’d come through the night unscathed, they all had, but this was the next charge in a war, and wars were nothing if not dangerous. For everyone.

Hoosier walked up to him, watching as the Horde enforcers chained their captives and strung them up from a steel beam in the ceiling. One moaned loudly as his feet left the floor, and Connor, much taller, cracked him in the face with a fist full of heavy rings, silencing him.

“I’m gonna need every scrap you can find. Once they start talking, I need you to make everything you can out of it.” Hoosier growled.

Sherlock nodded, studying the screen before him. The men had had no ID on them of any kind except that which was written on their bodies. He was running photos he’d taken of their new friends through a facial recognition program, courtesy of the United States government. Not that Uncle Sam knew he was his guest. He had maybe a ten-minute window, at the very outside, before somebody came in and caught him with his feet on the furniture. He was already past the five-minute mark.

With one eye on the screen and the other eye on the clock, he asked, “Where’s Bart? It’ll go faster with us both.”

“Bart’s…on something else.”

That hesitation seemed weightier than just Hoosier’s occasional, lingering need to search for a word. Sherlock turned and studied his President. “Everything okay?”

A harsh, hollow laugh answered his question, and Hoosier waved toward the men hanging from the ceiling. “No, son. No.”

Sherlock had been roused from sleep by a call from Connor, telling him to meet them at the Madrone Memorial Home and Park, where they’d earlier escorted Jerry’s body. Charlie Davis, the funeral director, was a friend of the club; his son Chip, the assistant director, had been a hangaround for a few years and still dropped by for the occasional party.

Chip had been working overnight, preparing Jerry’s body, restoring it from its time on ice at the morgue in South Dakota and its travel to Madrone. Fargo had been on site, keeping watch. They had Nate and their most trusted hangarounds watching their families, Keanu at the clubhouse, and Fargo on Jerry. Hoosier had added that last detail almost as an afterthought; it had proved prescient.

From his position in cover, Fargo had seen four men on heavily modded Harleys circle the block that the funeral home took up, with a dark van following. Acting on instinct more than anything else, he’d raised the alarm, calling Connor, who’d called in Muse, Diaz, and Sherlock.

Fargo’s instinct, too, had been excellent; by the time Connor and the others had arrived at the scene, Chip was unconscious, and Fargo was losing a fight with four armed men.

The van was nowhere around. But of the four men who’d come into the funeral home, now there were only these two. J.R. and Ronin were disposing of the others.

All four men bore the trident symbol of the Immortal Sinners. That the Horde hadn’t yet answered the attack in Sturgis must have made these upstarts bold.

Tonight, they would answer.

Sherlock knew he wouldn’t have been called to that scene except for three things: Demon’s physical distance from Madrone, Trick pulling out of outlaw work, and Lakota resting in South Dakota dirt. Not that he wasn’t capable of the violence of the night, but he was brains, not brawn. Normally, he would have been called to meet them here at the compound, to do what he was going to do now.

Connor had, in fact, called Demon; he’d met them here. He’d be part of the next phase.

Connor, Demon, Muse, and Diaz had all donned disposable protective coveralls; the rest of the night’s work would no doubt be messy.

Connor unsheathed his blade and stood before the smaller of the two men. Fisting the hilt, he aimed the point at the man’s chest; from his chains, the man flinched back. But Connor only dragged the blade along the placket of his faded shirt, severing the buttons until the shirt fell open.

On the man’s chest, leading onto his belly, was the trident symbol: by far the largest example they’d yet seen. That didn’t necessarily mean anything, but it could be indicative that the man was a leader. It would take real balls for a soldier to bear ink like that, risking the suggestion that his allegiance was greater than that of his superiors.

Leader or not, this man had definitely been in charge of the raid on the funeral home—and, thus, the attack in Sturgis.

Connor traced the point of his blade over the tattoo, carving deeply into the man’s flesh. They wanted the men to talk, so they had removed their gags. There was no need for a gag, regardless—the shop was soundproofed at a rating above 75; they could land a fucking Harrier jet in here without being heard.

But the man, already heavily beaten, only groaned as Connor carved, and blood washed over his belly.

“I don’t like this tattoo. It has a nasty habit of showing up in places that piss me off.”

Connor hadn’t asked a question yet, only made that snarling statement. Sherlock began to wonder if this were going to be an interrogation at all. They needed it to be. There was nothing on these fuckers yet; Sherlock needed some sliver of intel that he could use to wedge himself in and figure out where these bastards had come from and what the fuck they wanted.

They could start with why the hell they’d hit the funeral home. They’d already killed Jerry. What value could his body have had?

Sherlock paused his brain and rewound. What value could his body have had? That was the question. The only reason to hit Madrone Memorial was to take Jerry’s body. They’d had the van; that had to be why.

But why take the body? Jerry was only a Prospect, as far as they could know. He was an orphan, his only family the Horde.

They needed the body for some kind of proof. Which meant that they had someone demanding said proof.

Proof of what? That they’d killed Horde? That fact had made national news.

No—not proof. A message.

It was Jerry because he was the one who’d come home.

Sherlock’s eye caught a flash on the screen. They had a hit.

“Diaz, I need the three-amp orbital.”

Shit. Connor was going in hard. Had he asked the guy anything yet? Sherlock called out, “Con. Hold.”

“You got something?”

“Yeah. A name. Maybe more. Gimme a couple of minutes.” He studied the bleeding man, whose name he now knew. “I suggest you let that one simmer for a while. He’s the one we need.”

Understanding him, Connor nodded. While Sherlock began his magic, he heard his brothers rearranging their subjects. Then the sound of the sander. And of deep, wrenching, soul-bursting screams.

He looked up. They had the larger, less significant Sinner naked and spread-eagle on the ground. Connor, wearing a welding helmet and wielding the orbital sander, was removing the man’s ink.

The other man, Miguel Acevedo, was hanging, bent backward like a bow, from the ceiling. Muse had chained his ankles and winched his legs up behind him. To get that sharp a bend had likely broken his back, but he wasn’t paralyzed. Sherlock knew because Acevedo was fighting his bonds. He was also screaming in concert with his companion, though the buzz and splatter of the sander at work dwarfed the vocalization of the men.

Sherlock felt no squeamishness about the blood and gore erupting from the man chained to the concrete floor, and he felt no mercy toward these men who had wrought horrific injuries on Horde brothers. But the noise and smell was distracting, and he needed focus. He took a deep breath and narrowed his vision, turning everything that wasn’t his work into black space and white noise.

Hoosier, knowing that Sherlock couldn’t work with someone over his shoulder, stood a few feet off and surveyed the other work going on in the shop.

When Sherlock found what he needed, the man on the floor was dead; Connor had worn substantial swaths of his body down to the bone.

“Con!”

Connor handed the sander to Demon and popped up the visor on his helmet. “Yeah, man.” He walked over.

“Look,” Sherlock waved him around to see the screen, where he’d enlarged a photo of an elderly Latina woman dressed in her Sunday best, a small baby in a long white gown on her lap. Three other children, all dressed prettily, sat at her feet. Sitting in a cheerful back yard. Hoosier stood behind his son and watched, too. Sherlock looked to the President before he said the next thing.

Hoosier, understanding the question in his eyes, nodded, and Sherlock returned his attention to Connor. “That’s your in. He’s local. This photo was taken in Pomona.” He tapped the woman’s image. “At his house. Her address is the same. There’s a wife, too.”

He tapped the screen and a small box rose up over the image, showing an address. Connor pulled his gloves off and dug through the coverall to fish his burner from his jeans. He swiped at the screen, then put the phone to his ear.

“Ronin. You done? Good. Stick with J.R., but don’t come in. I’m sending Diaz to meet you in the van.” Diaz’s attention homed in as Connor continued, “I need you all to go to this address: 738 Whippoorwill Court. Pomona. Bring every single breathing body out of that house and to the shop. Any means necessary.”

Diaz nodded and began stripping out of his protective gear.

Miguel Acevedo, who’d slumped into an agonized stupor, came vividly alive. “No! No! Fuck you fucking
guero
cocksuckers! No!”

Connor chuckled and picked up his gloves. “Good work, my brother. Excellent fucking work.”

~oOo~

A few hours later, while Miguel Acevedo’s family—mother, wife, children—were probably going about their morning routine, unaware that the man of their family had recently been incinerated in the cremation chamber of the funeral home he’d broken into, the Horde sat in the Keep.

Sherlock’s personal phone buzzed against his thigh again, and he clenched his fists. Taryn, accustomed to the pattern wherein he came back when she beckoned, and apparently unable to cope with the new development of his lack of interest, had been texting him around the clock, at least once an hour. He was going to have to engage her in some way to get her to fucking stop, but right now, all seeing her texts did was piss him off, and he couldn’t afford the distraction. He’d stopped even looking hours ago.

He had the table, so he put his buzzing thigh out of his mind and addressed his brothers. “Occam’s razor: the least complicated answer is nearly always the right one. This is about La Zorra. But this is no small-time move. This is somebody with so much power that they can move without making waves. At first I thought it might be some kind of alliance of her enemies. But alliances are messy. The only way this goes down so quiet until now is if there’s only one true head. Now we know the head.” He turned to Hoosier. “This has nothing to do with the Leandros, Prez. The only connection was Gael Leandro, and that was incidental—a young thug thinking he could assert his family’s name in their old game. This isn’t about you. It’s not really about us. It’s about Dora Vega. You were right, though, that it was an old bird back to roost.”

Acevedo, who’d identified himself as a captain in the Immortal Sinners almost immediately after his family was threatened, had given up a name when Connor had announced that the Horde had arrived at his home and given the man a final chance to leave his family asleep in their beds. That name was Emilio Zapata. Once a cartel head with power to rival La Zorra’s, Zapata’s Colombian organization had been crippled a decade earlier, and Dora had risen on the back of his last attempt to reassert himself in the trade. She’d buried him, and then buried everybody else.

Maybe she should have buried him literally, as she had his older brother, Ramon. Instead, she had subsumed his organization and left him as a subcontractor. If Acevedo’s intel was sound—and by all measures it sure seemed to be—then leaving Zapata breathing, allowing him to work for her, was either a terrible miscalculation or part of a much bigger plan.