Rush - Blue Devils MC Book 2 (Book 1 Included FREE for a short time only!) (17 page)

Chapter Seventeen

Rush

Rush pulled out his phone and dialed Dumbo’s number.

“Let her go,” he said as soon as Dumbo answered. “She needs to be alone for a while.”

“Are you sure, Rush?” Dumbo said, concern apparent in his voice. “She didn’t look like she was doing too good.”

“Yeah, I’m sure.” And then he hung up and slid down the wall and stared at Turbo who’d managed to worm his way back out from underneath the couch and began licking Rush’s face, worry evident in every movement he made.

“Yeah, boy, I’m worried too,” Rush said out loud, petting Turbo in long strokes, staring at nothing, unsure of everything. “I knew…I knew that if she ever found out, she’d be livid, but Turbo,” Turbo’s tail wagged faster at his name, “I didn’t know. I didn’t know she could get that angry. Even at our high school graduation when I picked the Blue Devils over her, she didn’t get like
that
.

“And goddammit, Turbo,” his voice broke, “I deserved it. Every minute of it. Every condemnation she made. I didn’t ask questions. I didn’t think. I didn’t want to know. Lain and I…we buried our heads in the sand for a long time and I was
happy
to do it. I was
happy
to pretend that everything was okay.

“But it wasn’t,” he said dully and Turbo finally sat down, nuzzling up against Rush’s side, and Rush continued to pet him in long strokes, as if doing so would allow him to put the world back together. As if he just kept petting Turbo, everything would be okay.

“I fell in love with the Blue Devils back when John was in charge,” Rush told Turbo, his voice flat. There was no emotion left in his world - Blue had taken it out the front door when she’d left him. Left him for good. “Back when we really were clean and all we did was hold picnics and fundraisers and work on our bikes and transport legal cargo across the U.S. Back when we weren’t a 1% club. It just changed so slowly, ever so slowly, that by the end, we were up to our necks in shit that I never wanted to be a part of, and John was long gone, and Brock was our fearless leader. I never should’ve voted to make him president. Never.

“But Lain told me it was for the good of the club; that it was the only way to keep it from splitting up because Brock never would’ve agreed to be second in command. And he was right, of course, but what good did it do us? Years of illegal deals and worry about getting double-crossed and protecting our turf? Years of watching our backs as we got deeper and deeper into the drug trade, just sure we were going to get killed when our next deal went down?

“And in the end, we still split. There are two Blue Devil clubs now, you know. The other club members, the ones who chose to back Brock? They’ve formed the Blue Devil Originals. Bastards. Claiming that title, as if we’re some knock-off brand. The cops told us that today. No leads on the
Chupas
, but at least now we know where the Blue Devil
Originals
,” he snarled angrily, “ended up.”

He closed his eyes and let his head drop and hit the wall with a thud. Turbo whined again and sat up, giving him a few half-hearted licks on the chin.

“She may never come back, boy. It may be you and me. And if you eat the leg off my favorite chair, I’d deserve that, too. Because I’ve destroyed the trust of the one woman I’ve ever loved.

“And she’s never, ever going to forgive me.”

And he sat on the floor and he stared at the wall and the emptiness of the rest of his life laid before him and he had nothing left in him to care about it.

About anything.

Chapter Eighteen

Hannah Blue

Hannah stood in the shade of an acacia tree and fanned her shirt, trying to cool her skin off. She stared unseeing down the street, unsure of where to go or what to do. Her eyes were tight and dry with tears that refused to come.

She could go home, to her dad. She could crawl up onto the couch and curl up next to him and cry. Except, they’d never really been affectionate like that, and he’d tried to warn her away from Rush. Would he say, “I told you so?”

She remembered her defiant words she’d thrown so recklessly at him just last week.

Whatever happens between Rush and me, is between Rush and me, and is none of your concern.

And she’d meant it. If she crawled home, her tail tucked between her legs, she would have to admit that she’d been wrong. That Rush Blackburn wasn’t to be trusted. That he was nothing but a thug, a typical motorcycle gang member.

As the sun dipped further down in the sky, she reluctantly decided to go back to Rush’s house, just for the night. Sleep on his couch, then decide what to do in the morning.

Everything was always better in the morning, right?

She turned around and trudged back home.

No, back to
his
home. Not hers.

Not anymore.

Not ever again.

Chapter Nineteen

Hannah Blue

She awoke to sounds of pans banging around in the kitchen. At her groan, Turbo slowly got up and walked over, nudging her hand, begging for a petting. He must’ve spent the night on the living room floor, next to her feet, on the floor.

“Poor boy,” she whispered, scratching him behind the ears. “You usually sleep on the foot of the bed. All night long on hardwood floors must’ve been hard on your bones.” He whined and she smiled at him sadly. “You’re not going to like how today goes. Sorry, Turbo.” With a final pat on the head, she swung her legs off the couch and sat up, her head pounding. She felt like she’d over-indulged on wine, but she hadn’t touched a drop. She cradled her head in her hands for a moment, trying to get her brain to steady.

Finally, she stood up and shuffled into the kitchen, where Rush was cooking breakfast. The silence between them was hard. Frosty. She couldn’t bear to look at him. Couldn’t bear to see his naked chest, a towel slung over his shoulder. Avoiding even looking in his general direction, she popped a piece of bread into the toaster.

As she waited, ever so impatiently, for the goddamn piece of toast to just pop up already, he finally spoke. “You want some breakfast?”

“No, thank you,” she said, and the silence dropped between them again, as thick and impenetrable as a concrete slab. When the toast finally -
finally -
popped up, she pulled it out and munched on the dry bread as she left the kitchen. She couldn’t bear to spend another moment in the kitchen with him. With the man who’d broken her heart and then goddamn stomped on it.

She wandered back into the living room and sat on the couch. As she ate her way through the stupidly dry bread, wishing she’d poured herself a cup of coffee while she was in the kitchen but not wanting to go back in now, not when she’d actually managed to get out of it in one piece, she stared at the wall, unsure of what to do with herself.

The
Chupas
still had not been caught. The girls -
Isabel
- were still out there with those jackasses, being terrorized every moment of the day. The
Chupas
would still be after her. She had no job - the school had closed down after the kidnapping, of course; no parent wanted to send their child to a school that “allowed” gang members to kidnap their kids. All of her belongings were still in Mexico too.

She supposed she should go down there and pack up, but then what? She had some friends that she could go crash with, but then she’d be putting them in danger.

She’d thought the night before that everything would look better in the morning. As she managed to swallow the last bite of the toast, she decided that she was an idiot for thinking so, because fucking
nothing
looked better this morning.

She heard the back door of the house open and close, and then Rush’s bike tear out of the driveway. She took a deep breath, some of the tension easing from her shoulders, while at the same time, trying not to cry. He’d left and hadn’t said anything and wasn’t she happy that he hadn’t tried to talk to her? Except she didn’t feel real happy. She mostly just felt utterly, utterly miserable.

She shuffled into the kitchen and poured herself a cup of black joe, and then back into the living room to sit again.

Quiet.

Even Turbo had gone to sleep in the corner, apparently deciding that there was little chance of getting petted anytime soon.

Painfully quiet.

Finally, she turned on the TV, hoping to watch some news that didn’t include her. Even watching a report on the stock market would be better than a non-news story about how there was no news in the kidnapping case.

But as the local TV station, Channel 7, flicked into view, she found that it was a new news day.

And the report had nothing to do with the stock market.

“—the Lucky Strike police are saying that the Catholic schoolgirl showed up this morning at a local McDonalds, where an employee figured out who she was and called the police. The employee fed her a Happy Meal while waiting for the police to show up.

“As soon as the family can be contacted, the police will be releasing the student’s name to the public. So far, no word on whether the child can pinpoint where she’s been held.”

Hannah sat on the edge of the couch, her body rigid.

Was it Isabel?
Just a quick shot of her face would tell Hannah whether it was her or not. She just needed to know. Was Isabel safe? She’d always wanted to try McD’s, even though Hannah had discouraged her, saying that there was much better food in America than McDonalds. But Isabel had wanted a Big Mac with cheese and a bedroom with pink curtains and a refrigerator with milk. She’d wanted to see the Statue of Liberty.

She’d wanted so little, but for an orphan girl in Mexico - a
huérfana
, the lowest of the low in Mexico’s society - she’d wanted so much.

Really, Isabel had just wanted someone to love her.

Hannah’s chest got tight and her eyes burned and she stared at the TV, willing them to show her Isabel’s gap-toothed smile, her long straight hair swinging in the wind.

“An update on the kidnapping case,” the news anchor said and Hannah sat up and she didn’t breathe and she just stared at the screen.

“The parents of the student who walked into the Lucky Strike McDonald have been contacted,”
no, no, no, no, no parents, Isabel has no parents
, “and so the police have been given permission to release her name and picture to the public.

“Jasmine Garcia, age nine, was one of the 30 Catholic schoolgirls kidnapped by the notorious
Chupacabras—
”

But Hannah couldn’t hear anymore.

She fell apart.

And the tears came.

And she cried. She cried so hard she couldn’t breathe.

She felt so terrible - such a monstrous human being - because the only thing she’d wanted in the world was for it to be Isabel Lara on that TV screen and the fact that she’d cared so much that it was Isabel and that she wasn’t happy for Jasmine and her family made her a bad person. She should be happy because Jasmine had been a fine student. Quiet. Studious. And she’d always behaved and smiled politely and Hannah didn’t love her like she loved Isabel and she knew she should but oh God…

She was bent over on the couch, crying, the sobs tearing through her and she couldn’t breathe and she didn’t know what to do. Or where to go. Or why she should even care anymore.

Everything was gone.

Even Turbo sat in the corner and whined, afraid of her in that moment, and she didn’t blame him. She fucking couldn’t blame him at all.

Chapter Twenty

Rush

Rush stood quietly in the doorway to the living room, his arrival back to the house having gone completely unnoticed by his Blue.

Except, she wasn’t his Blue any longer, was she? She had made that oh-so-clear.

He stood there quietly, staring, as she cried, finally goddamned cried and she let it out, all of it, and he wanted nothing more in the world than to hold her but he knew she didn’t want him. He knew that she blamed him for this, and he knew that she was right.

Goddamn motherfucking right.

On TV, the news anchor prattled on but over his shoulder, in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, was a map with a large dot labeled “Lucky Strike.” Rush stared at the screen in surprise. Lucky Strike was about 20 minutes away, a small town off the main corridors that went through Arizona, a town that had shrunk after the mines around it closed, and shriveled up into almost nothing when the freeway passed it by.

Mines…

It was only minutes away from an old mine that his family had owned, until the copper had played out and they’d closed it. It’d been several decades and no one probably even remembered it…except for him.

What if the
Chupacabras
had taken the girls to the mine to hide? What if they’d decided to take them there while making arrangements with the buyers? It was the perfect hideout - remote, secluded, easy to defend. Only one paved road in or out.

If those goddamn motherfuckers are using
my
family’s mine to hide those girls away, I swear to God, I’ll kill all of them, one by one, with my bare hands. I’ll squeeze the life outta them.

He headed to his office, grabbed his bullet-proof vest, stripped off his cut, then put the vest on, adjusting the straps after Blue’s use. Then the cut went back on and he grabbed his pack and began slinging ammo and guns into it. He had to go see. He had to go take them down.

He had to prove to Blue that he wasn’t Lain’s lapdog.

Finished, he walked back out into the main hallway, past the living room and he could hear Blue sobbing, still sobbing, the first time she’d cried since she’d been kidnapped and he wanted so fucking bad to pull her into his arms and tell her it was all going to be okay, but much better than that would be to prove it to her.

He backed his bike out of the driveway and then roared down the road, anger throbbing inside him in time with the rumble of his engine.

How dare they? How dare they attack
my
Blue and then take those girls to
my
family’s mine? If they’re there, I’m gonna pick them off, one at a time. I’m gonna make them wish they never lived. I’m gonna make them feel the terror that those girls have been feeling.

He gunned the engine and sped down the road, relieved to finally be
doing
something. He’d gone for a ride that morning to clear his head but it hadn’t worked like it normally did. What could he do? How could he make things better? He’d had nothing to offer Blue, no way to make up for his fuck-ups.

Until now.

With a start, he realized that he was almost to the mining entrance. The heat waves danced off the concrete, distorting the air around him. It gave the world a bit of that carnival-ride vibe, where everything was just a little bit off.

And then the bullets started raining down on him.

Well, I found the
Chupas
.

Swerving off the road, he dove off his bike and into the sand and gravel, tearing up his left forearm on the unforgiving ground, the bike spinning out and off to the side. He crouched in the dirt behind a large rock formation and listened as the bullets popped and ricocheted around him. Finally, silence, and then a heavily accented voice spoke, taunting him.

“You think you just ride up and take girls away? You grow big
and
dumb in America. I hear you coming for long time. You bike gives you away.

“We got lots water and food. Do you have lots? Or you go to die in the heat? You
puta madre
, you just met your Jesus.” His laughter echoed and Rush closed his eyes, slumping against the rock.

Twice. Twice he’d done this - rushed off without thinking. Rushed off to save Blue in the hospital, rushed off to save the students here at the mine. What the fuck had he been thinking? Had he honestly thought he could just ride up and save 30 little girls singlehandedly? He’d been blinded by the need to
do
something, to prove to Blue that he wasn’t a lapdog. He believed that he could redeem himself in her eyes, if he just played the part of a hero.

But instead, he'd just made matters worse. Again.

Fuck, shit, piss, damn! I have really done it now. Think, Rush, think.

The pack of guns had thankfully stayed on his back through the crash. He could defend himself if he could only see what was coming for him, but stuck as he was with his back to the boulder, facing away from the mine entrance, he had no way of knowing how many Chupas there were or where they would be coming from.

I need more than one set of eyes. I should’ve at least told Lain where I was going. I should’ve asked him and the rest of the Devils for help.

The sudden realization that no one knew he was there gripped him. Rush knew if he didn’t tell someone where he was, what he was doing, or what he’d found, no one would ever think to look in Lucky Strike for him. Certainly, no one would follow the old mining road up into the mountains to check out his family’s mine that hadn’t been worked in 30 years.

Fuck, I’ve worked really hard just to become coyote food.

He patted his pockets quietly while listening for oncoming footsteps.

“You still there,
esé
?” The voice called from a distance but closer than before. “Give up now and I only kill you. Make me come up there and I make it hurt,
puta madre
.”

Rush lifted his hips off the ground straightening his leg so that he could free the phone from his pocket. The screen was cracked but not so bad he couldn’t make it work

Call or text?

Rush only debated the point for a second before calling. The
Chupas
knew exactly where he was. There was no point in trying to stay quiet.

He could barely make out the ringing on the other end of the line over his beating heart.

Pick up, pick up, pick up.

“Where the fuck are you!” Lain’s angry voice sounded like a gift from the gods.

“I’m at that old mine just outside of Lucky Strike. The one my family closed years ago. The
Chupas
are here, but they have me pinned down. You’ve gotta get up here.”

Rush knew he was pleading, but didn’t care. He could act calm, cool, and collected later. His life and anything after this moment rested on making this foolhardy stunt pay off. He needed his club.

He could hear Lain hollering in the background to the members to get going -
he must be at the clubhouse, thank God
- and then he came back on the line.

“How many are there?”

“I don’t know!” Rush said. “I’m stuck behind this boulder. They've got me pinned down. You’ve got to bring everything you have - based on the number of bullets coming my way, I think it may be the whole gang.”

“
Fuck!
When this whole thing is over, you’re going to explain to me how you ended up at that mine without calling for backup or even telling me you were going.”

“If I live through it, I’d be happy to tell you all about it.”

“Well, do your best to stay alive, will ya?” Without another word, Lain hung up, and Rush shoved his phone back into his pocket.

He leaned against the rock, listening for movement. Where the fuck were the
Chupas
? He couldn’t have them sneaking up on him, but he also couldn’t pop his head out and take a look. He held his breath, trying to listen in the too-still air for something…

Goddammit, it’d been too quiet for too long - it was making Rush more nervous than a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. He reached into the small of his back and pulled out his trusty Desert Eagle. It was time to cause a distraction.

He reached around the edge of the boulder and let off a clean six shots in the general direction of the mine’s entrance. A cry told him that he’d either shot someone or a ricochet had done the job for him. Although he considered himself a fair shot, even he couldn’t hit something he couldn’t see, so he figured it was a damn good bet that it had been a ricochet that had gotten the
Chupa
.

Rush could only hope that the
Chupacabras’
greediness would make them choose to protect the girls rather than leaving them in the line of fire up at the front of the mine.
Surely the
Chupas
would have the students hidden in the back of the mine shaft, around the corner from the main area, as a way of protecting their investment, right?

He listened for footsteps, his heart thudding in his chest. How long had he been crouched there, hiding? Time had ceased to have meaning for him.

“Come out,
esé
, and fight like real man,” Jesus called out. “Do not die like little child, hiding from the men.”

“But we’re not men,” Rush heard another voice call out. “We’re
Devils
!”

What the hell??

Gunfire broke out again and Rush peered around the corner of the boulder, finally risking putting his head in view of the front entrance. He could see the members then - fanned out in a half circle, they’d taken advantage of the
Chupas
concentration on the road into the mine and had instead chosen to attack from the sides. Unlike him, they must’ve actually turned their motors off and walked up to the mine.

Thank.

Fucking.

God
.

Pulling a Mac-9 out of his pack, Rush began picking off the
Chupas
in sight, one by one. The gunfire and the heat of the day all faded away to nothingness - there was nothing to look at or think about except which
Chupa
was going to die next. A part of him wished that he could make them suffer nice and slow before dispatching their souls to hell, but he knew that it was more important to get the girls out of harm’s way.

Finally, there was no more returning fire from the
Chupas
and after waiting an interminable period of time, he heard a sharp whistle from Lain. The men started advancing on the mine entrance, guns trained at the gaping darkness, ready.

Two motors started up and Rush looked up to see two
Chupas
tear out of the backside of the mine opening, down a dirt road, spewing up a cloud of dust as they went. Although the Devils shot after them, they were gone, only billowing dust left to prove they were ever there.

Goddamn motherfucking pieces of shit!

But Rush couldn’t waste time trying to chase after them. By time he got his bike back up and going -
if
it was still even running after that crash landing earlier - the
Chupas
would be long gone.

He’d just have to kill them later.

But for now, he needed to find the girls. Find Isabel Lara. Find out if all of this was for fucking nothing at all.