Shelter From The Storm (The Bare Bones MC Book 6) Read online

  Tracy shrugged. “There are all sorts of routes, but they all lead to Los Mochis in Sinaloa. Anyway, look at him. He’s probably a freelancer like Santiago Slayer. Fox is a güero, a white man. Why would he work for a cartel?”

  I became irritated. “I know what a güero is. Güero caca leche.” That meant white man who shits milk.

  “Oh.” Tracy looked at me, obviously aware of my irritation. “Well, I just want to say that I really like working with you on this whole CBD hybrid thing. If you want any help with your bud and breakfast just let me know. I know a lot of field workers who could help you with cleaning, building, maybe being maids, that sort of thing.”

  “What? Oh, yeah. You mean people you don’t need at Leaves of Grass, extras hanging around looking for work? Sure, that’d be great. Lytton closed the sale on the old motel, so we just have a thirty day escrow before we can start work around the end of June.”

  “You got a name for it?”

  “Yeah. Smoky Mountain High.” I’d just made that up on the spot, but it was good enough for now. “Let’s go.”

  Then we were at the bar, where I learned more people’s stories. I learned that the stunning, confident beauty Bellamy Jager had been a high school friend of Maddie and June, but she’d been sucked up into a cult. The ink slinger cum adult film actor Knoxie Hammett had saved her.

  I knew Fox intended to save me. Or did he? I had to find out if he really worked for the fucking Joneses.

  At the One Finger Salute, I had to endure sitting next to Fox at a long table with other Bare Boners and Bone Lickers. The roar of chatter layered above twanging country rock was enough to drown out any subtleties of conversation, and I kept glancing up at Fox’s beautiful, impassive face to see if anything betrayed him.

  Of course, all I saw was a man completely in control of himself, a master of all he surveyed.

  When it was time to walk to the square where they’d burn the bike, Fox took my hand. The sincere smile he graced me with was beyond question. Only evil guys in movies had the ability to thoroughly and completely fool their victims. Or didn’t they say Ted Bundy’s mode of operation was to hypnotize women into a false sense of security? With his good-looking charm, he’d skillfully set the stage to entrap them. Is that what Fox was doing? Setting me up until he could pop me off?

  But he could’ve done that at any step of the way. And he’d told me his real name. At least, I thought he had.

  “So Fox,” I said in a light tone, swinging our locked hands, “tell me more about your brother.”

  I carefully watched his face. He did look around to see who might be listening. But the surging mass of stoned, high, euphoric partiers could care less what we were saying. Wolf and Tracy walked nearby, along with Knoxie and Bellamy, and Ford and Maddie, but they were all lost in their own worlds. Still, Fox drew me closer and leaned down to speak.

  “Trent was our parents’ second and last kid. Once they realized he had MD, everything fell apart. My father blamed my mother for having lied, for not telling him she knew she carried the gene. I don’t know when he got involved in gun running, but he blamed her for that, too. My teen years were spent overhearing his conversations with guys named Eduardo and Alejandro.” I opened my mouth to speak, but Fox beat me to it. “I know what you’re going to say. How ironic I wound up conversing with guys named Carlos and Juan.”

  “Yes, I was going to say that.”

  “Well, it didn’t start out that way. After they divorced and stuck Trent in a ‘home,’ I vowed to become a lawyer, to fight for his cause. No one else seemed to give a shit. My mother said her fingers were just worked to the bone, and my dad was off in Laredo.”

  Laredo. The Jones’ backyard, or so I had thought. I butted in. “Was it the Jones cartel he worked for? Reason I ask, when I was held in their warehouse in Corpus Christi, all I used to hear about was Laredo. That was their main port.”

  I definitely felt him stiffen. I was clinging to his arm, and although he kept walking, there was a robotic tension to his step. “No, not the Joneses. The fucking Avilars.”

  “Oh.” I’d heard of them. They had a dedicated military wing that used submarines to smuggle in the Gulf of Mexico. “They’re rivals of the Joneses.”

  He only said, “I know. And now I can’t help my brother aside from sending money, because I’m stuck here.” He corrected himself, looking down at me and clasping my hand in both his large palms. “You know what I mean.”

  He must have hypnotized me with his warm, loving gaze, because I heard myself saying, “I know what you mean.” And grinning like a moron.

  By that time, ZZ Top’s “Tush” was blaring from the square. I could see the bike they were to burn lifted ten feet above ground on scaffolding. A few guys with jerry cans were up there splashing diesel on wooden pallets that had been piled up around the base. We were latecomers to the display, so we squeezed in next to Wolf Glaser, who had Tracy sitting on his shoulders.

  I hadn’t talked to him in a while. “How was jail?” I asked mischievously.

  Wolf’s trademark wide grin never left his face, even though Tracy was hollering with her hands full of his hair and do-rag. “Oh, awesomesauce! I showed the rent-a-cops how to break into a fifteen cubic foot gun safe, and they showed me where to get a cheap deal on stun guns.”

  “Really? You’re a safecracker, too?”

  “Not really. I just showed them how to blow the door off by drilling a hole and inserting a depth charge. Hey, everyone! Gather round!”

  Which was strange, because “everyone” was pressing in on Wolf about as tight as a game of Tetris. So no one gathered round, but that didn’t stop Wolf from bloviating to the skies above.

  “I want everyone to know! This woman here slung around my neck is my heart’s desire. I have wistfully wished for her from afar for a year now—a year during which I pined, sobbed, and drank Colt 45 malt liquor from a coffee mug while watching I Am Cait.”

  “Here, here!” Maddie cheered from her perch atop Ford’s shoulders. But no one else listened, because guys with long torches were now sticking them inside the pyre. Wolf had to yell louder to be heard above the hoots.

  “I knew I couldn’t continue that way any longer, and I was right! I had anguish to the right of me, misery to the left, and there I was—stuck in the middle with myself!”

  I laughed, but when the pyre finally flamed up, the clamor of the crowd hurt my ears. Even I couldn’t hear Wolf Glaser, who was standing about two inches from me.

  That was all right. I wanted to get lost in the flames that licked at the Harley’s tires. Fox stood behind me, his arms around my waist, our hands locked together. His torso felt like a slab of warm marble, and every cell of my body wanted to believe in him. He was completely too good to be true, a knight in shining armor who had ridden up to save me from the depredations of the police.

  “That’s fuckin’ hot!”

  “Burn, baby, burn!”

  “White hot!”

  As the entire bike was engulfed in flames, the heat became so intense that people moved back. We were one of the last people to do so, the heat so strong I felt my eyebrows must have been singed. I just wanted to bask in the cleansing purge of the bonfire until my body was melted against Fox’s.

  When we did move back, I turned my back to the fire so he could cradle me to his chest. I felt like a tiny doll when he held my skull in his palm. My cheek was pasted to his blazing chest and I breathed in his sweat.

  There was no way a man who smelled this good, who felt this good, could have bad intentions toward me.

  But hadn’t I told myself that about Lieutenant Commander Russ Heston?

  Yes. That’s exactly what I told myself about Russ Fucking Heston.

  I took a sucking bite from Fox’s throat and I could have sworn I heard him purr. When I pulled away I saw his eyes had slid shut and he seemed to be basking in the beauty of the moment. In a weird way, that gave me an even bigger push to grab his hand and pull him away from the bo
nfire. Not many people were leaving—everyone wanted to be there when the inferno reached its height.

  “What’s so urgent?” Fox chuckled, allowing himself to be led.

  “Over here.” We passed by a knot of smokers and walked into the fresh air by the corner of a fence. I couldn’t really look Fox in the eye. If I did, I knew I’d be a goner. I would lose my nerve. So I looked at a fire hydrant and said sort of creakily, “You didn’t just come here to see the sights did you.”

  When I looked at him, he still wore his smile, only confusion tinged it. “What do you mean? To Run-a-mucca?”

  I looked away again. “No. I mean to Pure and Easy. You came in with Santiago Slayer, saying you just wanted to see the sights.”

  But his confusion had only grown deeper. His smile was fading fast. “I did want to see the sights. The red rocks.”

  “But you never saw any red rocks, did you?”

  “Pippa, what are you trying to get at? You can be straight with me.”

  But I found it very hard to be straight. I’d been with so many lying men in my life, I’d become accustomed to not wanting to really know the answers. I had to squeeze my eyes shut, and the question came out all in one flood of words. “I want to know if you were sent by the Jones cartel to track me down, to bring me back, or maybe to—”

  “No.”

  “—to—”

  “No.”

  “—to bury—”

  “No, Flavia!”

  He shook me by my shoulders so violently I had no choice but to shut up. An instinctual fight-or-flight reaction made me open my eyes, and he was not a pretty sight to see. It was then for the first time I saw the hitman side of him. I suppose it’s there in every man, especially every man who has seen bloody battle. There is some off-kilter, crazed PTSD look in a combat veteran’s eyes when he’s fighting to preserve something he holds dear. I’d seen it in Russell’s eyes when he cold-bloodedly turned me over to the Joneses. And I’d seen it in the eyes of the baby gangsters working in the warehouse when the ATF had raided us.

  “No what?” I shrieked.

  “No I am not going to kill you!” And he angrily took several steps away, his back to me, then stopped.

  I wasn’t about to let up. “But you admit you work for the Joneses.”

  He came back, looking frantically from side to side. “Keep it down, woman! Yes I sometimes work for the fucking Joneses. But that’s not what this is about.”

  “Oh, it’s not, is it? You’re a sicario for the Joneses and I’m testifying against the Joneses and it’s just a fucking coincidence you show up in Pure and Easy?” I had to force myself to shut up in order to hear the answer. I could have screamed forever.

  “Listen, Flavia, the answer isn’t that simple. Maybe I was sent originally to track you down. But once I saw you, once I realized their beef against you wasn’t legit—”

  “Oh, you changed your mind? You changed your mind? Holy shiz, Travis McShane”—I yelled that name extra loud, on purpose—“you were sent here to bury me but I’m supposed to forget all that because you changed your mind?”

  Fox shifted in his boots, looked around at everything other than me, huffed and puffed. He clearly had no answer.

  I slapped my thigh. “Oh, that’s just great! Just fucking great! What am I supposed to do now? Should I tell my handler about you, and get relocated all the fuck over again and start yet another brand new fucking life just because you decided to change your mind?”

  “Well what did you expect me to do?” he yelled. “Not change my mind? Just go ahead and do it?”

  He had a point. We stood panting, shooting daggers at each other, our jaws askew, at a loss for words for once.

  And then his fucking phone chimed.

  And he fucking answered it.

  It wasn’t just any call, it was some moron—Santiago Slayer, as it turned out—FaceTiming him, Skyping or whatever it’s called when someone does a video call.

  “I’ve got to take this,” snapped Fox, holding up a forefinger. “Don’t go away. Hola, ese,” he said to the smiling, well-groomed face of his brother in the murder trade.

  “Que esta pasando?” Slayer said smoothly. “How is the conflagration of the annual motorcycle going?”

  “How the fuck did you know where I was?” I heard Fox ask, although I was angrily storming away.

  Slayer guffawed. “Oh, pfft. It is not that difficult when you have faces in all the right places.”

  Fox guffawed right back. “One of the Bone Lickers told you.”

  “Well, perhaps, but it always comes down to who knows who.”

  I had stormed too far by then to hear any more of their idiotic conversation. I had almost stalked right past Tobias, too, by the time I recognized the sullen, lonely tech guy. He morosely drank a beer while casting glances at the fiery motorcycle.

  “Tobias!” I said, almost angrily. “Have you gotten any news on my sister?”

  He sighed deeply. “Sister, schmister. Everyone wants something from me except that which I’m prepared to give.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Yes. I’ve got news. Sorry. In the heat of having my fighting skills laughed out of town by every biker within a five hundred mile radius, I forgot to give you the intel on your sister.”

  “Let’s go somewhere quiet. There’s a bar a couple blocks up.”

  “Agreed, as long as it’s somewhere I don’t have to have my face ground into the combined crotches of Tracy and Wolfgang Fuckboy Glaser…”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  FOX

  A house divided against itself cannot stand.

  I knew the day would come that Pippa would confront me with knowledge of who I worked for.

  I just didn’t expect it to happen so soon.

  I was unprepared, fumbling around like a moron in the bushes, not knowing what to say to her. When Santiago Slayer called me with an uncustomary bad sense of timing, I had to take it. I had no fucking choice. Who knew when he’d move onto the next party or hit, and go off the grid?

  “Que esta pasando?” He seemed to be in a hotel room from the sterile, uniform looks of things. Nauseatingly, he was shirtless, displaying a sort of gold monogrammed necklace, and two skanks cavorted on a bed behind him in their underwear. But he was all business for the moment. “I have found your Phil Din for you, and in the most unexpected of places, I might add.”

  My antennae went up with the readiness of a radar system locking onto a mark. “Where?”

  He chuckled. One thing you had to hand the guy. He didn’t let the stresses of this job get to him. “Well, you are not going to believe this, hermano. That pinche guey with the dissolving jaw posted his resume on LinkedIn.”

  It was as though Slayer were speaking Russian. Linking a resume? Did sicarios even have resumes? “What the fuck is that?”

  Slayer closed his eyes with patience. “LinkedIn. It is a very lame and corny place where only pinche gueys would bother going if they want to network with other pinche gueys in a business atmosphere.”

  I sort of got the picture. But not really. “So he posted his resume?”

  Slayer guffawed. “Yes, isn’t that unbelievable? But not under the name Phil Din, naturally. He used the name Jim Fell. Ladies, ladies. Not now.” He smiled indulgently at the snatches in the background who had become bored with each other. They draped themselves over his shoulder, causing his handheld camera to shake. Another minute was wasted while he set his phone on a table and detached the women.

  I was snorting with exasperation by then. “If he used the name Jim Fell, how’d you know it was him? Did his resume say ‘expert in ordnance, military grade weaponry, and snuffing out innocent people’?”

  Slayer was suave. “Of course not. No, this gilipollas went ahead and”—he closed his eyes while he held his stomach and chuckled with mirth—“he goes ahead and—”

  “Slayer.”

  His eyes popped open. “Oh. Sorry. He goes ahead and posts his photo to LinkedIn.”<
br />
  Even I had to laugh at that one. “His photo? Good one. That mug is a one in a billion.”

  “Yes, you could easily tell it was him from the way the inside of his mouth was showing on the outside. Have you ever seen his forearm? It seriously looks like someone applied zombie makeup. You can see through to bones and tendons. Who would hire someone who looks like that? Hard to believe someone can still be alive and look that bad. He was wearing one of those narco polo shirts.”

  We were both silent for a few seconds, the implication being that Phil Din would not be alive for much longer. There was no loss in that. The life expectancy for a Krokodil addict was two years at the outside.

  “Okay, so how does this help us figure out where he is?”

  Slayer once again chuckled jovially. “He mentions in the comment section that he’s currently staying at the Atomic Inn in Beatty, Nevada.”

  “Beatty? Didn’t we pass that on the way up?”

  “You are correct. It is exactly an hour and forty-one minutes north of Vegas. So I need not add, you must act fast. I will send you the phone number he posted, although it only pings off the nearest cell tower which, in Beatty, Nevada, of course is of no help.”

  The implication was that Din was hot on my trail too, since he’d moved from Pure and Easy to Beatty, directly in the path to Winnemucca.

  I said, “The Atomic Inn is good enough for me. I owe you one, Slayer.”

  “Pshaw,” said Slayer, making a gesture of wiping the slate clean. “You can show me a good time next time I am passing through Winnemucca.”

  Indeed, the Kindly Sicario hung up then without any more fanfare, and I was left staring at a blank screen.

  Spinning around, I looked for Pippa. Of course, she was nowhere in sight. Could I fucking blame her? She was probably on the phone to her handler giving him my cell number, real name, and license number. Hell, she was probably going first thing in the morning to the FedEx office to send him my Ben Wa ball for fingerprinting.

  But there was no fucking need for that since I’d given her my real name. What an asshat. I strode quickly back to the bonfire which was showing signs of flaming out now. The charred skeleton of the Harley started to crumble. I saw Tuzigoot and Brunhilda, and Faux Pas and Sapphire, but none of them had seen Pippa. Ploughing on ahead, I asked Ford and Maddie, Speed and Tess, coming up empty-handed. Where the fuck had she gone between stalking off in a rage and now?