by Nikki Wild
Hunter and I put a few rounds in the chests of a few hostiles, pausing to reload our weapons behind cover.
“That is some Dirty Harry shit,” I muttered to him as I hastily slammed bullets into my pistol chamber.
He finished loading his gun, and we nodded together before rising up from cover. With reflexes just quicker than mine, he let off a couple of shots from both wrists, missing once or twice but downing three cartel fighters in the process. We continued to mount our assault, aided by our team of fighters – most of whom were members of the Devil’s Dragons. They defensively stuck close to their leader, ready to annihilate any threat that appeared.
Even down here, exposed wiring and limited panels showed just how new the structure was. The rooms appeared to be filled with scattered construction equipment and debris, and a lot of walls were only built on one side, or lacked external plating. Still, the further forward we went, the more the various rooms and hallways started coming together.
The cartel members were spread a little thinner here, and we reduced their numbers with every corner we turned.
Before we could sweep the entire floor, a pair of bikers caught up with us.
“We found them!”
Hunter whipped around. “How many?”
“Fifteen girls!”
He was stunned by the news, pausing to process this. His gaze shifted to meet mine, and then he asked the biker: “Any Caucasians?”
“No sir…”
“Damn,” he hissed. “But at least we found the other abductees. The cartel must have spent its time shifting operations up here, instead of actually getting around to selling the captives…
“Where were they?”
“There was a fortified room up a floor, tucked away real neat-like in the back,” the biker answered with a grin. “We mowed down their guards, but the girls look pretty drugged up…”
“Keeps them complacent and unaware of their surroundings… What else is going on up there?”
“Still some scattered resistance, putting up a fight. Nobody’s surrendering. They’re gunning down to their last man and there’s still no sign of any of this money you promised…”
“It’s here,” Hunter murmured. “Come with us and offer some backup. We’re going to find the leader of this shit-show and he’ll be sitting on enough money to make your goddamned head spin.”
We pushed forward, facing fewer opponents than before. I suspected that our three teams had mowed through the vast majority of them already, and that this was a skeleton crew down here.
“We’re close,” Hunter finally observed, gazing at a small map on the wall. “This looks familiar again… I think that we’re right on top of the brains of this little operation.”
His eyes glanced over to a few doors nearby. He directed the team to split up and take each door in trios, and left the furthest one for the two of us. The bikers bashed into the doors and started gunning down the remaining opposition.
“This is it,” he told me. “Are you ready?”
I nodded in agreement, and with his hand on the doorknob, he pushed open the entrance…
Chapter 19
The chamber was brightly lit, with metallic siding and a tiled floor. But the compelling imagery that stood out was the single, well-dressed Mexican gangster in the back, facing us with a highly reflective revolver in his hand.
More compelling were the three white girls he was pointing the gun at… They sluggishly glanced up at us as we entered the room, clearly doped up out of their goddamn minds.
The cheerleaders!
“Arturo Alvarez,” Hunter replied coolly as he held his pistol high. “If I’d known I’d have the treat of seeing your pretty face again, well… I’d have sprung for a nicer gun.”
“It’s… it’s you,” the cartel leader muttered in disbelief. His face curled into one of undying rage. “You, after all these years… oh, amigo, how I have longed to put a bullet between your eyes after you killed my cousin!”
“Your cousin struck first. He tried to sell my sister into sexual slavery,” Hunter replied with gritted teeth. “As far as I’m concerned… the man got what was coming to him.”
“Who is this guy?” I asked.
“Arturo Alvarez is one of the most dangerous men in Víboras Verde,” Hunter replied, his eyes glued to our adversary. “Doesn’t surprise me that you’re heading up the kidnappings side of things here… although that’s a little disappointing, all things considered.”
“And why’s that?” He laughed. “You were so happy to see me again, you white demon…”
“There are much fouler cockroaches in this organization than this fucker,” Hunter answered, verbally knocking Arturo down a couple of notches. “You are horseshit in comparison to what I’ve seen.”
Our enemy bristled with irritation. “Horseshit, amigo? You think that I’m nothing? I’ve come a long way since we’ve last seen each other, pendejo… don’t underestimate me.”
“If you’re the guy in charge here then your cartel just might survive my little midnight ride,” Hunter replied. “Which is a damned shame. I was hoping to find someone worth my time…”
Arturo bristled with anger again. “The others aren’t needed to deal with you.”
Hunter remained unfazed, but he lowered his voice to address me. “Víboras Verde is led by a vicious inner circle known only as The Brothers. This leadership is a union of four close friends, bound by spilt blood and heinous crimes… and eight years ago, I killed one of them.”
“The one who took your sister?”
“Not exactly… but the one who oversaw their kidnapping operations,” Hunter explained. “That leaves three Brothers left to put in the ground. I’m stuck with the runt of the litter here… this guy is nothing compared to the others.”
I realized quickly what Hunter was doing. He was egging Arturo on… Trying to get him to make a mistake.
“Nothing?” Arturo demanded. “You think that I am nothing? We are equals, the three of us are equals, you stupid motherfucker!”
I expected Hunter to chuckle, but he regarded Arturo Alvarez with something akin to pity. “You were always the weakest link… weaker than the one I’ve already put in the ground. Arturo, you will always be in their shadow. Why else would they send you so far from home? They put you in my fucking backyard for a reason Arturo.”
Arturo moved slowly, pressing his gun against the nearest cheerleader’s head. “I will never be in their shadow.”
His hostage mumbled incoherently, still trapped in her drug-fueled daze. I had to do something. We were trapped in our standoff, and Arturo was about to splatter her brains against the wall as a final act of defiance…
“Drop the gun,” I demanded.
Arturo’s smile faded.
“You would have me kill this girl?” He demanded, shaking her shoulder as he held his pistol to her head. “I’ll put a bullet in her skull…”
“And you’ll join your friends in hell,” Hunter said, his arm steady as a rock as he kept the barrel of his gun carefully trained on Arturo.
“If you were going to kill me, you’d have already done it,” Arturo replied, the edge of his lip curling upward. “You want something from me, don’t you pendejo?”
Hunter took a step forward. “The Brothers have been playing you. They put you here to get my attention and they knew one of us would end up dead… So yeah… I want something from you.”
Arturo glared at us.
“Spit it out white devil.”
“I want your brothers,” Hunter replied coldly. “You give them to me and I’ll let you walk out of here alive.”
“You want my blood? You want my family?” Arturo asked furiously.
“I want the men who sent you here to die,” Hunter replied as Arturo moved behind the cheerleader, placing her between the two of them like a makeshift shield.
“I’m walking out of here with this bitch… You touch me and I kill her.”
“You’re not leaving thi
s room with that girl Arturo. You can die here now, or you can tell me what I want to know…”
“And why should I believe you?”
“Because you’re dead if you don’t, and that pretty little thing you’re holding isn’t going to stop a goddamned magnum from punching a hole straight through your sorry ass.”
“If I accept… I have your word that I leave here alive?”
Arturo hesitated. I watched as the cheerleader he was holding up floated on the edge of consciousness, her head rolling slightly to the side. It fell forward, and he shifted her body just slightly, the barrel of his gun moving ever so slightly away from her face.
And a shot rang out.
My glock kicked upward, a single cartridge skittering off the floor to my side.
Arturo fired, a round bouncing harmlessly off the roof and sending a shower of concrete flakes across the room. There was no further movement as he crumpled to the floor, taking the cheerleader with him.
My eyes were on Hunter in a heartbeat.
“What the fuck? Why?!” Hunter snarled. “He was surrendering! He could have helped us destroy the entire fucking cartel!”
Hunter walked over to Arturo Alvarez and kicked the gun from his hand.
“And the second you let your guard down, he’d have taken your head off with that holdout up his sleeve,” I replied, nodding to the body. Hunter reached down and pulled the sleeve back, exposing the little silver nine millimeter.
“He was never going to take the offer,” I said.
“We haven’t destroyed the real men in charge Sarah. They’ll keep coming back if I can’t stop the other brothers…”
I wasn’t listening. My ears were still ringing from the gunshots, but my eyes were trained on the wall behind Arturo… And the small scratches on the floor.
“I wonder,” I murmured, walking past Hunter.
“Hmm?” He glanced over. “Do you have something, Sarah?”
I lifted the butt of my gun. With a steady whack, I hammered it into the back wall.
“What is it?” He asked curiously, rising to his feet and leaning near me.
I smacked the wall again.
“Do you hear that, Hunter?”
He tilted his head curiously, gazing between the wall and me. “No. What are you doing?”
“I noticed something when Arturo dropped,” I noted. “This floor isn’t connected to the back wall.”
Hunter’s eyes flared wide open, and he grabbed the gun from me. With a quick swing, he bashed the wall again. At the reverberating sound, a sly smile crossed his lips.
“Detective, you’re a genius,” he chuckled…
“He was guarding something in here,” I realized, pressing against the wall and feeling the click of a latch.
A few bikers had filed in behind us, and they started helping Hunter pull the shelves away from the wall, exposing the wide doorway.
“Well, look at that,” Hunter grinned, turning back to his fallen adversary. “You were holding out on me? That’s no way to treat a friend…”
With his pistol held high, he pushed the door open. I backed him up, my glock at the ready. Fumbling along outside the doorway for a light switch, I felt a slight bump beneath my fingertips. With a quick glance at the biker president, I flicked the switch on and doused the room in light.
It was surprising how similar Arturo’s secret chamber was to Hunter’s war room. Dominated by a large table in the middle, with no windows and little in the way of décor, the walls and tabletop were covered in maps, diagrams, and notes – all scribbled in Spanish.
The men around us seemed more interested in the huge stacks of hundred dollar bills piled neatly against the far wall.
“What is this?” I asked aloud.
Hunter surveyed the area. “No idea…” He lifted a few pages up, gazing at the scribbled text, and his gaze drifted across a couple of maps of Mexico.
“This looks too important to leave behind,” I commented. I noticed how conspicuous red marks were chiseled into the maps, highlighting what appeared to be areas of interest.
Hunter’s gaze met mine, and he nodded in agreement. “It does. We’re going to have to take this all and have it translated back in El Paso. We could have stumbled across something pretty good here…”
As if drawn like moths to the flame, more and more of the Outlaws were pouring into the room, carting out armloads of money as we studied the table. I pulled out my phone and snapped some pictures of the arrangement. “Just in case the positioning matters,” I mentioned offhandedly to him.
“Good thinking,” Hunter nodded with a sly smile.
“I’d like to think you love me for more than just my body,” I told him, laughing. “Now let’s go ahead and round up the kidnap victims and get the fuck out of here before it’s too late.”
“Anything you say, Detective…” Hunter replied, pulling me into a deep and heavy kiss.
Chapter 20
It wasn’t long before we were pulling back up to the dilapidated bar that marked the headquarters of the Devil’s Dragons motorcycle club.
The ride back had been filled with unanswered questions. The more I thought about the events that had transpired over the night, the more that I worried about the aftermath…
Hunter pulled to a stop in front of the doors. As we dismounted, bikers surrounded us. They cheered in victory as we walked into their midst, but there were so many scattered thoughts in my head that prevented me from joining their revelry.
“We’re not done yet,” Hunter’s commanding voice rose over their jubilation. Everyone in our midst calmed down as they watched him carefully.
Their gazes followed him as he walked towards the back of the white van the Outlaws had liberated from the compound south of the border. It had barely fit through the tunnel on the way back, and I knew it was filled with teenage abductees… And a wounded friend.
As he approached, Hunter snapped his fingers and pointed at the van’s back doors. Several of the Devil’s Dragons unbarred and opened the back, and they reached in for their wounded biker.
Hunter ordered: “Talk to me, Grizz.”
The burly biker, slumped against the inner wall of the van, grumbled something into his ear. “Good to hear it, brother,” the biker president laughed and clasped his shoulder. “You’ll be in good hands soon. Ready to leave the back of this godforsaken fucking van?”
Grizz nodded softly.
“Bring him inside,” Hunter told his Dragons. It took five of them to carry his heavy, lumbering form through the crowd. Someone from another club propped the door open and flipped on some light switches as they carried their wounded comrade.
Hunter popped into the back of the van and checked on the girls. He lifted each of their chins in turn, gazing into their eyes and flicking his fingers lightly to draw their attention. When they were all vaguely responsive, he jumped out and locked the doors back up.
Smacking the side twice and gesturing to the driver, Hunter stepped aside as the engine immediately ignited and the van peeled rubber out of there.
“Where is he taking the girls?” I asked him.
“The hospital,” Hunter answered me quickly, before quickly addressing the rest of them: “Go inside, bring the maps to the empty back room, and leave behind everything we lent you for this. The money is yours to keep. Sleep well tonight, because you fucking deserve it.”
The bikers properly parked their motorcycles around the sides of the bar, and strolled indoors with their weapons, their bulletproof vests, and the entire contents of Arturo’s room spread between a dozen of them.
“The hospital?” I confirmed with him.
“Right now, those girls don’t know their ass from their elbows,” he told me. “They’re going to be suffering one hell of a hangover in the morning… better to let the authorities take over on that front.”
The authorities…
“Oh god, we’re so fucked,” I muttered into my hands. I felt Hunter step closer, and his arm w
rapped around my shoulders.
“What do you mean?”
“What we did tonight…”
“What we did tonight was save lives, Sarah – three of those lives belonging to that pack of missing cheerleaders you came here so desperately to find…”
“We crossed the border illegally. We’re anonymously dropping a bunch of drug addict girls to a local hospital. I can’t take credit for this. If word gets out on what we did…”
“Word won’t get out on what we did,” Hunter reassured me.
I looked up into his eyes as he stroked strands of hair from my face. It was so hard to grasp his conviction.
“But the girls,” I insisted. “They might not remember anything now, but when they regain their coherency, they’ll sure as shit remember an army of bikers ripping them out from that shithole and dragging them back across the border...”
Hunter’s eyebrow rose.
“You’re not worried?” I asked, trying to make sense of all of this. “Aren’t you worried that the cops will come crawling all over the Devil’s Dragons for what we did tonight?”
“You leave that to me,” he smiled cryptically. “We can handle the police around here…”
“You can handle the police?” I asked. My wrists wrapped loosely around the back of his neck, and I grinned into a powerful kiss on his lips. They felt firm but soft against mine, tasting of power, strength, and beneath all the rest, tenderness.
“We should get out of here,” Hunter whispered into my ear. “The others know what to do… they can govern themselves for a little while without me.”
“But what about your prisoners? You have Fang down in your cellar…”
“My Dragons can handle him,” he shrugged. “He can wait until the goddamn morning.”
“Well… if you think so,” I murmured, kissing him on the neck. “Seeing as I’m out of a job and don’t exactly have to hurry home… Do you think your men can handle everything for few hours?”
“Everyone here is a brother right now,” Hunter chuckled. “I think that they can make do without me for a single night…”