Fox had been dispatched do relay a message to Ruiz’s people.
The girls had gone back to the office to make their hiring decisions.
Candy had been introduced to Niko and had to approve of the guy, even if he did have such goddamn blue eyes.
Now he sat at his new bar, having a Scotch with Jinx, worry crawling through his gut, regular laps of it that made the drink hard to enjoy.
He felt Jinx staring at him, a silent question.
“Of all the possibilities,” Candy said into his glass, “I never once considered some damn piece of tail from a bar somewhere. Shit.”
“You know who I thought it was at first?” Jinx asked.
“Who?”
“Michelle.”
His head lifted on a startled snap, vertebra cracking a protest. “You what?”
His best friend’s face was passive. “I figured it out, obviously. I realized she wasn’t faking in the hospital, after you were shot.”
“You thought Michelle was the goddamn fed?”
“I had my eyes open, and you didn’t,” Jinx said, calmly. “You didn’t see the waitress as a threat because you weren’t looking for one there.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying you carry the burden – the whole burden – of the club, and Crockett, and our business, and everything, all by yourself. You don’t let anyone help you. And so you miss things. You miss threats. You miss out on the skills the rest of us could bring to the table.”
“That’s bullshit–”
“You’re like that dad who doesn’t realize all his kids grew up and can think for themselves. You need help, but you can’t ask for it, ‘cause you think we’re all in diapers or some shit.”
Candy started to protest…and sighed instead. Glanced away, to the mirror and his own miserable reflection. “Most days I feel like I’m a hundred-years-old,” he admitted.
Jinx’s hand landed on his shoulder and squeezed. “We love you anyway, though. You know we do. You just gotta learn to use us a little more.”
He coughed a hollow laugh. “Yeah.”
“And your girl’s not wrong. She’s a scary chick.”
“Hmph.”
“And I think we ought to let her help us.”
Again, Candy wanted to protest, but he clenched his teeth together.
“Phillip didn’t use her out of favoritism,” Jinx said. “He used her because she was good at what she did. Maybe it’s time for the Spy Kids to take a run at this.”
“Yeah.” Candy downed the rest of his Scotch in a long swallow. “Maybe so.”
Thirty-One
Michelle
A clear night. So many of them were in this part of the world. A net of stars and a waxing moon, corrugated steel shining. A hulking pole barn, trucks parked along its flank, light spilling from the windows.
“What I wouldn’t give for one cloud,” Fox muttered. He touched her shoulder and she twisted to look at him.
Her uncle was nothing but a face – that’s all any of them were, in their all-black, watch caps pulled low over their foreheads, knives, guns, Tasers, lock pick kits, and assorted other goodies stowed in various pockets.
“You,” Fox said, giving her the most serious look she’d ever seen on him, “are going to stick to the plan. Do you understand me? No improvising, young lady. If something happens to you, I’ll be a throw rug under Candy’s favorite chair. And that’s after Phil does the skinning.”
Tommy chuckled.
“You get in and you get out,” Fox continued. “And if shit goes south, you abandon the plan. Got it?”
She nodded and watched her quick exhalation puff to mist in the air. “Got it.”
“Alright. Move.”
They’d gone over this at least ten times back at the clubhouse, and so she had a sort of prescribed muscle memory, as they dropped down over the chain link fence and slithered through the overgrown reeds toward the barn. The air smelled like cooking meat, heavily spiced, delicious enough to tease at her tongue and make her mouth water. Other scents: tobacco smoke, pot smoke, unwashed bodies, gasoline, fire.
Albie had taught her how to be a spy: “Every single thing about your environment is important. Every scent, every sight, every sound. Everything gives you information. Everything is a resource, if you know how to use it.”
Thank you, Uncle, she thought, and then she and Tommy hit the rear of the barn and flattened their backs against the steel siding.
She could hear voices, but the metal distorted and threw sound, so it was hard to pinpoint their locations. She knew, from the barbecue tang in the air, that someone was cooking out, and the chatter and laughter were most likely outdoors, around the grill.
“Miles?” Tommy asked.
Static crackled in her earpiece. Then Miles’s voice. “I count at least six on the other side of the barn. Fire in the grill. They’re drinking, I can see the bottles. No movement going into or out of the barn.”
Tommy said, “Copy,” and peeled away from the wall. Michelle followed, and they flitted through the open rear doors quick as shadows.
The barn was currently being used as a distribution center. A small one. The main warehouse had to be somewhere farther south, closer to the border, but after Ghost Teague established ties with the Chupacabras, they’d set up shop here in Amarillo. From Texas, they distributed cocaine east and west, most of it to California, where that chapter of the Dogs was handling end-user sales.
God, it was a mess, this whole business.
By the dim light of a few bare bulbs dangling from the rafters, she could make out wooden crates stamped with sets of numbers. A tractor. Fuel cans. A forklift. To the left was the office, built with plywood walls, and above it a loft.
She and Tommy flipped up their collars, hiding their faces, and crept across the straw floor on tiptoe, not breathing. Tommy reached the door to the office first and turned the knob soundlessly, opened it a crack and peered inside. When he found it clear, he slipped in, waved her in behind him. Shut the door and pressed the thumb lock.
Her first thought, as she scanned the cramped space, was that Candy would have suffered heart palpitations if his own office looked like this. The computer was new, but that was where aesthetics ended; the desk and a series of file cabinets were heaped with papers, most of them sporting water rings from glasses and mugs. Empty soft drink cans, coffee cups with dark residue in the bottom, beer bottles – Corona, of course. Pens, paper clips, sweets wrappers. It was a sty, right down to the crumpled McDonald’s bags on the floor, gathered in drifts like fall leaves.
“Jesus,” Tommy muttered. “Where do we start?”
“Boot up the computer,” she said. “I’ll see if any of this is worthwhile.” She reached for the first stack of paper with gloved hands and flipped through it.
Most of it was rubbish, printed-out cartoons, invoices for things intended to mask the real business here: petrol, tractor parts, grass seed, etc.
The she stumbled onto some emails in Spanish, and handed them over Tommy’s shoulder. “Are these anything?”
He glanced away from the computer screen and scanned the first page, eyes widening. “Yeah…yeah, it’s something. Are there more?”
“Heaps.” She was already gathering them, sliding them into the knapsack she’d carried in with her. “What about you?”
“Spreadsheets,” he said, pulling a flash drive from his pocket and slipping it into the USB port on the modem. “A lot of spreadsheets.”
“Brilliant.”
“Me, obviously,” he said with a snort. “Because them, not so much. Wait…have a look at this.”
She glanced over his shoulder at the screen. “Is that what I think it is?”
“A business plan? Yeah.”
“Save it, too.”
“On it.”
There were a few more emails, and then nothing but dirty magazines and dog racing papers.
“Done?” Tommy asked, ejecting the flash drive and poc
keting it.
“Yeah, let’s go.”
“Miles, we’re on the way out.”
Voice tinny and crackled, Miles said, “Hold on,” through their earpieces. “There’s someone coming inside.”
~*~
Fox
The most important thing to know about human beings was this: they were basically stupid. He’d learned it very early, sometime between his mother’s fifth and sixth boyfriend, when Claudia Fox had pressed her gin-damp lips to his forehead, smeared him with cakey lipstick, and wailed, “Why do they always leave? All of them always leave me, Charlie! But not you. You’re my good boy.”
Why did they leave? Because she was stupid. Because she kept going out with the same man with a different face, every…damn…time. Stupid. It was why he’d finally stopped being her “good boy” and left when he was fourteen. The gin bottle had clipped him on the elbow on the way out the door.
In the years since, he’d met a handful of smart people, and no surprise most of them had been sired by Devin Green. Perhaps the smartest of all, the tosser. Probably cozied up with some new piece even now, working on Offspring Number Ten.
You had to respect the man.
Well, he did, anyway.
But, the point was: stupid. And in so many ways that was a blessing, because stupid was manageable.
He’d left his guns, his earpiece, his Taser, all his equipment in a little pile in the long grass, where he could come back for it later.
He’d stepped into the ring of light cast by the dancing barbecue pit fire, and six slack-jawed faces had turned toward him, firelight crystallizing in their eyes. “Boys,” he’d greeted, and they’d thrown down their beers and bolted from their chairs and surrounded him.
Idiots.
He’d lifted his arms up, hands empty, palms skyward. “Yeah, I know the drill.”
They shouted at him in Spanish.
“Sí, sí,” he responded, and braced himself for the impact when they grabbed him by the wrists and the hair and shoved him down to this knees.
Little excessive, but no less than what he’d expected.
Hands patted him down roughly, slapping at his chest, his waist, his hips. One even went in the front pocket of his fatigue pants and felt a little too boldly for weapons hidden in sensitive areas.
“Esta bien, pero primero invítame un trago,” he drawled.
“Shut up,” the man returned, in English. “On your feet. Up!”
They’d marched him around to the front of the building with far too much force – at least, they thought so, probably – and now here they were, standing in the middle of a barn full of cocaine.
One of them came to stand in front of him, glaring in a way that revealed his fear, simmering just behind the surly twist of his mouth. His English was correct, but heavily accented. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”
“Shopping. I heard this was the place for uncut coke. Right?”
The man traded a glance with one of his friends. Edgy. Nervous. Out of his depth.
Stupid.
“Who do you work for?” he asked.
And in his best Yank accent, Fox said, “Yo mama.”
The man swung at him.
Such an idiot.
~*~
Michelle
She gapped the window blinds with her fingers and sucked in a breath. “It’s Charlie.”
And it was, unarmed, held between two men while two more stood at his back and another stood in front of him, doing the talking. She couldn’t see that man’s face, but she didn’t need to; she recognized Fox’s placid expression all too well.
Tommy joined her and cursed. “What the hell’s he doing?” he hissed. “Trying to get us all killed?”
“Miles, do you see anyone else on the property?” Michelle asked.
“Negative.”
She sighed. “He’s having fun. Wanker.”
The man in front of Fox jerked back on his heels, taken aback by whatever Fox had said. The he pulled his arm back, a too-grand telegraphing of his intent to sucker punch Fox in the gut.
She thought she saw a smile flicker across her uncle’s mouth. And then he was a blur.
Using the men who held his wrists as leverage, he kicked his would-be-puncher square in the sternum. Kicking was a haphazard, sloppy affair for most people. But Fox? Years of gymnastics, karate, and Krav Maga were put to good use with a precise, powerful kick that sent his attacker to the ground and knocked his captors violently off balance. They staggered to their knees and Fox twisted out of their grasp, hitting the ground in a roll and springing up, one of the fallen men’s guns in his hand.
“Shit.” Michelle reached for the door.
Tommy staid her with a hand on her wrist. “Don’t. If we go out there, they’ll shoot at us, and we’ll have to shoot at them. No one’s supposed to die tonight.”
“Fox, you ass,” she snarled, but knew Tom was right. “Miles?”
“On it,” he said in her earpiece.
An actual Mexican standoff was happening in the barn aisle, Fox facing off from the three guys still standing. The ones on the ground here gathering themselves, though; they weren’t going to stay down long.
Michelle heard gunshots, a fast rat-tat-tat-tat as Miles emptied his nine mil into the air somewhere out in the darkness.
The men turned, startled, to glance over their shoulders, and that was all the time Fox needed. He surged forward, clocked the nearest in the temple with the butt of the gun, knocking him out cold and catching him, face scrunched up with the effort of holding him as he used him as a human shield/battering ram to knock the other two off their feet. Pistol-whippings all around to ensure they were all unconscious, and then he started picking their pockets.
Michelle yanked open the door and Tommy almost trampled her in his efforts to get ahead of her, lead the charge, shield her. It was a nice thought, but always annoying.
“What the hell?” she snapped as they approached Fox. He had an armful of wallets at this point.
He glanced up at them with a mild, unworried expression. “You wiped the security camera feeds?”
“Of course,” Tommy said.
“Good.”
“You want to explain what you’re doing, brother?”
He shrugged. “Recon shit.”
“Uh…” Michelle breathed a humorless laugh as Miles came jogging in, brows lifted in inquiry. “After you gave us all that shit about getting out if we needed to?”
He gave her a patronizing look. “You weren’t actually worried about me, were you, pet?”
She threw up her hands. “I give up.”
“Seriously,” Tommy said. “Wallets?”
“You have your orders and I have mine,” he said, mysteriously.
“Fuck you,” Michelle said, but she realized she was grinning, suddenly, chest light, blood full of adrenaline.
Fox sent her a wicked grin. “Forgot about the rush, didn’t you?”
She looked at her uncles, two of them rolling their eyes at the other, but all of them calm, self-possessed, so very British and capable.
“I did, yeah,” she said. “God, it feels good.”
~*~
She wasn’t a bit surprised to run straight into a wall of Candyman when they entered the clubhouse. His massive arm draped across her shoulders and he squeezed her into his side, asking, “You okay?” and sounding like he was trying to keep the worry from his voice.
“I’m great,” she said, and smiled up into his worried face.
His golden brows jumped. “Yeah?”
“Absolutely.”
“Your girl’s got it in her blood,” Fox said as he passed them. “A natural-born mistress of the night.”
“Don’t make my old lady sound like a hooker,” Candy said, a grin tugging at his mouth, a worried frown notching his brows together.
Oh, darling, she thought with an inward sigh. He just couldn’t handle it, her out in the field, doing dangerous things.
Th
ough, if she admitted it, as her adrenaline drained away, it felt awfully nice to be snugged up against his solid warmth. Back home, after a mission, she’d had a tumbler of whiskey and a frozen dinner to warm her. A strong man sheltering her under his arm, asking if she was alright, loving and worrying about her? Much better. Worlds better.
“Charlie wanted to get fancy, though,” Tommy said.
“And that means…?”
Fox walked to the nearest bar table and started emptying his pockets of the wallets he’d taken off Ruiz’s men. “I needed the exercise,” he defended. “And I thought we could use some leverage.” He began opening the wallets, pulling out driver’s licenses.
Michelle thought she understood, but held her tongue.
Candy gave her a last squeeze and went to join Fox.
Tommy looked at her and grinned the old familiar grin. “Shots?”
“You read my mind.”
~*~
Candy
The illuminated screen of the laptop seemed to make the chapel even darker, the shadows piled up in the corners, the brightness of the computer burning his eyes.
On the other end of the Skype connection, Ghost was obviously sitting at his kitchen table; Candy recognized the cabinets and counter behind him. “Is it working?” he asked, and Candy stifled a laugh as he saw Ava Lécuyer lean in around her father, smile at the webcam, and then withdraw. “Yeah, Dad, go ahead.”
“You old bastard,” Candy said. “Making your kid set up your computer.”
“Who set up yours?” Ghost fired back, smirking.
“My baby thing old lady.”
Ghost smirked. “Fair enough, kettle.”
Candy laughed. “Alright. So. My MI-5 unit went to the warehouse.”
“Right.”
“I want them off our backs, Ghost. Believe me, I respect your decision, and I know you had no choice, but they hurt my girl, and they hurt me, and–”
Tastes Like Candy (Lean Dogs Legacy Book 2) Page 31