“I’ll call ahead and give them our ETA. Everyone is on standby as it is so they should be ready to help.”
Wylie nodded. “Mercy, I need your keys.”
With gritted teeth and clenched fists, Mercy mentally fought with himself over what to do. Follow orders and let his friend and colleague go down, or stay and fight alongside him?
“Mercy,” Wylie said, his demeanor calm. “I need your keys, man.”
“It’s a red Charger, right out front.”
“Perfect. Easy for Ro to follow.”
A sob escaped Eva. “Wylie. You can’t do this. You need to come with us. We all get out…together. Let Ronan chase a ghost. They’ll never know. He can say you got away.”
“They’ll never believe him. They have eyes everywhere. This is a part of the setup. They’ll take him in if he comes up empty-handed, and I’m not letting that happen. I love you too much, and I just got you back,” Wylie said, pulling her into his embrace. “It’ll be okay. I need to do this. I need to know you’re in the air and on your way to safety. I’ll be right behind you. I’ll see you in Montana.”
He pulled away and made his way to the door. “You all get on that plane and get the hell out of here. Don’t worry about me. I’ll see you soon.”
Ronan followed Wylie out to the parking lot and called in to whoever he was reporting to. “I got eyes on the fugitive and am in pursuit. I’ll send coordinates to my location momentarily.”
Wylie smiled at his cousin. “Hey cuz, you want to see my new place? Just bought it a little while back. It’s pretty nice.”
“Fuck, Wylie. Don’t make this harder. You know how this ends,” Ronan chided. “I’ll take a bullet if it means you getting away. Okay? You do what you have to do.”
“I’m not putting you at risk. It’s my turn to take one for the team. You just make sure the team has a fighting chance.” Wylie shook his cousin’s hand and pulled him into a hug as they stood between their respective vehicles. “Follow me, I have some quick cleaning up to do before this goes down.”
27
“I’m telling you, it was my father.” Eva fumed as Mercy helped her with her seat belt after carrying her to the helicopter.
“I’m sure it looked like him, but your father is gone, Eva.” Mercy was rushing to get them in the air but didn’t want to upset her any more than she was.
“It was him. My father and David Kimble were in that car that passed us in town. He looked right at me,” she argued.
Mercy buckled himself in and knocked on the wall behind him and the helicopter began to ascend. “I know this is all overwhelming, but you’ve been sick, so maybe the meds have you confused?”
“I know what I fucking saw, Mercy. Don’t condescend me and baby me like some invalid. Wylie is in trouble,” she cried. “They will kill him.”
Mercy pinched the bridge of his nose, jaw clenched. “Eva. This is what Wylie wanted, okay? It’s what he wanted. He knows what he’s doing. We have to get the hell out of here and wait for our next move. The team is already on it.”
Eva looked down at the ground and saw Baine staring back at her. She put her hand to the window, grateful for his sacrifice and kindness, and smiled when he put his hand up and smiled back. Several people were quickly cleaning out his car and tossing stuff in the nearby firepit that was already burning when they got there.
These people were just regular people stepping up to support a much larger cause like their lives depended on it too, and maybe they did. Once it was safe, Baine and his small crew of friends and family would head back to the hospital and finish cleaning out the space Eva occupied just in case someone put two and two together.
It was too risky to take Dr. Mather with them, so he became the diversion. Mathers went on the jet, headed for Seattle. He needed to get off the plane there so whoever was in town watching him had something to chase or report. With the plane in the air a handful of minutes ahead of them, all eyes were focused elsewhere when the helicopter lifted off and traveled in the opposite direction, staying as close to the tree line as possible until they were at a safe enough distance.
The new plan meant Eva and Mercy took the helicopter to a waiting plane in a private airfield in Idaho where they’d then make their way to Montana. Mathers would fly home to Seattle. Make sure he was seen landing and stepping off the plane. After an escort home where all the cctv cameras would track him, he’d quickly flee out the back door to another waiting vehicle that would then rush him to a private airfield and a second waiting plane that would then take him to Montana, where he’d continue to care for Eva.
It was all carefully planned down to the finest detail. Except for Wylie. There was no plan for him other than a suicide mission. It pained her to think where he was or what was happening to him. Ronan would give him a good chance, but Wylie would turn himself in before he let Ronan make a move that incriminated himself.
Eva stared off in the distance, Mercy’s words as he spoke to the team in Montana a mere mumble at this point. She could almost see Wylie’s house, getting farther and farther away, wishing they were there together at that moment, finishing what they started there. She wasn’t ready to give up their time together, and being forced to felt nearly unbearable.
The helicopter shook as a massive explosion occurred in the distance. A white plume of smoke shot from the trees in the distance, followed by flames and dark soot-filled clouds.
“Mercy!” Eva cried in sheer panic. “Mercy! It’s Wylie. His house. That’s where his house is.”
“Shit!” Mercy yelled into the phone. “We need optics, Liam. Use the coordinates I gave you on Wylie’s location the other day. What can you see? It all went up just now.”
Mercy removed his seat belt and kneeled before Eva, grabbing her hands as they both watched and waited. He handed Eva an earpiece and linked it to his device so she could be in on the call.
“Nothing’s coming from the house. I can’t get a hit on anything,” Liam confirmed. “We can get a drone up, but it’ll take time. There aren’t any cameras nearby, and Wylie’s personal device is offline now.”
“Oh my God,” Eva cried. “Why is this happening? He has to be okay, right? He has to be.”
“He’s smart,” Mercy assured. “He had the property rigged to cover his tracks. That’s all. He did this. I’m sure of it. He wanted to destroy any evidence you guys were there.”
“No. They didn’t know. They didn’t know where we were…”
“There are a lot of things we thought they didn’t know, but they did…” Mercy dropped his head, fighting back his own emotions while they waited for Liam to give them something, anything. “He’s alive, okay? That’s what we are going to believe until we know otherwise.”
She wiped her tears on the back of her hands and shook her head in agreement. “Okay. You’re right. We’ve come too far for it to end this way.”
“I have word from Ronan.” Liam broke in, “He’s…the…Wylie…explosion…”
“You’re cutting out,” Mercy snapped in frustration. “Repeat.”
“Explosion…gone…Wylie…” Liam was still breaking up.
“Mercy?” Eva cried.
“This fucking thing doesn’t work up here. It’s because we’re on this system so the assholes can’t tap us. Shit.” He threw the earpiece and his device across the way. Taking the seat next to Eva, he draped his arm around her for comfort, fighting off his own tears, which were threatening. “It’s Wylie. It’s fucking Wylie. He’s fine. Okay? He’s going to be fine. You’ll see. When we land, they’ll have answers. Hell, he may even beat us there at this rate. That red Charger is fast,” he insisted, trying to lighten the mood in a very dark situation.
Eva laid her head on Mercy’s shoulder and began to cry. “This is all my fault. He came for me and so did my father. If Esteban didn’t kill him already, he will. I may as well have killed him myself.”
Eva was resting on the oversized sofa in the main house at Wyatt Ranch while Dr. Mather
s hooked her back up to her IV, and they awaited news on Wylie. Mercy led the debriefing, sharing the information they’d collected during their final moments in McKenzie Ridge. Mathers had landed within minutes of Eva and Mercy, and the three were shuttled up to the house together, where they rejoined the team.
“It appears he blew up the house as a diversion to keep eyes on him and out of the sky so you all could get out safely,” Dace said. “He needed to destroy his office and any evidence left behind. I’m gathering it was quite the setup.”
“It was quite the setup.” Eva smiled. “You’d be proud, Liam. It looked like your lair, but smaller. It was like he had a piece of each of you there with him, I mean…he had it rigged with explosives. That’s all you, Luke. He looked up to all of you. Every move he made he considered what each of you would do. He’s the best piece of you all in one.”
The brothers each nodded and grinned, proud of their brother and the choices he made to protect all of them.
“He should have come here,” Eva trembled. “He should have followed the plan and just come here with Mercy in the first place. If it wasn’t for me…”
“Stop,” Dace emphasized. “Wylie is the free spirit of the bunch. He’s going to do what he’s going to do, always. I guess having a little bit of each of us in him gives him that confidence. This isn’t your fault. He had a choice, and he chose you.”
“I anticipated it,” Liam recounted. “I intentionally planned his route with Mercy knowing he would ditch the plan and come for you. I put him near those original houses he checked for a reason.”
“And I slapped the tracker on his bag before we even left Portland. This wasn’t you. It was one hundred percent Wylie. This is who he is, and he wasn’t about to leave you behind. He was your extraction team.”
“You all knew.” She smiled.
“We’ve always known,” Declan confirmed. “Despite how hard he denied it, we knew. If there was any way to find you without a single clue, it was going to be Wylie who figured it all out.”
“He’s just a stubborn prick,” Luke quipped. “He hasn’t even looked at another woman since the day he met you. This has been your story from the beginning, but it just took him a while to figure it out. It’s just the beginning, Eva. Don’t give up on him. He’s out there.”
“He’s out there,” Liam broke in, tapping away at his laptop. “It’s just a matter of time before we hear from Ronan and Ryker or maybe even Carter.”
“If we hear from any of them, it means he’s in custody,” Eva said, lip quivering.
“Then we’ll get him back.” Eli shrugged as if his suggestion was an obvious response to the greater issue. “Simple. We spring him.”
“Simple?” Eva laughed. “They’ll kill him. My father is behind it, and he will kill him. Especially if he knows I’m connected to you guys. If he knows me and Wy are…” Eva couldn’t hold back the emotion.
“Eva, honey,” Declan insisted. “Your father is dead. I saw him more than once in that morgue because I wanted to make sure he was really dead. Trust me when I say he was there, very much dead, and there is no way some drug Liam talked about that makes the body appear to be dead, or whatever that shit is…”
“I wasn’t able to trace anything around the time of Esteban’s death,” Liam confirmed. “The drug I was thinking about is no longer in production and hasn’t been for some time. It was a dead end.”
“If you’re talking paralytics, there’s a series of drugs that can induce death-like coma states,” Dr. Mathers chimed in as he finished tending to Eva. “All singular pharmaceuticals were seized, destroyed, and banned in a unified act some time ago, as you mention. But there are a series of neuromuscular blocking agents that, when used in combination, can produce the same effect.”
“Wait,” Declan said, “so you’re saying he could have faked his own death?”
“More or less, if he had a good chemist who knew what they were doing. There are some very safe, long-lasting paralytics that have easily remedied side effects like tachycardia and histamine-induced hypotension…things like that. One could create a ruse that could last as long as three or so hours, give or take. The only error in that hypothesis is they all act rather quickly, less than two minutes for these drugs to take effect. Much like if you were to have surgery and administered anesthesia—it’s quick-acting. So unless it was administered later, he would have had to inject himself right in front of you.”
“So it is possible,” Eva trilled. “It was my father. I know it was.”
“Doc, I saw his body multiple times over the course of a week, and nothing changed. I even…left something with him to see if he’d moved, which he didn’t. Is it possible for someone to, perhaps, administer this type of thing repeatedly?”
“Certainly, but not likely. If you saw him over the course of several days, then he was dead,” the doctor deadpanned. “Doses of that degree and frequency come with significant consequences. If he wasn’t already dead, then the lethal amounts of these drugs would’ve killed him.”
“He had been shot, as well,” Declan added.
“Oh?” The doctor’s brow spiked. “He was dead. Those combinations of blockers are dangerous in a healthy body…but a damaged one? Dead. I’d say unless he had a clone, you’re seeing ghosts, my dear.”
Liam and Luke, twins, looked at each other, then Eva when Liam asked, “Is that a possibility? I mean a twin, not a clone, of course.”
“No.” She let her head fall back on the sofa cushion and rubbed her forehead. “It was just him and my aunt. There weren’t any other siblings. I’m telling you, though. I know what I saw.”
“I know what I saw too,” Declan said gently. “It was Esteban in that morgue.”
“Exhume the body,” Dr. Mathers declared bluntly. “Simple enough. See if he’s…in there.”
28
The room was quiet for a moment as they each let that thought roll through their minds. Digging up the body of their biggest enemy felt very much like opening the tomb of King Tut. You just didn’t wake the dead like that and expect nothing in the way of repercussions.
Eva finally broke the silence. “I know my father. It was him. And he was definitely with David Kimble. Exhume the body. I’ll sign whatever needs to be signed as next of kin.”
“It did look like him, guys, and it’s not far-fetched for Kimble to be with him,” Mercy added, finally giving in to Eva’s theory.
“But Kimble helped us in the end,” Dace continued. “Why would he do that, just to flip and work with Esteban again? Give me a theory to work with here because I really want to get on board with this, but it’s missing too many pieces for now.”
“To set us up,” Eva confirmed. “Revenge. It’s what he thrived on. We didn’t just stumble upon that transaction on the coast by chance. It was to get our hands dirty. All of us. Whatever we got too close to happened a long time ago, and we got in the way.”
“And he’s taking his revenge while he finalizes whatever deal has been in the making all along?” Eli questioned. “It’s a decent theory.”
“My father was a terrible and vile man. This is completely his script. He’d done this and worse a hundred times before. We interrupted his business to the degree that it’s taken this long to re-establish whatever it was. And he’ll make us pay for that. Dearly. And he may have Wylie.”
“I’m sold,” Declan asserted. “It’s believable enough to take extra precautions because he’ll come for all of us. Including my wife and son.”
Declan’s wife was once married to Esteban. She also shared a son with him, who Declan now claimed as his own. They faked their deaths to lure him out in the first place, making Lydia and Jax prime targets for revenge if Eva’s theory had any merit at all.
“I’m putting Watermark on lockdown and extra teams on everyone,” Luke insisted, making the call. “No one leaves the building, and nobody comes in but our own people.”
“Have Ma and Da shut down the pub. They’re at risk too,”
Liam directed. “Get them to Watermark with everyone else. And I think we need to dispatch a team to McKenzie Ridge. We have family and friends there who were involved. It’s where all of this went down.”
Dace pulled out his phone. “That’s a great job for the MC. I’ll get Gannon on it now. They can be there in a few hours. Meantime, Ronan and Ryker may still be in the area, so I’ll give them a heads-up. They can take watch until we get people there.”
“Do you need Mercy and me to head back?” Eli asked, ready to help.
“I’m so sorry,” Eva cried, completely distraught.
“This isn’t your fault,” Declan comforted. “You have nothing to be sorry for. We were taking your father down with or without you.”
“I should have never let it get to the point it did. I knew very young he was a bad man and needed to be stopped, but I wasn’t brave enough until I knew I had you guys to help. I had the opportunity to take him down and prevent all of this and didn’t.”
“You were a kid, Eva. That’s heavy shit for a kid,” Declan said.
“But I was old enough to know he was a bad man. I was old enough to stop him,” she replied, wiping her tears, her expression going stone cold. “That man will haunt me and those I love for the rest of my life now. It’s the legacy he left me. And now he has Wylie. I know he does. I feel it in my soul.”
“Then we’ll get him back,” Dace explained. “We’ll get Wylie back and deal with Esteban once and for all.”
“Hey, guys?” Eli interrupted, turning up the television. “Check this out.”
“Shit…it’s Wy,” Liam murmured, immediately going to his laptop to look up more information.
“Federal agents took an international fugitive with ties to the Valdez Cartel, Wylie O’Reilly, into custody today after an explosive pursuit. O’Reilly, wanted on multiple charges including treason, domestic terrorism, and illegal weapons and drug trade, has been at the top of America’s most wanted list for more than a week when he and his four brothers fled before being detained by local field agents in their home state of Oregon. O’Reilly was taken into custody after what agents are calling the largest terror act on US soil to date after attempting to detonate an explosion designed to take out the entire town of McKenzie Ridge. In an odd twist, world-renowned bounty hunters, who also happen to be the fugitive’s cousins, reprimanded O’Reilly just in time, we’re told. We’ll hear more from arresting agents and the attorney general tonight at eleven.”
Brother's Keeper V: Wylie (the complete series BOX SET): NEW RELEASE + Series Box SET included! Page 133