Ghost swapped his flashlight for his Colt. In the military, he’d been trained to aim for the center of mass, always. Shoot to kill, not to wound; a wounded man could reach for a gun and shoot you back. So it went against every instinct when he whispered, “Maybe let’s not try to kill all of ‘em. Unless we have to.”
Collier snorted in response, and Ghost heard the sound of him drawing his own gun.
The door was unlocked, and when it eased open, they found themselves in a linoleum-and-laminate kitchen lit by a hissing tube above the sink. The room was the color of nicotine stains, the counters cluttered with pots, pans, plates, and opened cans with dark liquid trailing down the sides.
And the smell.
Ghost took a shallow breath through his mouth.
A radio somewhere was blaring Alabama. He heard voices: several men and at least one woman.
“Get me another beer!” someone shouted, and that was their cue to get the hell out of the kitchen.
Ghost pointed to the ceiling. Upstairs. Because if they were holding Roman, they’d put him up there, where he didn’t have an easy escape route.
Collier nodded and they glided soundlessly from the room, guns raised, away from the noise and into a narrow hall. Smoke-stained floral wallpaper. A stack of dirty boots. The front door – not too late to back out, a voice very much like Duane’s chimed helpfully in the back of Ghost’s head – and the stairs.
It seemed too easy.
And of course it was, because a woman came around the corner, arms full of empty beer bottles.
They saw her. She saw them.
Ghost held a finger to his lips. Shhh.
She screamed. Damn it.
Ghost charged her. She kept yelling, screaming for someone named Dusty at the top of her lungs, tapering into a thin, high shriek as Ghost reached her.
She dropped the bottles and they shattered on the floorboards, flecks of glass spattering his shins like buckshot.
Her hands curled into claws and she scrabbled for his face, keening and hissing, trying to stagger back from him. But he grabbed her arm and swatted her away, brought the butt of his gun down on the side of her head. Her eyes rolled back and he let her drop.
Then charged up the staircase.
A stampede of footfalls tore through the main floor, men running and shouting to get to the woman he’d dropped. They’d have to be quick.
He felt Collier at his back, breath hot on his neck, as they pounded up the stairs.
Another woman waited for them at the top, older, gray-headed, hand clutched to her throat.
Collier grabbed her by the wrist and pointed her down the stairs, waving his gun for emphasis. “Go. Go!”
A door stood cracked-open at the end of the hall and Ghost moved toward it. When he was two feet away, it opened wider and a man poked his greasy head through. “Hey, what’s–” His eyes bugged when he spotted Ghost.
Ghost kicked the door, hard, and it sent the guy tumbling back into the room, landing on his ass with a squawk. He had a gun at his hip, Ghost saw, and he trained his own piece on the man’s chest. “Don’t touch it.”
He touched it.
Ghost charged into the room and kicked him in the head.
He was still in the process of toppling back, unconscious, when Ghost stepped over him and deeper into the room. It was a bedroom, as expected, with a sagging iron-framed bed shoved into a corner, and two sofas made up with sheets and pillows. Clothes were piled in laundry baskets and the whole place smelled like sweaty socks and weed.
Roman was tied to a chair in the center of the room, mouth covered with duct tape. He was alone aside from the man Ghost had just knocked out.
Collier hustled into the room, shut and locked the door. “We gotta hurry,” he warned. “A shotgun’ll tear this door in half.”
“Yeah, I know.”
With his free hand, he pulled the knife from his hip and cut Roman’s zip-tied wrists free.
Roman pulled the duct tape off his mouth himself with a hissed, “Shit!”
Ghost moved to his ankles. “We gotta move.” He kept the knife sharp – he couldn’t do laundry for shit, but he took care of his weapons – and it cut through the plastic like butter. “Hurry.”
“Shit,” Roman said again, struggling to his feet, shaking the circulation back into his wrists.
Footsteps pounded up the stairs and down the hall. The door shook in its frame as someone launched a shoulder against it.
“Now,” Collier said, moving to open the window.
It was a two-story drop. Ghost felt the impact of the landing rattle up through his ankles, his knees, his spine; felt it as a sharp stab of pain in his teeth, of all places.
“Fuck,” Roman groaned, collapsing. No doubt his feet were still numb, and the jar had been worse for him.
Above, the blast of a shotgun. Yells, shouts, clamber of feet.
Ghost grabbed Roman’s arm and hauled him up. “Move, move!”
~*~
Maggie sat cross-legged in the center of her bed, Ghost’s gun winking up at her from the comforter. It was small. Silver, with a wooden…handle? Is that what you called that part? She didn’t know. She didn’t know anything about guns, only that this looked like a miniaturized version of the guns cowboys used in old westerns. A revolver? A revolver. She thought. Something told her it wouldn’t be as simple as point-and-shoot, but that’s what Ghost had told her to do.
Downstairs, the TV murmured quietly, something with a monotonous, soothing narrator. A documentary, no doubt; her parents didn’t watch movies, as a general rule. But the fact that they were watching something together at all was its own small miracle. Was it because they hadn’t expected her back for a while? Could they only enjoy one another’s company in her absence? How much they must have loved her weeks with Ghost, then.
It was moments like these that she seriously considered running away, like some melodramatic teenager in a novel.
She hoped Ghost was okay.
In a small way, she hoped Roman was, too.
The horror of what she’d seen – a grown man dragged away against his will – was something she couldn’t think about in concrete detail. The fear threatened to overtake her. So she sat on her bed, and she stared at the gun, and she wondered what her life might look like right now if she’d never asked a scruffy, good-looking stranger on the sidewalk to buy her beer that day.
Then she heard the engine.
In this neighborhood, everyone drove a Mercedes or BMW, a Buick or a Town Car. There was one Jag up the block. Mrs. Henderson had an Impala. The only loud engines belonged to the neighborhood’s teenage sons, and they were all top-of-the-line Camaros and Mustangs.
This engine, though, roared. An ugly sound, like the muffler had been disconnected.
The same engine she’d heard earlier tonight, outside Hamilton House.
She sprang off the bed and went to the window, gapped the blinds with her fingers and peered down at the street below. A jacked-up, mud-spattered truck had pulled up at the curb, and two men were walking across the lawn to the front door. She saw the silhouette of a long shape in one’s hand – a baseball bat? A shotgun?
“Shit,” she said, and then heard the doorbell.
~*~
Roman set the bottle down with a gasp, hand braced against the kitchen counter. “Fuck.”
“I can stay, if you need me to,” Rita offered at the door.
Ghost waved a no. “We’re good. Thanks, Rita.”
She cast a suspicious glance toward Roman – one of the Ryder boys had clocked him in the face and he was starting to bruise – and slowly slipped out.
When the door clicked shut, Collier said, “We’re fucked.”
“No shit,” Ghost sighed. He was really starting to regret that he’d brought them all back here to his apartment. Chances were good the Ryders were keeping tabs on the Dogs at this point, and he’d just led them straight to his home, his kid, innocently sleeping down the hall.
; Roman drummed his fingers on the counter, eyes trained on the Jack bottle. If he got sloppy drunk, Ghost had already decided he wasn’t letting him stay over. He probably wasn’t going to let that happen anyway, if he was honest. “You’re gonna need stitches,” he said, nodding toward the split on the guy’s forehead. Congealing blood trickled from beneath his unruly forelock.
Roman probed the area with a wince, fingers coming away red. “Nah, it’s fine.”
“So what now?” Collier asked.
It was really the only question to ask.
“I’m gonna have to talk to Duane,” he said, and Roman went white. “Alone,” he clarified. To Roman: “He might just put one between your eyes the second he sees you. On principle.”
“Jesus,” Roman said, shuddering.
“Speaking of which: what the hell have you got cooked up with the Ryders anyway?”
Roman bit his lip.
“Start talking, or I’ll take you back to them.”
Roman looked to Collier for help.
He shrugged. “Hey, don’t look at me.”
“Fuck.” Roman took a deep, ragged breath. “Yeah, shit, okay. I’ve been dealing with them about a year.”
“A year?”
“You wanna hear this or not?”
Ghost motioned for him to get on with it.
“A year, yeah. Their crops got busted.”
“Weed?”
“What the hell other kinda crops would I be talking about?”
“They’re farmers. I dunno. They might have…corn or some shit.”
“Their weed got busted,” Roman corrected, rolling his eyes. “Cops tore it all outta the ground, bagged it up, and took it away. They planted again, obviously, but the soil was bad or something, I dunno. So one day one of ‘em reaches out. I got sent to make the drop, and we got to talking. They wanted to trade: I give them weed, they give me meth, and let me distribute that.”
“Damn,” Ghost said, rubbing the back of his neck. “That shit kills people, dumbass.”
“So does coke, and we sell that.”
“There’s a big damn difference, and you know it.”
“Whatever.” Roman threw his hands up. “I took the proposal to Duane, and he said no. Big surprise. The idiot doesn’t do shit.” It was the first time Ghost had heard him say anything negative about their president, and it was refreshing. “But I thought it was a good idea. So I set something up.”
“You’ve been selling meth wearing a Dogs cut, without his permission,” Ghost said.
Here, Roman winced. “It gets worse.”
“I bet it does.”
“A couple months back, I got stopped at a sobriety checkpoint, and, uh, let’s just say I wasn’t sober.”
“Oh my God,” Collier sighed.
“When they hauled me in, they found the meth. And so, um, I…”
“You squealed on the Ryders,” Ghost supplied.
“They’ve been after them for a year! They never could tie the weed bust to them officially, not enough to make an arrest. I told them who’d cooked the meth and that I could give them the Ryders on a silver platter.”
Ghost wanted to say he was surprised, really he did, but he wasn’t. He wasn’t sure there was anything Roman could tell him that would come as a shock. “You’re a CI,” he said, flatly. “You wearing a wire right now?”
“No. Shit, no. It wasn’t formal like that. They tailed me to a drop and caught the Ryders with their hands full.”
“And they just let your ass go?”
“What’s a DUI when they got a major drug arrest?”
“Why wasn’t it on the news?”
“They’re keeping it on lockdown until they can round up the whole crew.”
“Why not just knock on their front door?”
“They don’t make the shit there. Nobody knows where the cook houses are.”
“Not even you?”
“No. Why would they tell me that?”
“I dunno. Why would you turn rat? People do lots of crazy shit.”
“I’m not a rat,” Roman said, eyes widening in obvious fear. His nostrils flared, a prey animal scenting danger. “I’ve never said shit about this club.”
“No, you’ve just been dealing with all kinds of creeps behind its back.”
“They were business opportunities.” His voice gained volume, grew high and tight. “I’m not Duane’s nephew,” he said with a sneer. “I can’t just walk into church with a garage blueprint in my hands and expect anybody to listen to me. So I had to do some things I didn’t’ want to, sure. But anybody would’ve in my position.”
“And what position is that?”
“Future president.”
Ghost grinned. And then he laughed, hollow and humorless. “Jesus Christ, you actually think that, don’t you?”
“It could happen,” Roman said, bowing up his back. “You don’t care about this club. You’re off playing house with your piece of jailbait. I’m the one who wants the chair. I’m more like Duane than you.”
“That’s not a good thing!” Ghost snapped.
“You’ll wake Aidan,” Collier said, tone gentle, inching his way into the kitchen, no doubt readying to intervene if Ghost lunged across the island.
But the idea of hitting Roman held no appeal. He didn’t want to get his hands dirty.
He backed up a step, shaking his head, exhausted. “You’re ambitious, yeah? You want it. But you’re a dumbass. All the ambition in the world won’t get you anywhere if you’re this fucking stupid.”
Roman was denied the chance to respond by the phone ringing.
~*~
“Ghost?” Maggie whispered into the phone, hand trembling so badly she thought she might drop it. “Ghost, they’re here.”
“What? Who’s there?” She could hear the panic in his voice, though he covered it with gruffness.
“Those guys from Hamilton House. They’re here, at my house, they’re inside.”
Downstairs, she heard another crash. It sounded like the china cabinet, the breaking of thousands of dollars’ worth of fancy crystal. Her mother had screamed once, right after the door was kicked in with a terrible bang, but Maggie hadn’t heard anything from her parents since. She had no idea if they were conscious…or alive.
Ghost swore on the other end of the line. “Where are you? Are you okay?”
“I’m upstairs. I’m okay, but my parents–”
“Stay where you are,” he commanded. She heard voices in the background, the thump of boots, the rattle of his breath. “I’m coming. But stay there. Don’t go out to them, okay? You’ve still got the gun?”
“Y-yes.”
“If they come into your room, use it. Aim for the chest, center of mass.” When she didn’t respond: “Mags!”
“Yeah. Okay. Okay.” She heard footfalls down below, the men moving around. Then another crash. “Hurry. Ghost–”
“I am, baby. I’m coming.”
There was a rustle, then another voice came on the line. It was Collier. “Maggie, Ghost is headed that way. Hang up with me, and call 911, okay?”
“Okay.” A dial tone filled her ear and she gulped. She’d call 911, sure, except now there were footsteps coming up the stairs. Shit.
She hit the numbers and hunkered down low on the other side of her bed. She could hide here, but the cord stretching from the hallway table into her room was a dead giveaway.
“Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?” the operator asked in her ear.
And her door opened.
Maggie held her breath. She set the phone down on the carpet and gripped the gun tight in her other hand, praying she wouldn’t have to use it.
She could hear the man in her threshold breathing through his mouth. Hear the thump of her pulse in her ears. Hear the operator asking, “Hello?”
“Where you at, girlie?” the man asked. “I know you’re in here.”
“Is anyone there?” the voice from the phone asked.
If Maggie
responded, he’d hear her. Then again, he already knew she was here…but she might have him at a disadvantage. Might.
Oh God, oh God…
She stared down at the gun, her pale fingers clenched tight around it, her bubblegum pink nail polish.
The floor groaned quietly as he took a step into her room.
She wanted Ghost to be here – but he wasn’t.
She didn’t want to make this kind of decision – but she had to.
He took another step –
And she popped to her feet, so fast all the blood drained out of her head and black spots formed at the edges of her vision. But she had the gun raised, held mostly steady in both hands.
“Don’t move,” she said, her voice a squeak.
He was a tall guy, fat, beer belly straining his white t-shirt. Small, piggish features and an impressive sunburn on his face. He held a baseball bat in one hand, but she didn’t see a gun. Thank God. She had him at a disadvantage there.
He stared at her a moment, slack-jawed. Then grinned. “Where’d you get that little pea-shooter?”
“Don’t move,” she repeated, firmer this time. “The cops are on the way,” she bluffed. Maybe the operator could hear her. Maybe.
He breathed a phlegmy laugh. “You’re one of them biker bitches alright, ain’t ya?”
“Drop the bat.”
He opened his mouth to speak.
“Shut up, or I’ll shoot. Drop the bat. Hands behind your head.”
Still grinning, sighing like he was amused by her, like he was indulging a child, he let the bat fall to the carpet. It thumped down and rolled into the doorjamb. “Things don’t gotta get ugly, sweetheart.”
“Shut up.” Ghost called her sweetheart. It sounded like an insult coming out of this redneck’s mouth.
He laughed again, a crackling smoker’s laugh. She knew she looked afraid, and that he was underestimating her.
She thought maybe she could use that to her advantage.
“Where are my parents?”
“Thought you wanted me to shut up,” he drawled.
If nothing else, this was stalling for time.
“I’m the one with the gun,” she said. “Answer the damn question.”
American Hellhound Page 40