“Get up and go into the bedroom,” he said as their eyes remained locked. She didn’t move.
“Now!”
She quickly got back to her feet and hurried into the bedroom.
“GET YOUR FUCKING HANDS IN THE AIR!”
Dante had no time to react. The door came crashing in. A group of large men, maybe ten of them, dressed in dark suits rushed towards him. A few pistols pointed at his head.
ON THE GROUND! NOW!
No way in hell was he going to get down.
“Who the fuck are you?” He asked.
POW!
A hard fist slammed into his chin. Then several more landed in his ribs. His face. Back of his head. He was taking shots from all directions. His ears rung. His head ached. The faces in front of him became blurry. He fell to his knees. He tried to cover his face. The blows continued to rain down.
He hardly knew what was going on. But he could feel his arms being tied behind his back and his legs tied at the ankles. He had two black eyes and a busted, bleeding lip. He was only wearing his boxers, blood dripping on his ripped tatted flesh. They picked him up and threw him onto the couch.
The well-dressed thugs stood over him.
“Get off me! Help! Dante!”
He shook his head from side to side, trying to shake out of the fog that he slowly sinking into. They had really kicked the shit out of him. But the voice of Taylor in distress was enough to rouse him.
“Stop it! Let me go!” two of the goons were dragging Taylor through the living room of the spacious hotel room. She was only wearing a t-shirt and panties. She was twisting and turning, doing her best to resist them. Dante gritted his teeth.
“Get off of her! I’ll break your fucking—”
His words were cut short by a hard fist to the jaw. Several more blows blurred his vision.
One man stepped forward from the pack. He removed a pair of dark sunglasses and looked down at Dante. His eyes were a ghostly gray. Pure evil. Sadism.
“You’ve had quite the last couple of weeks, haven’t you, Dante?”
Dante frowned and stared hard at the man. Nothing made sense to him but he had a feeling things were about to become a lot clearer. “
“Who the hell are you?”
“I work for Mr. Cormier. You know who that is, don’t you? The man you have been hired to kidnap.”
“I don’t know what the fuck you are talking about. You have the wrong guy. It would be a good idea for you to—”
His words were cut short by two hard shots to both sides of his ribs.
“I think that it would be a good idea for you to shut up and listen. You were hired to kidnap Mr. Cormier.”
The man stopped, turned and looked towards Taylor with a wicked smile. The two goons still had their dirty hands on her. Her eyes were wide open, with what looked like shock.
“I guess you two didn’t get around to much small talk in the bar,” the ghoulish man said.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Dante said.
The man explained that he was the head of Mr. Cormier’s private security firm. Part of his job was following around and digging up as much info as possible on potential employees. For the past week, he had been following Taylor’s movements. That’s what led them to Dante.
“If only you could have kept your dick in your pants, we would never have found out about your little plan.” The man paused and shook his head, a tight-lipped smile on his face. “Looks like you are going to turn out just like your father.”
“What the hell do you know about my father?”
“Dante it’s my job to know as much as I can about everybody.”
Moments later six of the goons swarmed him. The picked him off the couch and hustled him out of the room and down the hallway to the service elevator. There was a man in the elevator, wearing the same style of suit as the thugs. Dante gritted his teeth as he watched Taylor kicking and struggling.
The elevator doors opened. The basement. They were rushed down a hallway and out a back door, which led to an alley. An SUV waited with its doors wide open. They were thrown inside. The car screeched off. Their bodies pressed against each other. Dante could feel Taylor trembling. Now he was sure of it. She was definitely telling him the truth. He would do everything to protect her. There was no way he would give in to these bastards.
Chapter 7
Gus blew out a thick cloud of smoke and shielded his eyes from the scorching Arizona sun. There was nothing but dirt and dust all around him. He was off the grid, outside of civilized society, yet still close enough to keep his high-speed Internet, which allowed him to run the Brotherhood's shipping business while remaining far, far away from the prying eyes of law enforcement. The next time he got nabbed he wouldn’t be coming out for maybe a decade or so. He tried not to worry about it. Tried to forget that he was a fugitive.
Yet he was happy to be out of Sacramento and in the wide open desert. Sacramento PD had him under tight surveillance for months. A guy on the inside tipped off that the raid would be called any day. They were going to bring in the tanks and the choppers. Multiple film crews would be there. Lights swirling. Sirens blazing. It would be a great show. He would be dragged out of the house. Thrown face first onto the front lawn. Heavy artillery pointed at his head. They would be screaming and cursing. Chaos! Chaos! And then the twenty people that lived in the three-story house, which functioned as a sort of commune, would be dragged out as well. Their skinny, ragged, drug-addled bodies trembling with fear. This was it! It was happening! The big raid! The one that everyone spent so much time worrying about! They were done! It was over. They were going to spend the rest of their life in federal prison worrying about when they were going to be shanked or raped.
Knife fights and male on male love had never really been Gus’s thing. So he decided to slip the knot twenty-four hours before it was slipped around his neck. He caught the first bus to Saulito along with two lady friends. He’d spotted Craig’s list ad In Sosolito. Guy was asking 8k for a Class B RV with 95k miles on it. Along with two lady friends, he caught the next bus to the squalid town. He negotiated the guy down to 5K and he and his two lady friends crossed the border into Nevada and from there they trekked to the Arizona desert.
During the trip, Gus wondered why he hadn’t chosen the mobile lifestyle sooner. Out in the desert, he felt a sense of calm that it was very difficult for him to experience while living in the city. So many damn cops in the city. Out here he could forget all that and focus on the work required by the Brotherhood.
He saw a cloud of dust rising into the sky a couple hundred yards away. His lady companions. He shook his head and blew out another cloud of smoke. Damn those women were crazy. Momma and Baby Girl. 20 years apart but you wouldn’t have known by the way that they played around with each other. Scratching and crawling and wrestling. Riding the AV bikes and shooting their rifles into the desert sky. And when they got some whiskey and some dope into them, there was no telling what they end up doing to each other or to someone else. Desert life seemed to be perfect for them. After they recovered from the first few weeks away from the favorite substances.
They could get on his damn nerves sometimes. And he would smack them around a little bit when that was needed. But he tried not to be too hard on them. Like most women who were let into the Brotherhood’s circles, Momma and Baby Girl were both trailer park refugees. They had run away from a life of misery. Run away from seeing every one around them disintegrating one pill, pop, or slam at a time. And they had run into the waiting arms of men who were loyal, sadistic, yet also loving and kind in a strange, perverse sort of way.
Momma and Baby Girl. They were good biker wives. Or maybe wenches was the better word. Harlots. Whores. Sluts. Yes! Yes! Yes! He loved every inch of them. And didn’t have an unkind word to say about their pasts. They didn’t judge him. And he didn’t judge them. They were all runways. Misfits. Incapable of functioning in the world. So they had dropped out. Given up. Sought refuge outsid
e the prying eyes of the world. Outside the cruel, judging, hypocritical eyes of society.
Out in the desert where a man could be free, it was possible to have two wives. They left him alone during the day when he had to work. And when it was time to play, they never held back.
Gus stubbed out the cigarette and went back into the RV. His work section was in the front of the mobile home. King sized bed, which all three of them, enthusiastically shared in the back. He sat down at his laptop.
He opened an excel spreadsheet and spent the next few minutes checking the status of the East Coast deliveries. They had all been successfully completed.
“Fuck!” Gus said.
Of course! The fucking New York job! Everything should have completed by then. But of course, it wasn’t. The Chinese should have already sent the initial payment of 100K dollars. But of course, they hadn’t yet.
“Goddamnit!”
Where the hell was Dante. They hadn’t communicated in a couple weeks. Gus sensed that something was wrong. Definitely wrong. He could feel it in his gut. He trusted his instincts. He had had a bad feeling about this particular delivery, which involved a human being, ever since the Brotherhood had first discussed getting into the tricky, messy, complicated business of human trafficking. He hadn’t wanted anything to do with it. There was no need! They were already making great money in a business that they understood very well.
Why did they have to branch out? Get themselves involved with the fucking Chinese. Kidnapping. Human trafficking. That’s what it was. And there was some weird science fiction element to the kidnapping as well. Apparently, the Chinese wanted to replicate the DNA of some genius who used to be a former athlete. They wanted to clone him. Or replicate his DNA. Or some other kind of weird shit. They wanted to create a super race. Or a super army.
They should have stayed away. But they had been greedy. The money was too good to pass up. So they hadn’t.
Gus sighed and shook his head. He felt personally responsible for all the men and women that entrusted with pickups and deliveries. He had been doing this work for the past fifteen years. He felt grateful for the work that he was able to do. Others might have scoffed at him. What did he have to feel proud about? He was essential a delivery manager in a criminal syndicate. At any moment the FEDS could kick down his door, take everything he had, and throw him into a cell.
It was the relationships that meant the most to him—especially with the younger pups. They made him think about his own children—who he hadn’t seen in more than a decade. Thinking about them made him feel a deep hole in his chest. Kyle and Cody. A boy and a girl. They were probably planning it for months. Or maybe not. Maybe the idea had come to them out of the blue. Anyway, he had made it far too easy for them to rip him off. And he and the string of biker whores that came and went, certainly gave them the motivation. They had gone under his mattress and stolen his 56K stash. Fuck! Fuck! He’d cursed up a storm, knocked around all the girls, threatening to throw them off the nearest bridge if they didn’t cough up the money fast. But after seeing them break down in tears, pleading, crying hysterically, terrified, he realized that they most likely didn’t have anything to do with the sudden disappearance of his cash.
It didn’t take long before he figured out who had taken the money. The two devilish bastards, 19 and 17, sent him a text message with a picture of tons of money laid out on a cheap motel. “Thanks, Dad! Always knew you would come thru for us!”
He’d taken his phone and thrown it into the wall. Then he had broken down and cried. He had gotten exactly what he had deserved. He hadn’t heard from them since that text message. But he still held out hope that he would one day be able to reunite with them. There was so much that he needed to say. So many things that he needed to get off his chest. The guilt that he had carried around for years would always be with him until he had a chance to sit down face to face with them. Until that day, he would continue to find meaning in the Brotherhood. That’s why he felt so protective about the young people that he sent out into the world on dangerous missions. In fifteen years, none of the delivery people had been killed. A couple fist fights and knife fights. A few bumps, bruises, and stab wounds. But that was all.
Why did they have to branch out from the opiod trade? People in the country were hungry for pills. Pills. Pills. The addiction was ravaging the nation, tearing towns and families apart. One man’s addiction is another man’s empire. That was the lane that they should have stayed in. That was the game that they should have continued playing.
It was a dangerous game. But it was one that they were good at. In response to a lot of national attention on opioids, the police were turning up the heat. Puffing out their chests. Holding press conferences with masks covering their faces. Warning dealers that their doors were about to get kicked in.
Gus had never cared for the police. Actually, he had never cared for any kind of authority. And that's the attitude that got him kicked out of the military. One day during his first year at Fort Winaka in Colorado, he had decided that he wouldn’t be following any orders that day. He also decided that he needed a proper outlet for the rage that had been bubbling inside of him over the last several months. That proper outlet happened to be the face of one of his superior officer. The first shot landed cleanly on the officer’s’s jaw, knocking him backward, making his eyes spring wide open with surprise and fear. The barrage of blows that followed landed everywhere. He beat the superior officer into a bloody pulp. Beat him until he couldn’t swing his fist anymore. Until he couldn’t see clearly because of all the blood that had splattered into his eyes.
The door of the RV opened. Gus looked up. Momma walked in. Gus licked his lips. His cock jumped in his pants. Hot Momma! He was happy that she was finally getting sun on her usually pale body. A desert tan would do her good. His fixed on her sweet, not too fleshy, not too thin thighs. He always loved the combination of sexy, cut off shorts and cowboy. And it looked particularly sexy on her. His eyes followed the large tattooed, King Cobra snake, which started at her ankle and continued to slither and curl around her leg until it reached her love mound.
“How you doing, baby?” Momma said, her large breasts pushing up against a white tank top. Sweat glistened on her skin. Her age spots had begun to show lately. He didn’t mind that. Not one bit. It only made her look that much more attractive. There was nothing he loved more than an older woman who hadn’t lost her youthful, party, whoring spirit.
Chapter 8
Everything had been going so well. It was the kind of day that Taylor could have only dreamed about. She had landed a job as a secretary at Cormier real estate. Yes, that to Daniel Cormier! She would be working in his presence. Maybe not in his office exactly, maybe not quite taking orders from him, but he would be around, his energy buzzing in the air, his ambition and drive fueling everyone in the office. After months of unemployment, she couldn't wait to get to work next week.
After getting the job, she had walked around the city as if on a cloud. Just when she thought that things couldn’t get any better, she got a text from a hot blond guy that she had hooked up with a couple days before. They agreed to meet at a bar downtown. And from there, they had headed back to the hunk’s, Midtown Manhattan, five-star, luxury hotel room. It was nearly twice the size of any apartment that she had lived in while in New York. And what a time they'd had! Fucking and sucking, nibbling and licking.
BANG! BANG!
Two loud fists banged against the door. And the blissful day was shattered. A group of well-dressed thugs had rushed into the hotel room. They had roughed up both her and Dante. They had violently assaulted him with both fists and feet. The thugs dragged them out of the room. At a back exit to the hotel, an SUV was waiting.
They traveled for about an hour before coming to a stop. Where were they? Everything was so quiet. So still. Both she and Dante were bound and gagged. Tape covered their mouths. Their wrists were bound behind their backs with some sort of cord that mercilessly cut into her
skin. They were both laying on their sides facing each other. There was more fear than anger in Dante’s eyes.
The back door to the SUV opened. Sunlight flooded and exploded in their eyes. Taylor blinked and try to turn away. Two of the well-dressed thugs, probably Eastern European, pulled them out of the back.
Taylor’s legs nearly buckled as she tried to stand up. One of the men caught her before she fell and held onto her a little bit too long for her liking. She hated the fell of his slimy hands on her flesh. Hated feeling his fetid breath so close to her face. He finally took his hands off her.
Where were they? Taylor looked around, confused. They were standing next to a woody area on what appeared to be a windy suburban or maybe country road. The thugs said something in a language she couldn’t understand.
Two of them came towards her and Dante.
“This way,” one of the squared jawed men, said pointing to the entrance to the wooded area, which appeared to be some sort of hiking trail. “You walk in front. We have a pistol at your back. Pow. One shot you dead. Slow death. We let you bleed in the forest. Painful. Very painful.”
A car zoomed by on the other side of the curvy road. Taylor’s eyes grew wide. She wanted to scream at the top of her lungs. But her mouth was tightly covered by the tape. And of course, there was the matter of the gun nudging into the small of her back.
“WALK!” One of the men grunted.
Dante stopped. He writhed back and forth, twisting and turning, trying to free his hands from the tight cord. Hard fists landed to his chest and face, knocking him to the ground. They continued to kick and punch him for another thirty seconds. Taylor wanted to scream. Tears began to run down her eyes. She wanted to fall down on his chest. She felt responsible for getting them into this deadly trap.
The goons pulled Dante back to his feet. His lips were busted and his eyes had been blackened. He’d definitely taken a good beating. Yet she couldn’t help feeling that he might have been exaggerating just how much damage they had done.
Eye on the Spy: Thriller (Capitol Affairs Book 1) Page 13