Fargo’s instinct, too, had been excellent; by the time Connor and the others had arrived at the scene, Chip was unconscious, and Fargo was losing a fight with four armed men.
The van was nowhere around. But of the four men who’d come into the funeral home, now there were only these two. J.R. and Ronin were disposing of the others.
All four men bore the trident symbol of the Immortal Sinners. That the Horde hadn’t yet answered the attack in Sturgis must have made these upstarts bold.
Tonight, they would answer.
Sherlock knew he wouldn’t have been called to that scene except for three things: Demon’s physical distance from Madrone, Trick pulling out of outlaw work, and Lakota resting in South Dakota dirt. Not that he wasn’t capable of the violence of the night, but he was brains, not brawn. Normally, he would have been called to meet them here at the compound, to do what he was going to do now.
Connor had, in fact, called Demon; he’d met them here. He’d be part of the next phase.
Connor, Demon, Muse, and Diaz had all donned disposable protective coveralls; the rest of the night’s work would no doubt be messy.
Connor unsheathed his blade and stood before the smaller of the two men. Fisting the hilt, he aimed the point at the man’s chest; from his chains, the man flinched back. But Connor only dragged the blade along the placket of his faded shirt, severing the buttons until the shirt fell open.
On the man’s chest, leading onto his belly, was the trident symbol: by far the largest example they’d yet seen. That didn’t necessarily mean anything, but it could be indicative that the man was a leader. It would take real balls for a soldier to bear ink like that, risking the suggestion that his allegiance was greater than that of his superiors.
Leader or not, this man had definitely been in charge of the raid on the funeral home—and, thus, the attack in Sturgis.
Connor traced the point of his blade over the tattoo, carving deeply into the man’s flesh. They wanted the men to talk, so they had removed their gags. There was no need for a gag, regardless—the shop was soundproofed at a rating above 75; they could land a fucking Harrier jet in here without being heard.
But the man, already heavily beaten, only groaned as Connor carved, and blood washed over his belly.
“I don’t like this tattoo. It has a nasty habit of showing up in places that piss me off.”
Connor hadn’t asked a question yet, only made that snarling statement. Sherlock began to wonder if this were going to be an interrogation at all. They needed it to be. There was nothing on these fuckers yet; Sherlock needed some sliver of intel that he could use to wedge himself in and figure out where these bastards had come from and what the fuck they wanted.
They could start with why the hell they’d hit the funeral home. They’d already killed Jerry. What value could his body have had?
Sherlock paused his brain and rewound. What value could his body have had? That was the question. The only reason to hit Madrone Memorial was to take Jerry’s body. They’d had the van; that had to be why.
But why take the body? Jerry was only a Prospect, as far as they could know. He was an orphan, his only family the Horde.
They needed the body for some kind of proof. Which meant that they had someone demanding said proof.
Proof of what? That they’d killed Horde? That fact had made national news.
No—not proof. A message.
It was Jerry because he was the one who’d come home.
Sherlock’s eye caught a flash on the screen. They had a hit.
“Diaz, I need the three-amp orbital.”
Shit. Connor was going in hard. Had he asked the guy anything yet? Sherlock called out, “Con. Hold.”
“You got something?”
“Yeah. A name. Maybe more. Gimme a couple of minutes.” He studied the bleeding man, whose name he now knew. “I suggest you let that one simmer for a while. He’s the one we need.”
Understanding him, Connor nodded. While Sherlock began his magic, he heard his brothers rearranging their subjects. Then the sound of the sander. And of deep, wrenching, soul-bursting screams.
He looked up. They had the larger, less significant Sinner naked and spread-eagle on the ground. Connor, wearing a welding helmet and wielding the orbital sander, was removing the man’s ink.
The other man, Miguel Acevedo, was hanging, bent backward like a bow, from the ceiling. Muse had chained his ankles and winched his legs up behind him. To get that sharp a bend had likely broken his back, but he wasn’t paralyzed. Sherlock knew because Acevedo was fighting his bonds. He was also screaming in concert with his companion, though the buzz and splatter of the sander at work dwarfed the vocalization of the men.
Sherlock felt no squeamishness about the blood and gore erupting from the man chained to the concrete floor, and he felt no mercy toward these men who had wrought horrific injuries on Horde brothers. But the noise and smell was distracting, and he needed focus. He took a deep breath and narrowed his vision, turning everything that wasn’t his work into black space and white noise.
Hoosier, knowing that Sherlock couldn’t work with someone over his shoulder, stood a few feet off and surveyed the other work going on in the shop.
When Sherlock found what he needed, the man on the floor was dead; Connor had worn substantial swaths of his body down to the bone.
“Con!”
Connor handed the sander to Demon and popped up the visor on his helmet. “Yeah, man.” He walked over.
“Look,” Sherlock waved him around to see the screen, where he’d enlarged a photo of an elderly Latina woman dressed in her Sunday best, a small baby in a long white gown on her lap. Three other children, all dressed prettily, sat at her feet. Sitting in a cheerful back yard. Hoosier stood behind his son and watched, too. Sherlock looked to the President before he said the next thing.
Hoosier, understanding the question in his eyes, nodded, and Sherlock returned his attention to Connor. “That’s your in. He’s local. This photo was taken in Pomona.” He tapped the woman’s image. “At his house. Her address is the same. There’s a wife, too.”
He tapped the screen and a small box rose up over the image, showing an address. Connor pulled his gloves off and dug through the coverall to fish his burner from his jeans. He swiped at the screen, then put the phone to his ear.
“Ronin. You done? Good. Stick with J.R., but don’t come in. I’m sending Diaz to meet you in the van.” Diaz’s attention homed in as Connor continued, “I need you all to go to this address: 738 Whippoorwill Court. Pomona. Bring every single breathing body out of that house and to the shop. Any means necessary.”
Diaz nodded and began stripping out of his protective gear.
Miguel Acevedo, who’d slumped into an agonized stupor, came vividly alive. “No! No! Fuck you fucking guero cocksuckers! No!”
Connor chuckled and picked up his gloves. “Good work, my brother. Excellent fucking work.”
~oOo~
A few hours later, while Miguel Acevedo’s family—mother, wife, children—were probably going about their morning routine, unaware that the man of their family had recently been incinerated in the cremation chamber of the funeral home he’d broken into, the Horde sat in the Keep.
Sherlock’s personal phone buzzed against his thigh again, and he clenched his fists. Taryn, accustomed to the pattern wherein he came back when she beckoned, and apparently unable to cope with the new development of his lack of interest, had been texting him around the clock, at least once an hour. He was going to have to engage her in some way to get her to fucking stop, but right now, all seeing her texts did was piss him off, and he couldn’t afford the distraction. He’d stopped even looking hours ago.
He had the table, so he put his buzzing thigh out of his mind and addressed his brothers. “Occam’s razor: the least complicated answer is nearly always the right one. This is about La Zorra. But this is no small-time move. This is somebody with so much power that they can move without making
waves. At first I thought it might be some kind of alliance of her enemies. But alliances are messy. The only way this goes down so quiet until now is if there’s only one true head. Now we know the head.” He turned to Hoosier. “This has nothing to do with the Leandros, Prez. The only connection was Gael Leandro, and that was incidental—a young thug thinking he could assert his family’s name in their old game. This isn’t about you. It’s not really about us. It’s about Dora Vega. You were right, though, that it was an old bird back to roost.”
Acevedo, who’d identified himself as a captain in the Immortal Sinners almost immediately after his family was threatened, had given up a name when Connor had announced that the Horde had arrived at his home and given the man a final chance to leave his family asleep in their beds. That name was Emilio Zapata. Once a cartel head with power to rival La Zorra’s, Zapata’s Colombian organization had been crippled a decade earlier, and Dora had risen on the back of his last attempt to reassert himself in the trade. She’d buried him, and then buried everybody else.
Maybe she should have buried him literally, as she had his older brother, Ramon. Instead, she had subsumed his organization and left him as a subcontractor. If Acevedo’s intel was sound—and by all measures it sure seemed to be—then leaving Zapata breathing, allowing him to work for her, was either a terrible miscalculation or part of a much bigger plan.
Sherlock thought it was the latter. He’d run it by Bart when he’d come in before the meeting, and the VP had goggled at him, studied the intel again, and then said, “Holy shit. You’re right.”
He looked around the table. “La Zorra’s been gearing for war for more than a year. I think we just named her enemy. I also think she already knew exactly who it is. Maybe she even planned it to go down like this. She wanted the north because she was ready to force his hand. Taking Canadian trade gives her an effective monopoly on the entire North American narcotics trade. She’s got her fist around every product. She’s contracted with or eliminated every producer. Her sales network is flattening the competition. And now she has her last frontier—and she also has the west coast ports. She’s like the fucking Queen Victoria of narcotics. But the way she’s done it makes no sense—she’s taken control of something she’s killing. That could look like an opening to somebody trying to unseat her.”
“What?” Hoosier asked.
Bart took over. “We couldn’t figure out what she’s been doing. She’s been raping the shit out of her production sources, and at the same time, she’s been expanding, increasing demand, beyond what her growers can keep up with for the long term. That’s rookie shit, and she’s no rookie. She’s taken over a whole country—and more than that. She’s achieving monopoly status on narcotics production on two continents.” Bart paused and looked around the table. “It’s like she’s trying to run the whole industry into the ground. And setting her enemies up to think she’s faltered and they can take her head on.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Connor muttered.
Demon laughed.
But Trick said, “She told me once that she wasn’t a drug lord, she was a warlord. Now I get it. So…what? We’re cannon fodder in her fucking war?”
Connor answered his friend. “We’re her vanguard. That’s what she sees. We’re leading the front.”
“But if Sherlock and Bart are right,” Fargo cut in, struggling to speak through his newly wired jaw, “we’re not in on it. We’re her patsies. And she could sell us right the fuck out.”
Hoosier sighed. “We just lost two brothers. We lost more than that since this shit started. That’s the way of war, and it’s the way of the outlaw, but I hate it. You’re right—Dora’s no…rookie. She’s got a plan. If you’re right about what that plan is, then we need to be ready for shit to go…fifteen different kinds of sideways. If she sells us out, we all go down hard…Affairs in order, brothers. Bury your shit. Clean your houses. Let’s not make it easy.”
~oOo~
Sherlock thought he’d been tired when they’d pulled into Bart’s driveway at the end of their long, long run. Pulling into his own driveway about twenty hours later, he thought he might well have crossed into an entirely new level of consciousness. Hallucinations couldn’t be far off.
As he dismounted and locked down his helmet, Stuff ambled up.
“Everything cool?” he asked the amiable hangaround.
“Yeah, yeah. She took your truck out for about half an hour—just down to the Safeway and back. I don’t think she knew I was lurking around.”
“Good.” He didn’t know why he hadn’t simply told Sadie that he’d left a guard on her, she didn’t seem to mind being protected, but he was just as glad she’d enjoyed some time to herself—as far as she knew.
He held out his hand. “Thanks, buddy. I got it from here.”
After Stuff drove off, Sherlock went in the back door of his house, feeling pounds of psychic weight lifting away at the mere thought that his girl was waiting for him inside.
A blast of lavender hit him as soon as he crossed the threshold. Even in his fatigued state, he knew exactly what had happened, and he managed a chuckle. His kitchen was cleaner than it had ever been. The floor gleamed, the counters sparkled. Jesus, there were red tulips in a vase on his table.
He hung his kutte on a chair and went to the fridge in search of a beer—and found beer and fresh food and a twelve-pack of Diet Coke, all of it arranged on shiny-clean glass shelves. There was even a dozen eggs in the little built-in egg holder. He was pretty sure he’d never used the egg holder before.
“Sadie?” he called as he opened his beer. Though he’d made a habit not to drink around her, he needed this one—and she’d bought beer for him, so obviously she’d be okay with it. He crossed into the living room. Also spotless. “Sadie? Sweetheart?”
There was a little paper bag on the coffee table, like a lunch sack, folded closed. Just as it caught his attention, Sadie came in from the hallway. She was sweaty and dirty, with cute little smudges on both cheeks. “Where the fuck have you been? I texted you three times! I’ve been fizzing out of my head! I’m out of things to clean!”
God, he’d never thought that some of those texts he’d been getting all night and all morning might have been Sadie. And fuck, he’d never thought to call and check on her. He’d told her he wouldn’t be long, but here it was, noon. He set his beer down next to that little bag and pulled her into his arms. She put up a halfhearted fight and then gave in to him completely, clutching at his t-shirt. “I was so worried.”
“I told you there wasn’t any danger.”
“But you were gone so long, and I didn’t hear from you.”
“I was just…busy. I’m sorry, though. I’m not used to having anybody to check in with.” He tipped her head up and kissed her. “Thank you. I don’t think the house looked this good when I moved in.”
“I like to clean. It keeps my head sorted out sometimes.”
“That makes you just about the perfect woman, in my book.” He kissed her forehead and set her back, feeling the need for another swig of beer. As he picked up the bottle, he also snagged the little sack. “What’s this?”
“No, wait—” Sadie said, reaching for the bag, which was about the most suspicious thing she could have done. Sherlock was too tired to feel more than curious, though. He pulled the bag out of her reach and opened it.
Emergency contraception.
He hadn’t thought about what he’d said in the shower since he’d left the house in the middle of the night, but he’d meant every fucking word. He knew he’d been unfair to her, maybe even bullied her into acquiescence, but he’d meant it. He loved her. He wanted a family, some meaning in his stupid life, and he wanted it with her. He’d laid himself bare and fucking begged. He’d have been willing to talk about it calmly, but he hadn’t made a call last night he regretted today.
Sadie had, though, it seemed. And she’d done something about it. Without talking to him first.
Sherlock was exhausted, a
weariness that went deeper than his body. Taryn had been assailing him all fucking day, and for days before that, and he still hadn’t dealt with that shit. Taryn, who’d killed his kid and forced him to the sideline to let it happen without even giving him the chance to figure out his part in it. And now Sadie had done the same damn thing.
He threw his beer across the room. It slammed into the wall next to a replica Master Sword, shattered, and splashed beer. Sadie jumped and then backed away. He grabbed her arm before she could get out of his reach. “What the fuck did you do?”
“Nothing! Ow, stop. You’re hurting me!”
If anything, his grip grew tighter; he couldn’t control it. “Then what the fuck is this?”
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