“You came with them.”
“What?”
Galvan flicked his eyes at the van. “I only count one car.”
“We’re not— I just . . . hitched a ride.”
The conversation was getting away from him, and the clock was running down. Nichols decided to punt.
“What do you know about a man named Aaron Seth, Galvan?”
“Never hearda him.”
“Seth’s a sex trafficker, and maybe a lot more. De la Mar—Pescador—works for him.”
“So ask Pescador.”
“How ’bout handing him over, so I can?”
He shook his head again, face heavy with resignation. Regret.
Oh shit, thought Nichols, heart leaping into his throat. Have I fucked this up?
“I gotta keep my word.”
Galvan bent over the captive, jostled him until his eyes opened, spoke into his ear.
“I told you I’d kill you, you son of a bitch.”
Before Nichols could move a muscle, Galvan pushed the shank. It went in smooth and easy, like a dolphin diving through a wave.
Galvan stepped back, and the Federale slumped onto his side. Blood sprayed from the wound and spattered the dirt, one pulse after the next. Nichols couldn’t help but think that if you closed your eyes, it would have sounded exactly like a sprinkler overshooting the border of a suburban lawn and watering the street.
For a moment, no one moved.
Galvan stared down at Pescador with a sense of joyless accomplishment, as one might regard a grave he’d just finished digging.
Nichols contemplated Galvan—and the angles. He was still standing between the gringo and the guns, and despite what he’d just seen, his impulse was to stay there.
Enough death for one day.
Apparently, the sentiment was an unpopular one.
Gunfire. Two shots, echoing through the open air, Nichols diving to the ground.
But it wasn’t Fuentes’s squad; they were still standing down, awaiting an order yet to come and probably anticipating a discussion between their boss and his American buddy over the life of the one-armed gringo who’d just offed the target.
It was coming from farther away.
From the van, to be precise.
The open, unguarded, bulletproof van.
One of Fuentes’s men toppled out the back, into the dust. Another followed.
Head shots.
The girl to whom they’d been attending shrieked. Just as abruptly, she went silent.
Fuentes didn’t have to give an order. His men turned, fanned out, advanced on the van.
“That’s far enough,” somebody called.
From the rear of the van, holding the girl in front of him like young blond body armor, stepped Kurt Knowles.
“These colors don’t run,” he announced, voice heavy with swagger. “And if they do, boy, they come back with more ammo.”
He pulled something black and baseball-sized from his pocket, tossed it in the air, and caught it in his fist.
“This right here’s what’s called an M67 tactical grenade. I dunno if you bean-eating cocksuckers habla the inglés, but let me tell you, I toss this puppy over there and a whole lotta y’all will go home a whole lot lighter.”
From behind the van stepped five more Natives, locked and loaded.
Where are their bikes? Nichols wondered, scanning the horizon, seeing nothing. They must’ve ditched them, grabbed a ride back with a passing big rig or a club truck or something.
He had to hand it to Kurt Knowles. Never woulda thought to find stealth ops in the True Native playbook. The one thing you could usually count on with bikers was hearing them coming a mile away. Dumb, loud, and powerful were their MO, ninety-nine times out of a hundred. But it stood to reason that today would be the day the dice came up cockeyed.
“We got your van up and running, too,” Knowles went on, shit-eating grin plastered across his face.
Right on cue, the engine gunned, and the lights flashed on. Nichols stole a look at Fuentes, saw his jaw set in defiance.
This was going to be a fucking bloodbath, with that attitude.
Knowles wasn’t done. “I know you’re prob’ly thinkin’ you got the keys right in your pocket, señor, but hell, that don’t make much difference to grease monkeys like us.”
“What do you want?” called Nichols, fed up with the bluster and wanting to preempt Fuentes and his hotheadedness. They’d have been taking fire already if the Natives weren’t looking to make a deal; might as well get all the cards on the table.
“I was just getting to that,” said Knowles, stepping over the fallen bodies and treating his audience to another smile. “Him. And him. And her. And you.”
Galvan.
Fuentes.
Cantwell.
Nichols.
“Fuck you,” Fuentes replied, stepping forward, gun in hand. “And fuck your grenade. You’ll never take us alive.”
He turned his head, grabbed his nuts, and spit.
Nichols watched the bullet of saliva arc through the air, hoping it was the last fluid the ground would drink today.
Those hopes took a body blow as a familiar shit-brown sedan crested the horizon.
Everybody turned to stare. The driver touched two fingers to the brim of his fedora, as if in greeting, and rumbled toward them like he had all the time in the world.
CHAPTER 42
Sherry felt the car stop, heard the footsteps, held her breath.
She didn’t want out this time. She wanted to stay right where she was, curled against Eric in the dark womb of the trunk, forever.
If she died—suffocated, starved, simply gave up the habit of being alive—that was fine. Nothing that could happen in here was as bad as what surely would out there. And peace was peace, regardless of the terms on which it came. You could only struggle for so long.
The monster stood inches away now; Sherry could smell him through the metal. Charred clothes and sweat, muscle and musk. Animal lust and very human cruelty.
“I’m gonna open this trunk now, Sherry,” he intoned. “If you give me any trouble, I’ll take this tire iron and smash in your boyfriend’s skull. We clear?”
Sherry assented meekly, in a voice she could barely hear, and then the purple, orange, and pink light of the setting sun flooded her field of vision. The monster, backlit and shadowed, reached for her, grabbed her by the arm, and swung her to her feet.
“You, I don’t need,” he told Eric, and reached into his pocket for a small leather pouch. Before Sherry had time to panic about what it might contain, Buchanan extracted a slim metal rod and inserted it into the handcuff’s keyhole. The bracelet encircling Eric’s hand clicked open. Buchanan pushed him back into the trunk, fingers to chest, and slammed it shut.
“I don’t need him,” he said again, and turned his wolf eyes on Sherry. “He can live or he can die. It’s up to you.”
Buchanan raised his eyebrows—or, rather, the scarred swath of forehead where his eyebrows should have been—and Sherry nodded her obedience.
“All right, then. Party time.” He clamped a huge hand around the back of her neck, turned Sherry a hundred-odd degrees, and started trudging into the desert. Sherry looked up, and her eyes widened as she saw what she was marching toward.
Hell on earth.
Two groups of armed men, weapons trained at each other. Every last one grim faced, ready to die. One army clustered around a van. The other, black-clad, defending the skeletal wreckage of a smoking, overturned car. Bodies already littering the ground. A half-dressed girl Sherry’s age trapped in the clutches of a leathery giant.
A hostage, just like herself.
And stranded in the middle of it all—like people without a country, ballast swirling in the whirlpool of war—were Ruth and the sheriff
, and a one-armed man whose face was smeared thickly with blood.
Buchanan frog-marched Sherry toward the van. Of course, his lot was cast with these men—the takers of girl hostages, the bad guys. The ones about to kill her friends.
She stumbled, eyes roving the scene, foot finding a rock. Buchanan’s grip on her neck tightened. Moving without Eric felt awkward, wrong; she’d grown accustomed to the tug at her wrist, the weight at her shoulder—so much so that she could feel the ghost of his presence now. Like those phantom itches amputees get in their missing limbs, she thought, and cast another gaze at the one-armed man.
He was watching her, too. A look of consternation on his face.
They locked eyes, and Sherry froze in her tracks. There was something familiar about him—intensely and mysteriously so. Was he a member of Seth’s flock? Somebody she’d seen around town?
Buchanan brooked no pauses. He prodded and pushed her on, until Sherry was standing beside the other girl and her enormous captor—nearly Buchanan’s height and twice his girth.
All eyes, Sherry realized, were on her and Buchanan. Their presence here had changed the stakes, somehow.
It was not a reassuring thought.
Ruth Cantwell broke into a dash, only to be restrained by the man by her side, the apparent leader of the squad in black. Sherry’s name died on her lips, without a sound. Their eyes met, but the anguish in Cantwell’s was too much, and Sherry tore herself away, sought out the sheriff instead.
There was no sustenance to be gleaned there. Nichols’s face looked hewn from granite, as if he’d already resigned himself to tragedy.
Meanwhile, the one-armed man continued to stare at her, his eyes twin magnets. As if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. As if the only thing worth looking at, here at world’s end, was Sherry Richards.
“Kurt,” Buchanan grunted in greeting, shouldering in beside the mammoth biker.
The guy looked Sherry up and down. “Who’s this?”
“This right here’s the best leverage we got.” He nodded his chin at the drama unfolding across the way. “See what I mean?”
Cantwell shook free of the leader’s grip on her elbow. “Tell them to stand down!” she demanded. “Nichols! Tell him!” And then the sheriff was in motion, walking toward her—whether to back her up or calm her down, Sherry couldn’t be sure.
“Best leverage we got,” Buchanan repeated. “The Messenger’s daughter.”
Sherry twisted out of his grip and spun to face him.
“What?”
The monster leered at her, his mottled face contorting into something like a smile. “What’s the matter, sweetheart? Don’t you recognize your dear old dad?”
Buchanan raised his voice and called across the field.
“Red rover, red rover. Send Galvan right over.”
He thrust Sherry forward and shook her like a rag doll.
“Now, tough guy. Or I’ll break your daughter’s neck.”
The one-armed man. They locked eyes again, and this time Sherry looked through the blood and the grime and saw him. Knew him, fully and deeply, as the man whose presence had sustained her and whose absence had destroyed her life. Who’d walked her to school each morning, picked her up each afternoon, protected her from monsters, taught her how to swim. Whose calm constancy and unwavering love had been the counterweight to Melinda’s flights of fury and devotion, her manic binges of piety, her bottomless, depressive free falls.
He was the only thing she’d ever really believed in, and she had never really stopped. Even when believing in Jess Galvan had felt as naive as believing in Santa Claus. She had ignored her mother’s vitriol, her reckless slander. Known, in some essential and untouchable way, that her father had never intended to leave her. That he was fighting his way back, and that someday he would succeed, no matter what the odds. That he would come for her, and life would change.
They stared at each other, across twenty feet that might as well have been ten thousand, and Sherry thought, Oh God, Dad, not like this.
CHAPTER 43
Sherry!” Galvan bellowed as the tears leaked from his eyes. “Baby! Are you okay?”
He stepped toward her, tripped over Pescador’s body, and pitched onto his forehead.
Nichols’s face loomed into view, and the next thing Galvan knew he was upright, stump-arm draped across the sheriff’s shoulders.
Son of a bitch was right. He could help me.
“That’s your daughter.” It sounded more like a statement than a question, but Galvan yessed his head just in case, and they both stared across the plain at her.
“Isn’t she beautiful?” he murmured—and when the words hit the air, Galvan realized how fucking softheaded they sounded. How off. Like he didn’t have the faintest idea what was going on.
Get it. The fuck. Together.
Before. It’s. Too. Late.
“Who is he?” Galvan demanded, turning to Nichols and flexing every muscle he could think of—seeing which ones he could bring under his control, what power he could wring from them. It felt like a supreme effort just to keep his brains from dribbling out his ears, his intestines from plummeting out his asshole. But somehow—magically, tragically, miraculously, hideously—Galvan’s daughter was standing before him for the first time in two years, four months, and seventeen days. And she needed him.
Still needed him.
Galvan could have flown if he had to.
“Marshall Buchanan. He’s Seth’s muscle,” Nichols said at his ear. “One nasty piece of work.”
“And who’s Seth?”
Nichols’s scrutiny was skin-prickling.
“What do you know?” the sheriff asked finally.
“All I know—”
The scumbag holding Sherry shouted again, interrupting a sentence Jess had no idea how to finish anyway. “I’m waiting, Galvan. But I’m not waiting long. Bring over the heart, and you have my word, I won’t hurt either one of you.”
“All I know . . . ,” Galvan began again, sweeping the ground with his eyes until he found the box.
The goddamn infernal box.
“Hand me that,” he said, pointing. Nichols complied, stepped out from under Galvan’s arm and bent and scooped it like a fumbled football. Little bit of grace to the guy, thought Galvan. Probably an ex-jock.
Save your attention for what matters, Jess.
“All I know is, I don’t know a goddamn thing. They told me to carry this box across the desert, and that’s what I did. Told me to hand it over to the guy that met me.” He looked down at Pescador’s body and saw a column of black smoke twirling from it. “That’d be him.”
“What did—”
“He didn’t ask so nice.” Galvan scowled at Buchanan, imagining what it would be like to rip his spine out through his mouth. “And now I guess I gotta give it to that cocksucker.”
He took a step forward, then stopped when Nichols clamped a hand over his arm.
“What’s in it?”
Galvan eyed him for a moment. “See for yourself.”
He pressed the box to his side with the bad arm, pried the lid off with the good hand. He didn’t look down at it; instead, he watched Nichols’s face.
Needed to remember what a normal fuckin’ reaction looked like.
The sheriff didn’t disappoint. His eyes saucered, and Galvan had to close the box to jar him back to reality.
Such as it was.
It took Nichols a few more seconds to summon speech.
“You can’t give that to him. I don’t know what it is, but—”
“The hell I can’t. There’s only one thing I care about in the world, Nichols, and that’s my baby girl.”
He looked past the sheriff, at Buchanan.
“I’m comin’ over,” he announced.
Galvan put his head down, starte
d walking.
Footsteps, behind him, coming fast. Galvan spun, expecting Nichols, prepared to drop him if need be.
But no. It was the woman, the one who’d tried to call off the Mexicans when she saw Sherry.
“So am I,” she called.
Galvan waited for Buchanan to object, but the big man stood impassive.
“I’m Ruth Cantwell,” she told Galvan, catching up to him and then slowing her pace to match his agonized shuffle. “I’m Sherry’s friend. Maybe she told you about me.”
“Glad she has one,” he grunted.
“You’re supposed to be in prison.”
“That ain’t the way I see it.” He tossed her a look. “You’ll get her outta here? Take her home?”
“I’ll try. But what about—”
“I’m in this ’til the end.”
He didn’t know how true it was until he heard it.
They were almost there. Galvan could see the salt water streaming down Sherry’s cheeks. He wanted nothing more than to fold her into a hug, take away the pain, make everything all right. The way he used to, back when the world was simple and the beating hearts of slaughtered virgins didn’t have to be delivered to the sons of ancient priests.
Back when all that mattered was keeping Sherry safe, the family provided for, and that was terrifying enough.
“Hey, baby.”
She broke free of Buchanan and threw herself into his arms. For an instant, all Galvan’s troubles melted away. This was happiness. A dream fulfilled.
“Sweetheart,” he whispered into the hollow of her neck.
“Daddy. I’m—”
And then, with a jerk, she was gone—pulled to her captor’s side.
Galvan stared at him and boiled with rage.
“All right, you’ve got me. Let her go.”
Buchanan’s eyes were like twin blue volcanoes. “I think you misunderstood my offer. I told you I wouldn’t hurt her. Not that I’d let her go. I need her, tough guy. To keep you in line.”
He pivoted. “Knowles, get rid of that little blond piece of ass, and put them both in the van. Set up the cage, and make sure it’s locked tight. This one’s an escape artist.”
The Dead Run Page 26