by Violet Blaze
Permanently.
“Time for a smoke break?” I ask as Dober, Jack and Smoky glance up at me from their seats at the table. I'm not sure where Glacier's disappeared to, and Mug is in the shop working on his bike. Mick's still not looking at me, absorbed with whatever hacking job he's working on at his laptop. The man's a genius with both paperwork and technology, go figure.
“I've got a hit on Rebecca's credit card,” he says, finally tearing his eyes away from the screen as I stand up and slide a pack of ciggies from my pocket. “The idiot's actually using her MasterCard in San Francisco. Six transactions today. One of them at a hair salon and another at some expensive fucking boutique. Two grand on clothes. Can you believe that? Landon is dead and this bitch is out shopping?”
I don't have the stomach for this shit right now, so I don't respond. None of the other boys do either. I can hardly even imagine it: Rebecca out on the town while her husband's body rots in the ice cold waters of the Pacific Ocean. They were so damn close, soul mates I woulda said if I'd believed in that rubbish before Lyric. But I guess Rebecca's love for the finer things outweighed her love for Landon.
“Priorities, Jack,” I say because I really just can't see hunting Rebecca like a dog, putting her down like the loose end and the traitor that she is. “Rebecca's not half as important as Clayton Moore. Now, you tell me where he's used his credit card and I'll give you a bloody pat on the back.”
I light up my cig and pause as I hear the front doors of the chapel slam open. The heavy sound of boots precedes Glacier as he storms into the room and pauses just beyond the puddle of gold light from the lamps, like he was born for the shadows or something. When he finally does step forward, his face is sweaty, his ice blue eyes tinged with fear.
Fuck.
Fear and Glacier don't exactly go hand in hand. The first, last, and only time I've ever seen this look was when Landon went rogue. I beckon him forward and realize my hands are already starting to shake. Whatever this is, it must be pretty goddamn awful if the psycho doesn't have the energy for a smirk or a sarcastic comment.
“This is bad, boys,” he tells me, tells us, his gaze scanning the room, pulse thundering so hard in the side of his neck that it looks like there's something trapped there. Glacier steels his expression and looks me dead in the face. “Really bad.”
I glance back over at my brothers as they all rise to their feet.
“What the fuck is this about?” Dober barks gruffly.
Glacier just stares at him for a long moment.
“Out with it,” I snap.
“I was listening in on the police scanner while I worked on Mug's bike with him.” There's a long pause, a harsh breath. The piercings on Glacier's face reflect the gold glare of the lights. “There's been a mass shooting at Sea Salt. Four dead, four injured, possible kidnapping in progress.”
There's a single second of silence as his words click, twist, make sense inside our addled brains.
Sea Salt. That stupid new grocer on View Avenue. The one where the girls went to shop, where Lyric texted me from all of ten minutes ago.
Four dead.
Four injured.
Kidnapping in progress.
Holy. Fucking. Christ.
Our first response is to head directly over to Sea Salt, but a group of outlaw bikers showing up at the scene of a shoot-out is the last thing anyone needs. We'd probably get our arses capped on sight by the goddamn rozzers before we got a chance to see our girls. If they're even still alive.
I shut that thought the fuck down.
We camp the police scanner until we get confirmation that the injured are being transported to Trinidad Community Hospital. That's when the calls start coming in: Janae, Glinda, Fauna. The Old Ladies.
They hit us where we hurt, right in the heart of the club.
Glacier gets a call for Sketch, too, since he's his club sponsor and apparently listed as the kid's emergency contact. Guess he doesn't have any other family. There are no calls about Jump-Start, and I start to worry that a police officer might be showing up at Bettina's house sometime soon with bad news.
Shit.
Nobody calls about Lyric either because, hell, we aren't crap to each other, are we?
I dial up her brother instead. I swear to Christ if that son of a bitch doesn't answer …
“What?” Sully snaps, and I have to pause a moment to suck in a deep breath.
“Who's Lyric's emergency contact?” I ask, and Sully pauses, his breathing getting erratic on his end of the line.
“What?”
“Who. The. Fuck. Is. Her. Emergency. Contact.”
“My … sister, I think. Why?”
“Call her and then call me back. Make it quick.” I hang up and toss my mobile onto the bar top. “Get over to the hospital and see your wives,” I tell the boys. “I'll handle things from this end.”
“I'm not fucking going anywhere,” Dober says, looking shaky and pale as fuck. “Janae will live, and you need me here. Let's take care of this shit now. Bystanders reported seeing men on bikes? It's Mile Wide without a goddamn doubt. I say we find those sons of bitches and finish this while they're still in the area.”
I nod my chin at Mick and Jack as they take off like bats outta hell, leaving me alone with Glacier, Smoky, Dober, and Mug.
My mobile rings, and I snatch it up.
“Well?”
Sully snorts rudely.
“We haven't heard anything about Lyric. Why? What's going—” I hang up on the man before he can finish his sentence. If the other girls are in the hospital and no one's reported her body on site, then Lyric … is missing.
Kidnapped. Again. On my fucking watch. Makes me want to blow my damn brains out.
I have to find her. Have to.
But where the bloody hell do I start?
“Get her out of the fucking car and leave her inside; I don't care where.”
Clayton Moore appears in front of me, his face grim as he slides me out of the backseat and tosses me over his shoulder like a bag of flour. The world spins, but I see trees—lots and lots of fucking trees. Everything is wet out here, dewy and cool and lush. Ferns dot the muddy landscape, surrounding the base of an old house with stone on the bottom half and faded blue siding on the top half. The roof is covered in moss, but it's far too ugly to look like a fairy-tale cottage.
We're in the forest somewhere, I realize, trying to calculate how long we were driving, how fast. We must be at the edge of Redwood National Park.
And I'm not blindfolded. That's not good. If I'm not blindfolded, that means I can see the faces of the people involved in this bullshit which means they probably don't expect me to live long enough to talk about it.
My breathing starts to race as we whirl around, my head bobbing as Clayton walks towards the blue house. Before we reach the door, I manage to see five vehicles parked on the brown carpet of pine needles that surround the place: three motorcycles, the sedan I rode in, and a truck.
As soon as we hit the front of the house and step inside, I smell it.
Pot. Cannabis. Weed.
It is fucking everywhere and it is fresh.
And that's when I realize we're in a grow house—a house that's being used to cultivate weed. It's epidemic around here, has been for a long time. Humboldt County as a whole—Trinidad, Arcata, Eureka—the housing prices have always been astronomical in comparison to the economic health of the area. The reason being: illegal growers. They come up here, cultivate product, use the profits to buy houses in cash and strap the cities around here with all sorts of problems that they can't afford to handle. Couple times a year, the county sends a helicopter up with a heat scanner to search for houses just like this, buried in the forest and impossible to find on foot. The warmth needed to keep the plants alive lights them up like fireworks on the Fourth of July.
My body tumbles forward with a sudden burst of velocity and then I'm landing on a filthy beige sofa, the fabric pilling and torn, yellow stuffing leaking o
ut the edges. I blink to clear away the vertigo and take note of the foil covered windows and walls, the green plants with their special heat lamps, the man smoking a cigarette not six feet away from me.
He's got a machine gun in one hand.
I've seen pictures of drug cartels on the news, seen their masks and their massive guns and their tanks. But seeing this in person, in my city, it's … I don't want to believe it and it's happening to me.
My gaze moves away from Machine Gun Guy over to Clayton Moore. He's speaking in quiet, rapid Spanish with another man, a short guy with buzzed dark hair and a swarthy look that might be handsome if he didn't look so … criminal.
I'm going to die in here.
The knowledge is a cool pit in the heat of my nauseous belly, bringing that realization slowly crowning over my head. I'm going to die at the hands of a drug cartel and it's not because I'm dating—going to marry—the president of the MC that's standing in their way.
No, I know I'm here today because I'm the mayor's daughter.
Clayton Moore argues with the man for several long minutes, their words too quick for me to pick up on. I've taken Spanish, for many years actually. But I'm not so good that I can translate whispered slang about … murders and kidnappings and guns and death. No, in college I learned useless things like how to ask for a bathroom or tell somebody about my day. If only my professors had taught me the words for let's ransom this bitch or how much can we get for an ounce around this shit hole?
After a few more minutes of arguing, Clayton leaves the way he came, disappearing out the front door and slamming it behind him, leaving me alone with the two Saldaña guys. Or, at least I think they're the Saldaña guys. For all I know they could be a part of Mile Wide. But no. No, the way Clayton argued with that short guy, the one with the buzzed hair, it looked like a power struggle.
I freeze as a door opens down the hallway and three more men appear in the living room—or what used to be the living room—and turn as one to stare at me. They're still talking in Spanish, but at this point I'm too freaked-out to be able to translate anything at all.
Me. Five foot two and trussed up. Five men who didn't hesitate to order their cronies to gun down a bunch of women on the search for organic cocoa powder.
Outside, I hear the roar of bike engines as Clayton and his boys leave me alone at a grow house in the middle of the forest with five machine gun toting gangsters.
“Listen up, puta,” Buzz Hair says as he moves over to the couch and stares down at me with steely gray eyes. “You behave and nothing is gonna happen to you. We,” he lifts up a knife I hadn't realized he was holding and gestures between me and the other guys, “are caballeros. Gentlemen. So, you are gonna call up el alcalde and tell him the deal. You understand me?”
It takes me a second to translate that. El alcalde … mayor? Great.
I nod because, come on, what else do you do when the bad guy tells you his plan? You nod and cry and promise and agree—and then the second his back is turned, you plan and scheme yourself the fuck out of there.
The Saldaña Cartel needs to make sure the Trinidad Police—and especially the two FBI agents—are busy tonight, their attention focused anywhere else but at the Alpha Wolves Compound.
I feel like I'm going to throw up as Buzz Hair hands me a script and informs me that if I deviate a single syllable from that piece of paper, that he'll shoot my finger off and keep Royal's sister's ring for his esposa.
I believe him.
The phone is in my hand, my fingers dialing my dad's cell phone number as I try to puzzle my way out of this situation. I'm only going to get one shot at this. One. If I blow this, I may as well dig my own grave. Seconds away from hitting send, I hear the sound of a car moving down the dirt road toward the house.
My blood chills and I assume it's the cartel's reinforcements or some more Mile Wide guys, but then I notice the stiff tension in the men around me.
“Get her down to the basement,” Buzz Hair says a split second before Machine Gun Guy grabs my gag and jerks it up to my lips, clamping his fingers hard around my bicep and drawing a gasp of pain from my lips. “Son of a bitch,” the man mutters as I'm dragged, stumbling on bound ankles, my feet so numb I can barely stand. “It's the fucking policía.”
Down the hall we go, past the rows of plants in black pots, the heat lamps buzzing above them, the walls and ceiling covered in silver insulation.
A knock sounds at the door and a moment later, I hear Agent Shelley's voice.
“This is Special Agent Heather Shelley with the FBI; we'd like to ask you a couple of questions.”
Three feet until the basement door. Two feet.
I let my knees collapse, the sudden shift in weight giving me a split second to turn my head and let out the loudest, shrillest scream I can muster. The sound tears my throat to pieces, shattering it like ragged glass and yes, I'm gagged, but that doesn't stop all the sound. A shrieking pierce tears through the fabric and echoes in the silent hallway at the same moment Machine Gun Guy hits me in the side of the head with his gun.
Stars explode as my temple blooms with pain, my body sagging beneath me as the man adjusts his hold on my arm and drags my comatose body towards the basement door.
“This is Agent Shelley; we need backup at 761 Forty-four Creek Road; this is a code three.”
Shots fire from inside the house, straight through the door, the sound echoing around my scrambled brains as I scream, this time out of reflex. What have I done?!
The cement steps of the basement loom and then the door is slamming shut behind us.
Our big break comes moments later, courtesy of the police scanner.
“This is Agent Shelley; we need backup at 761 Forty-four Creek Road; this is a code three.”
Code three. Urgent crime in progress, sirens, all due expediency.
“Forty-Four Creek,” Glacier says, snapping his tattooed fingers at me. “There's a shit ton of grow houses buried up in those trees. If Mile Wide's using one of those to hold Lyric, we might have a chance. It's not too far from here. About … twenty miles maybe?”
I nod my chin at him as Smoky passes out a deadly arsenal to me and the boys. We've called in everyone tonight, from the prospects to the old-timers. Nobody sets foot in our fucking territory, shoots up our old ladies.
I ignore another call from the mayor on my mobile and watch as Glacier pulls up a map on his, showing me the address that Agent Shelley mentioned on her radio call. He's right; it's not too far from here. If we are barking up the wrong tree so to speak, this won't take us far off target. Thing is, I'm having a really hard time believing that this shooting at the store and the urgent plea for backup from the FBI agents in town is a coincidence.
“Gun up and let's go. If we leave now, we can get a head start on the cops. With all this business at the grocer, the department's going to have to rely on backup from Eureka. It's gonna take 'em time to get here.”
Without waiting for a response, I head outside, straight to my 66 Bobber and climb on, jamming my helmet in place and listening to the overwhelming growl of bikes around me. The men at my back are loyal, armed to the teeth, ready to take back our territory.
Me, the only thing I give a shite about is getting back my woman.
The road curves along the coast, past Patrick's Point and Big Lagoon, devolving into a crumbling swath of cement with trees on both sides, leading us past driveways that are longer than the length of the entire city of Trinidad. This address on Forty-Four Creek, it takes a special turn down a private drive, through the mud and trees, potholes everywhere, the signage disappearing in a blur. A couple of our growers live around here, but I try to keep them separate from the club, meeting with them in town and only on occasion when there's a problem. Otherwise, they pay their tithes to the club and hand over their product and that's that.
But this particular house, I've never even heard of it.
Makes me sick, knowing that Mile Wide's been operating around here without my kn
owing, without any of us knowing. I have no idea how long this coup d'état's been planned, but it's about to end before it even really gets started.
Old-growth redwoods surround us, drowning us in wet foliage and darkness unbroken by city lights. The only pools of visibility come from our headlights as we speed past fresh ruts in the ground and around a deep curve that makes my wheels spin and my bike growl ferociously. Wet dirt splatters my boots and legs as I get dangerously close to the ground and come around the corner.
Waiting for us in the middle of the road is Clayton Moore and whatever's left of the club that used to call itself Mile Wide.
Through the dark trees behind them lies a blue house with a stone base, lit only with a single porch light.
I pray to God that Lyric really is in there.
My body practically falls down the steps, dragged forward by Machine Gun Guy until I'm lying on an old rug that's so faded with time that I feel like it must've been here since the house was built.
The man leaves me there and takes a position at the edge of the staircase. I try to lift my head to watch him—and the two men that came with him—but my vision is still wonky and I'm having trouble getting the room to stop spinning.
Deep breath. In and out, slow and easy.
As my eyes adjust to the dim lighting, I take note of the shape of the stairs, the way they trace their way down the wall and then turn at a right angle at a small landing. Two more steps down and I'm right there, my back resting against another ratty old couch. It smells like human piss and cigarettes down here, churning my stomach as I struggle to lift my body into a sitting position.
Upstairs, the crack of gunfire is loud, making my heart beat fiercely with hope. The agents aren't dead yet. If they were, there wouldn't be anymore shooting, right?