Thrill Ride

by Julie Ann Walker

  “On it,” he said, punching in Becky’s number and listening as his secure connection was made. After the first ring, Becky picked up with, “Holy shit! You’re never gonna believe where I am.”

  “Becky—” he tried to interrupt her, but she just talked right over him.

  “After one hell of a car chase…By the way, did you know Eve can drive like a Hollywood stuntman?”

  “Huh?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” she quickly went on. “The important thing is, I think the spooks were clueing-in to what we were doing, making them run after their own tails and all, because they started to back off. And that’s when Eve had a friggin’ epiphany. Guess what she did?” Before he could even open his mouth, his sister sailed ahead. “She decided we could kill two birds with one stone, and that brings me back to where I am. Which is standing in line at a seedy-as-hell sex shop watching Eve purchase a whorehouse’s worth of vibrators.”

  “Huh?” Okay, so apparently his vocabulary had shrunk to that one word. And it might have something to do with the fact that his brains had ostensibly turned to mush. Just plain, gray mush. It was the only thing that could account for the fact that none of what Becky had just said made damned bit of sense. Hollywood stuntman? Sex shop? Eve?

  “Oh, shit!” Becky breathed. “They’re coming in the door. I gotta go.”

  And that was enough to joggle some sense back into his slushy cerebrum. “Beck—” But she’d already hung up on him. “Goddamnit!” He clenched his fists before once more dialing her number, grumbling to Boss as he listened impatiently to the click and beeps, “I don’t know how you put up with her. She is the most exasperat—”

  “Save it,” Boss interjected. “Here they come.”

  And, sure enough, when Bill leaned past Boss to glance out the driver’s side window, he spotted Rock and Vanessa barreling toward them on a loud, rusty dirt bike. And, even at a distance, it was easy to see they’d been through hell. From what he could make out, Vanessa’s hair was a wild rat’s nest, and Rock looked like he’d taken a bath in mud, the tattoos on the guy’s bare arms nearly obscured. The only clean part on the Cajun appeared to be his face, and that was fixed with grim determination.

  No doubt Rock didn’t like being here in the middle of the city. And Bill couldn’t blame the guy, considering the entire free world was out for his hide. Thumbing off his phone, Bill tucked it back in his hip pocket—he’d have to make that call to his sister a little later, because right now they had to get this party started—and opened the passenger door.

  Hopping out, he gave a hand signal to Ghost and Steady parked in the pickup truck behind them before climbing into the bed of the first truck. Once Steady mimicked his maneuver, Bill slapped on the back window, alerting Boss they were ready to go.

  And go they did.

  Boss hit the gas, shooting through the cross traffic and slamming into the park where Rock had stopped the dirt bike. Steady and Ghost were hot on their back bumper until they crossed the street, then they pulled even and Bill, hanging on to the lip of the truck bed for all he was worth lest he find himself bounced right out, glanced across at the other vehicle to see Steady grinning gleefully. Because he was happy to be seconds away from having Rock back among their ranks, or because the crazy sonofabitch loved it when things got fast and dangerous? Bill didn’t know. Figured it was probably a little of both.

  And, then, in a move straight out of the Operators’ Tactical Driving Handbook—if there wasn’t such a thing, there should be—both trucks sandwiched the motorcycle between them, pointing their front ends toward each other to form a V before rocking to stop.

  Dust swirled up around them in a brown cloud, and Bill took that to be his cue. He stood up in the bed, his hand on the butt of the pistol tucked in his pants. Not like he’d use it, of course. But there was nothing wrong with a little showmanship.

  “Hello, Rock,” he said as the dust—it smelled dry and tasted acrid on his tongue—began to settle. “We’ve missed you, man.”

  Rock’s face contorted with betrayal as he glanced over his shoulder at Vanessa. “Get off the bike,” he enunciated slowly, concisely, his deep voice clearly legible even over the growl of the three vehicles’ engines. And it was a good thing Vanessa wasn’t fragile, because that tone, not to mention the I’ll-never-forgive-you-for-this look plastered all over Rock’s face, was enough to shatter the backbone of a lesser woman.

  “Rock, I—” Vanessa began, but Rock cut her off when he roared, “Get off the fuckin’ bike, Vanessa!”

  She hopped off the rusty motorcycle like it suddenly grew teeth and bit her in the ass, plastering herself up against the bed of Bill’s truck. And then Rock did what they all assumed he would. He torqued the throttle, spun the bike in a tight one-eighty, and took off, head low between the handlebars. Which is when Bill and Steady jumped into action.

  Jump being the operative word.

  They both planted a foot on the side of their respective truck beds and launched themselves at Rock, yanking the guy backward as the dirt bike shot out from beneath him. From the corner of his eye as the three of them hit the ground in a tangle of arms and legs, Bill saw the motorcycle careen a short distance before slamming into the base of a big tree and toppling to its side.

  Sonofabitch! He grunted as Rock managed to land an elbow to the bridge of his nose.

  “Get off me!” Rock howled as Bill and Steady worked to gain the upper hand. “You don’t know what you’re gettin’ involved in!”

  “We’re getting involved in saving your goddamned life, you crazy, Cajun sonofabitch!” Bill growled just as Rock managed to snake an arm free and clock Steady in the jaw.

  “Pendejo!” Steady cursed, wrestling to get Rock’s arms secure.

  It wasn’t working. The slippery bastard managed to break every hold they momentarily got on him and, goddamnit, they were losing him!

  “Little help here!” Bill yelled, ragged breaths sawing from his lungs, pulse pounding in his temples due to the mighty struggle. He was relieved when Ghost sprinted around the back of one truck to lend a hand. And it was un-freakin’-believable, but it took all three of them to subdue Rock. Even then, it was still one hell of a fight.

  Bill managed to scramble on top of the bucking man, pressing a knee between Rock’s shoulder blades as Ghost struggled to keep Rock’s hands behind his back. Steady whipped out a couple of zip ties and, in a flash, secured the Cajun’s wrists.

  “Don’t do this,” Rock begged, heaving, trying to unseat Bill and doing a pretty good job of it. The guy was whip thin, with the physique of an Olympic swimmer, but his appearance was deceiving. Because the ragin’ Cajun was strong as an ox. “You’ll all wind up puttin’ your fool heads in the middle of someone’s crosshairs! Don’t do it! It’s not worth it!” His voice broke, and everything in Bill stilled. Breath, blood, thoughts. Just…full stop. Because, was Rock actually…? “It’s not worth it!” Rock choked again, his voice sounding like he’d sent his vocal chords through a meat grinder.

  And, yeah, Bill was pretty sure the guy was sobbing.

  Jesus.

  A hard lump settled in the middle of his throat, and the ulcer he was so certain he’d finally kicked to the curb acted up and started gnawing on his stomach lining. Because Rock was one of the toughest bastards he’d ever known, with a hard set of emotional calluses built up over the years of bearing witness to the repeated horrors of war, and for him to be openly losing it now…

  Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but shit must be really bad.

  Worse than any of them imagined.

  And it only made it all the more terrible that, in order to keep them safe—and Bill was certain that’s what the deal was—Rock had been determined to go it alone. Was still determined to go it alone if the continued bucking and cursing and screaming was anything to go by, the big, stupid, self-sacrificing prick.

  “And putting our fool heads in the middle of someone’s crosshairs would be different from every othe
r day because…?” Steady huffed, and Bill was glad to see he wasn’t the only one sucking air. Wrestling with Rock was tantamount to kickboxing a kangaroo. Steady moved to secure Rock’s kicking feet by sitting on the guy’s calves and lacing together two zip ties.

  Rock continued to struggle with everything he had, grunting and wailing and, even though Bill couldn’t understand French, he was pretty sure Rock was begging them not to do this.

  “Hurry it up,” Boss called, leaning an arm out the window of the truck. “We’re starting to draw a crowd.”

  And, sure enough, when Bill glanced up, running a forearm under his bloody nose—goddamn, stubborn Cajun!—it was to find a woman grasping the hand of a small, dark-headed boy, looking on in terror.

  “We’re good,” Steady declared, throwing his hands in the air like a steer roper who’d just completed his final knot.

  “Get ’im in the truck,” Boss commanded, and Bill and Steady each grabbed an arm and a leg, hoisting Rock up—good God, the man was heavier than he looked, too. As gently as they could, they transferred him into the bed of the pickup truck and all the while Rock continued to fight them as if his life depended on it…or, more likely, as if their lives depended on it.

  And then Bill felt like crying too, especially when Vanessa turned around to peer into the truck bed, tears flowing down her dusty cheeks. “Stop struggling,” she pleaded, choking on a sob as Bill jumped up alongside Rock in order to carefully flip the guy onto his back. “P-please. You’re going to hurt yourself if you—”

  “How could you!” Rock roared once he was on his back. His face was wet with tears and snot and blood, and it was obvious that at some point during their struggle he must’ve taken a blow to the nose.

  Shit.

  They hadn’t wanted to hurt him.

  “How could you do this to them!” he continued to scream at Vanessa. Bill had to press a hand to the center of his chest as stomach acid started inching its way up the back of his throat. “How could you do this to me! I trusted you! And now you’ve killed us all!”

  “Hey, now—” Bill began but was cut off when Vanessa shook her head and backed away, muttering, “No. No, Rock, I—”

  “Get in the truck, Vanessa,” Boss commanded, but she just continued to stand there, openly sobbing, shaking her head and staring at Rock with…was that?

  Yep. That was definitely her heart in her eyes. And, shit, that made what she’d just done so, so much worse.

  Bill glanced down at Rock, wondering if the man knew that BKI’s sexy little Latin communications specialist was in love with him. Hard to tell, given the guy was busy struggling while simultaneously staring poison-tipped daggers at the woman.

  “Get in the goddamned truck, Vanessa!” Boss thundered, and she jumped a good foot in the air. Then, as if she suddenly remembered where she was, she wiped a forearm over her eyes and sprinted around the back of the vehicle.

  Bill watched her crawl into the passenger seat before glancing down at Rock, ready to give the asshole a piece of his mind for one: not letting them help him figure this thing out from the very beginning, and two: taking his hurt and frustration out on Vanessa when she’d only done what any one of them would have done in the same situation.

  But one look at the guy’s face and…

  Christ. Every thought flew from his head. Because Rock’s eyes were pleading, frantic, almost wild with fear. And it was seeing that fear—the bone-deep terror in a man he respected the shit out of and had grown to love like a brother—that had a lone tear slipping from the corner of his left eye to run into the groove beside his nose.

  “Please, Bill,” Rock begged even as he continued to buck ineffectually against his restraints. “Please don’t do this. You hafta let me go. I’ll never forgive myself if—”

  He stopped the man from saying anything more by slapping a palm over his mouth. He used his other hand to press a finger to his lips. And when Rock only continued to struggle, he wiped away that ridiculous tear—come on, steel-balled operators weren’t supposed to cry—and whispered, “Stop, my friend. We gotcha now. And we don’t plan to let you go again.”

  ***

  “Stop crying, Vanessa,” Boss commanded, and she tried to obey. She really did. But the look on Rock’s face…

  Disbelief, hatred, betrayal. It’d all been there. Flashing up at her like a neon sign.

  “I sh-shouldn’t have—” she sputtered, wiping at her wet cheeks, but it was useless. The tears just kept on coming. “I shouldn’t have done this,” she finally managed, choking on a hiccup, grabbing onto the door handle when Boss sped into a turn as they raced out of the city. Concernedly, she glanced out the back window to find Bill lying in the truck bed beside Rock, his arms and legs wrapped around the man, obviously trying his damndest to keep him from bouncing around too much since he was trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey.

  And all of this was happening because she’d betrayed him…

  Him. The man she loved. The man who’d saved her life, helped her conquer her nearly debilitating fear, and sacrificed his own safety in order to bring her back here where she’d be safe. The man who’d trusted her…

  Oh, good God, what have I done?

  “Bullshit,” Boss spat, shifting down when they started to climb the mountain road that led to Eve’s vacation house. “You did what was right. He may not think so now, but in the end he’s gonna thank you.”

  Even through the dirty back windshield, she could see the tears mixing with the blood on Rock’s face.

  Tears. Holy shit, she wouldn’t have believed it if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes. But it was true. Tough-as-nails, big-balled, take-no-guff Richard “Rock” Babineaux had lost it. And it had nothing to do with his busted nose. Nope. No way. Because in the time they’d worked together, she’d seen him shrug off two broken fingers, a knife wound through his side, and a hairline fracture to his shinbone.

  Thank her? Boss thought he was going to thank her?

  “He’ll never forgive me for—” She was interrupted when Bill reached up to slap a hand on the window. Frowning, she watched as he held up his cell phone. Or, should she say, what was left of his cell phone. The thing was cracked right down the middle, an obvious casualty of that scuffle with Rock.

  Scuffle?

  Jesus, it hadn’t been a scuffle; it’d been an all-out brawl. And for a minute there, she’d been sure Rock was going to come out the victor, even against three very skilled, very big, very determined operators. He’d fought with everything he had, and it’d been heartbreaking to watch when he was finally brought down. Almost like witnessing the death of a heavyweight in the ring. All that courage and valor and determination just suddenly…beaten.

  New tears gathered in her eyes, but she managed to hold them in long enough to inform Boss, “Bill’s phone is broken. Does that—”

  “Fuck!” Boss cursed, checking his rearview mirror to make sure Ghost and Steady were still keeping pace in the pickup truck behind them. “You need to call Becky. Tell her we’re running late. Tell her to keep those goddamned spooks away from the house for a little while longer.”

  Vanessa was in the process of pulling her phone from her cargo pants when Boss’s cellular buzzed in his pocket. “Goddamnit! First get that for me, would you?” he said, grinding his jaw as he flew into another turn, using both hands to control the speeding vehicle on the narrow mountain pass.

  Gingerly—because, come on, this was Boss; she wasn’t sure she’d ever actually touched the guy and now she was about to go rooting around in his pocket—she used her thumb and forefinger to pull his jeans pocket wide. Then she slipped her hand inside and snagged the vibrating phone.

  “Speak of the devil,” she said after seeing Becky’s coded number on the screen. Thumbing on the device, she bounced into the passenger side door when Boss swerved around another bend, hitting her funny bone in the process. She cupped her screaming elbow, grimacing in pain, as she held the phone to her ear. “Hello?”

&
nbsp; “Vanessa?” Becky’s voice sounded harried. “Are you guys back at the house?”

  “No. We’re on the mountain road right now and—”

  “Damnit!” Becky yelled that one word so loudly Vanessa was hard pressed not to yank the phone away from her ear—her likely bleeding ear. “Tell Frank to gun it! The spooks lost interest in us, and we think they’re on their way back to you guys. We lost track of them when we got cut off by this goddamned train!” As if on cue, the high, lonely wail of a train whistle echoed through the receiver. “And why isn’t Billy answering his phone?”

  Ignoring that last question, Vanessa turned to Boss. “Becky says to punch it,” she quickly relayed. Adding, even though she didn’t know exactly what it meant, “She says the spooks lost interest in them,” What interest? “and are heading our way.”

  “Perfect,” Boss grumbled sarcastically as he slammed his boot down on the gas. But they’d only gone another 100 yards when Ghost began laying on the horn behind them.

  “What in the world?” Vanessa asked at the same time Boss let loose with a string of curses so blue they blistered her ears. He was glaring at his rearview mirror, the hard muscle of his jaw twitching spasmodically. And when she turned in her seat to look behind them, she caught a glimpse of a plain white van blazing up the hill behind Steady and Ghost.

  Oh, shitburgers.

  That looked suspiciously like the van that’d been parked outside Eve’s house before she made her trip to Santa Elena, and it didn’t take a genius of Ozzie’s caliber to figure out these were the spooks Becky was talking about.