Young Guns Box Set

by Kane, Remington

  “James and I need your help, Harrison. It’s because of something Jerold did.”

  “Who the hell is Jerold? I thought I heard you wound up marrying that asshole Rafe Washington?”

  “Jerold is my other son, and yes, I married Rafe, but he’s gone now. He died in an accident.”

  “Too bad he’s dead, because if he was alive, he could help you, and how the hell did you find me anyway?”

  “I spoke to Celia Cross recently and she told me where you were. She said she ran into you last year.”

  “Celia Cross? Oh, you mean Celia Johnson. Yeah, Cross is her husband’s name. Did she also tell you that she came here and renewed old times with me? That girl always was a whore, married or not, and she had no right telling you where I am.”

  “Are you saying we can’t stay here with you?”

  “First, you tell me why you need to.”

  After fighting back tears, Debra relayed her story. When she finished, she saw Harrison shaking his head.

  “You two stepped in some deep shit, and now you want to track it into my house?”

  Debra spread her arms wide in a pleading gesture.

  “We don’t have anywhere else to go, Harrison. Do you want me to beg, then I’ll beg. I’ll kiss your ass if it will keep James safe.”

  Harrison was about to tell his sister to go to hell and leave his property when an idea came to him.

  “This dude Biggs, how badly does he want you?”

  “He’s insane. He wants to murder us as a sick kind of justice for losing his daughter.”

  Harrison stared at them for a few moments as the wheels turned in his head.

  “Shit, I guess I have to let you stay, now don’t I? After all, we’re family, right?”

  A relieved smile brightened Debra’s pretty face.

  “Thank you, Harrison, and I promise we won’t be any bother.”

  “No, you won’t be, and you’re going to earn your keep too, get it?”

  The smile left Debra’s face.

  “Yes, I get it. And I’ll be happy to clean and cook for you.”

  Harrison handed James the gloves he was wearing.

  “Get to work, boy. Those roof gutters don’t spit the leaves out themselves.”

  James took the gloves from his uncle, as he too understood what earning their keep meant.

  46

  Money To Burn

  SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA, JANUARY 2003

  Cody and Romeo had been in the city for four days as they performed surveillance on the drug operation of a crack cocaine kingpin named Denny Haydon.

  They were looking down on Haydon from the roof of a building. Haydon was across the street and standing in front of the apartment building of a woman he was dating. The redhead was one of six women that Cody and Romeo had seen Haydon with. Standing nearby were Haydon’s four bodyguards. The men accompanied him everywhere he went.

  Haydon was born in San Diego and had been dealing drugs since grade school. After dropping out of high school in his junior year, he made his first million smuggling marijuana. Haydon was twenty-nine, had dark hair, stood six-feet tall, and was covered in tattoos. The fact that his basic description matched Romeo in some ways had given Cody an idea.

  “If you dyed your hair black you could pretend to be Haydon so that we can get inside the Citadel.”

  “I thought we were going to claim that we won the invitation in a poker game.”

  “That was before I saw the resemblance between you and Haydon.”

  “But what if they have a picture of the dude?”

  “Hutchins said the only photo of him he could find was that mugshot of Haydon. It was taken when he was eighteen and had been arrested in a bar fight. His face is all puffy from the beating he’d taken, and anyway, there is a slight resemblance between you two. Along with the tattoos, I think you’ll be able to pass as Haydon. Besides, you already sound like you’re from California.”

  Romeo lifted up his binoculars and stared down at Haydon.

  “You’re right, there is a resemblance. We’re both good looking dudes who get the ladies. All right, we’ll go that route, but we still have to get our hands on the money and find his invitation.”

  “We will, once we figure out where the money is.”

  “I thought we agreed it was in that warehouse by the docks, right?”

  “Yeah, that’s probably it. But I don’t know, there’s hardly any security there.”

  “Think about it, Cody. If Haydon left a dozen men there, it would let people know how important it was. I think he keeps things low-key so that no one catches on.”

  “That makes sense, and we did follow the money trail to that building, but I want to see if he winds up there again. If he does, we’ll make our move on him.”

  “That sounds like a plan,” Romeo said.

  * * *

  The boys had spent days following the proceeds of crack sales as they moved along from one drug dealer to another. They had identified three separate locations where the day’s intake of cash was delivered. From one of those locations, they followed an armored van disguised as a delivery truck to the warehouse on the docks. Later, they followed Denny Haydon to that same location.

  The brick warehouse sat two blocks from the piers near a company that sold and serviced dump trucks and other heavy equipment.

  The sign on the front of the building claimed that it was a storage facility. The sign told the truth. Money was stored there on a daily basis, before being shipped across the border, but only after Denny Haydon had taken his cut.

  Hutchins had estimated that Haydon’s operation was raking in upwards of a million in cash a day. Cody and Romeo hoped he wasn’t too far off the mark because they needed that much to buy their way into the Citadel.

  The next day was uneventful as Haydon spent most of it at the apartment of yet another young lady.

  “And we thought we did all right with the babes,” Romeo said. “This guy has us beat.”

  “That’s good, it means his mind isn’t always on business.”

  “He’s got a Mexican cartel backing him and thinks no one would dare rob him. He’d be right if we didn’t need the money for the Citadel.”

  “Putting the hurt on a Mexican cartel only makes this better in my eyes. I have no love for any of the cartels.”

  “I know, bro, but we need to be careful or we’ll have them on our trail.”

  “The only trail we’ll leave will lead straight to Denny Haydon. We’ll make it look like he robbed his own operation and ran off.”

  “You think the cartel people will buy that?”

  “I don’t care. We only need the Citadel to believe it.”

  * * *

  Haydon left his lover’s apartment and climbed into his limo with his bodyguards. When they headed toward the docks, the boys followed from several blocks behind. Cody had planted a magnetic tracking device on the vehicle days earlier when Romeo, acting like a drunk, distracted the driver. At the time, Haydon and his men had been inside a restaurant.

  “He’s going to the warehouse again,” Cody said.

  “Yeah, so what do you think, do we make our move now?”

  Cody considered the question for several seconds, then jerked his head in a nod.

  “Yeah, let’s do this. We go in hard and fast and don’t give them a chance to breathe.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. You know that warehouse won’t have normal doors.”

  “That’s why we brought the explosives with us.”

  “Yeah, Cody, but what if they don’t have enough oomph to knock in that reinforced door?”

  “You have a better plan?”

  Romeo grinned. “I say we give the explosives a little help.”

  * * *

  Denny Haydon stood inside the warehouse where he stored the illegal profit from his crack cocaine sales. He had his usual four bodyguards with him along with six other men. Their weapons were out, and they were on high alert as Haydon opened
the vault to check on the day’s take.

  “What’s that sound?” asked one of the bodyguards, as a rumbling noise grew louder.

  When the men guarding the front of the building began firing at something, Haydon understood that they were under attack.

  He was leaving the vault with the intention of closing and locking it again when a massive dump truck slammed into the reinforced steel gate in the loading dock area. The gate was no match for the truck’s weight and momentum. It peeled away from its left side as the truck burst in. However, the impact absorbed much of the truck’s forward motion while causing it to tip sideways.

  As a result, the scrap metal the truck was carrying spilled from its rear and piled into a heap on the warehouse’s concrete floor. The sound was deafening, even more so as it reverberated off the brick walls.

  Haydon had been so shocked by the spectacle that he had frozen with his hands on the vault door. Two of his bodyguards had stayed alert. They moved toward the flipped over truck with their machine guns ready to fire.

  “The truck is empty,” one of the guards reported. “Maybe some idiot forgot to set the parking brake and it rolled down the hill.”

  Haydon relaxed at that news and turned to push the vault door shut. An instant later, the cab of the dump truck exploded as the charges set by Cody and Romeo went off. More than a dozen different fires were spawned inside the warehouse as everyone was knocked off their feet by the blast.

  Several men had more than their balance disrupted as debris struck them. Two died instantly while the others were knocked senseless or wounded. The men who had been closest to the blast were all but obliterated by it and their blood and organs painted the walls and ceiling.

  Denny Haydon had been blown inside his vault. He lay near one of the mounds of bills that had caught fire and struggled to stay conscious.

  Before anyone could make it to their feet, Cody and Romeo entered and began killing. Their targets offered feeble resistance in their dazed state and the boys made their way to the vault without having a round come close to them.

  When they looked inside the vault and saw Haydon struggling to make it to his hands and knees, they barely noticed him.

  They had been hoping that the vault would contain enough cash to fund their stay at the Citadel. In truth, the vault housed twenty times that amount. There were stacks of banded cash, cash shrink-wrapped onto small pallets, and the bags of banded bills that had come in just that day. Looking inside the vault, the boys knew that Hutchins’ estimate of Haydon’s income had been woefully short.

  Cody broke from his trance and tapped Romeo on the arm.

  “We need to hurry.”

  “Right.”

  Cody moved in on Denny Haydon as Romeo went about shoving money into a duffel bag. Haydon’s attempt to strike Cody was met with a punch to the face that dazed the already wobbly man and sent Haydon back onto the floor.

  When Cody cuffed Haydon’s wrists behind him, the drug dealer mumbled a question.

  “You’re cops?”

  Cody ignored him, then taped his mouth shut and yanked him to his feet.

  “The bag is stuffed, dude,” Romeo said. “Should I find something else to fill up?”

  “There’s no time for that, and the smoke is getting thick in here. Let’s go.”

  Haydon jerked his head around as he was dragged away. When he saw that the fire inside the vault had spread, he began mumbling about the money burning.

  “Crime doesn’t pay,” Cody told him, and yanked harder on the cuffs at Haydon’s wrists. They had more than enough cash to fund their entry into the Citadel. Cody didn’t give a damn what happened to the money left behind.

  Once outside, he tossed Haydon into the rear of his limo, stepped over the bloody body of his chauffeur, and climbed behind the wheel. As he put the long vehicle in gear, Cody looked at Romeo via the rear-view mirror. Only his eyes and mouth were visible through the gaps in the ski mask, and Cody saw that Romeo’s grin was as huge as the one he was wearing.

  They were one step closer to getting inside the Citadel.

  47

  Thinner Than Blood

  OCTOBER 2018

  Back in Manhattan, Sara and Tanner had just learned of James’ plight. They visited the apartment building where they spoke with one of James’ friends. He was a teenager named Juan, whom Tanner had met once before.

  “They took off in James’ car yesterday, Tanner. I bet by now they’re in Mexico or somewhere.”

  Sara talked to several of the neighbors, but no one knew any more than Juan. As they settled in their car again, Sara looked worried.

  “We need to find them, Tanner, or that boy and his mother might wind up dead.”

  “I’ll ask for help from Zoe Farnsworth, maybe her hacker skills can help track James down.”

  “Yes, that’s a good idea. They could be anywhere by now and we have no way to know where to start looking. Why do you think James wouldn’t ask us for help?”

  Tanner drove away from the apartment house as he answered.

  “Maybe he thinks we wouldn’t give him any help now that his brother is a cop killer, and Sara, he doesn’t know us that well.”

  “I know, but I liked him right away, and he has a great future ahead. We have to help them.”

  “I could help them another way, my way.”

  “You mean you could kill Maurice Biggs?”

  “It would end the gang’s reasons for hunting James down.”

  “It would also place you in danger.”

  “Nothing I couldn’t handle.”

  “I believe you, but I don’t want you to risk yourself if it’s not necessary. Let’s find James and Debra and then make plans. Making sure they’re safe should be our first priority.”

  * * *

  James was safe, and he was working hard doing chores for his uncle. Harrison had him painting the dining room while Debra was giving the home a thorough cleaning. While they labored, Harrison was in Atlantic City, where he ran his bookie business out of the rear of a barber shop.

  Before leaving the house, he told his sister to make sure she had dinner ready by six-thirty, when he would be returning home, but that they wouldn’t be eating together.

  James and Debra took a break from their work to have lunch. As they sat in the kitchen, Debra released a sigh.

  “Mama and Daddy always talked about having a house like this, and so did your father and me. It doesn’t seem fair that Harrison is the one who wound up with such a great place and that he lives here all alone.”

  “A house would be cool, and I’ll get you one someday, although, I guess I won’t be working as a lawyer.”

  Debra reached across the table and took her son’s hand.

  “We’ll get out of this somehow, James, then you’ll be able to get back to school.”

  “How, Mom? Let’s face it, Jerold has screwed us over royally. We can never go back to the city as long as Maurice Biggs is alive. Hell, we’ll probably have to change our names and move out west or something.”

  Debra shook her head. “I prayed on it last night, and James, I got such a feeling of peace. Somehow… I don’t know how, but somehow I think everything is going to be all right.”

  James didn’t share his mother’s faith, but he was glad to see that she was feeling better about the situation and decided to not be so pessimistic.

  “We’re safe for now, and that’s something.”

  “Yes, Harrison came through for us.”

  James rose from the table as he wiped his mouth.

  “I’d better get back to painting. I still have two walls to finish.”

  “And I’ve got bathrooms to clean.”

  “Good ol’ Uncle Harrison,” James said. “He’d give you the shirt off his back, but only if it needed mending.”

  * * *

  In Atlantic City, Harrison was on the phone and talking to a contact he had at a gambling parlor in the Bronx. When the man answered that, yes, he had a way to contac
t Maurice Biggs, Harrison grinned wide.

  “Is he paying for information about Jerold Washington?”

  “That’s what I hear. They say Biggs wants to kill him and his mama and brother, the dude is mad as hell about his daughter dying.”

  “How much will he pay?”

  “I don’t know, but I can find out and get back to you. Why, do you know something?”

  Harrison smiled into the phone. “If the price is right I do.”

  48

  Worse Than Imagined

  OUTSIDE PORTLAND, OREGON, JANUARY 2003

  Abadandi had called it right when he told Ann that her husband wouldn’t lift a finger to help her leave. While it was true that Begley protested the treatment of his wife, he also refused to demand that she be allowed to leave.

  “I can’t say that I don’t want you here, Ann, and honey, it’s only two more years.”

  Ann had gawked at her husband. “Abadandi wants to keep me here as a virtual prisoner and you say you’re on his side?”

  “I’m not on his side, but I also see his point. We were hired as a team of sorts, and you would be hard to replace.”

  Ann took in a deep breath and held it for a moment before releasing it slowly. Screaming at her husband would do her no good. She had to reason with him.

  “I know you want me here with you, Jack, but baby, if I’m forced to stay here things won’t be the way they were. I’m not saying I’ll grow to hate you, but I’ll be damned if I’ll ever let you in my bed again.”

  “If you left I’d lose you for sure. This way I still have a chance to keep you. Am I being selfish? Probably. But Ann, I don’t want to lose you.”