Chapter Eight
New Mexico
The Desert Bloom Cult Compound
Wyatt ‘Holt’ Gibson looked up from his book at Ice’s approach, amazed that his break from watching the compound was almost over already. As soon as he picked up a book, time just stopped for him. It had been that way since childhood, and even though it was considered a bit odd for a hardcore, hardboiled ex-bouncer and -bodyguard and current MC member to love reading, it was what it was. Holt was never without a book in hand – or at least within immediate reach – and his brothers teased him mercilessly about it, while thinking that it was actually pretty cool.
He marked his place, put the book down. “My turn?”
“Yep,” Ice said with a sigh. “Cain just brought back some food, so go have a late dinner. I’m gonna crash out for a few hours. Get me up around midnight.”
Holt nodded. Ice had taken last night’s shift solo, and had been up for the whole day, and even though the man was the toughest person that walked the planet, even he needed to recharge his batteries. It was the only concrete proof that Ice was actually fully human, and not part machine, despite the fact that he looked like the Terminator on steroids.
“OK, no problem,” Holt said and got to his feet. “Anything happen while I was on break?”
“Not one goddamn thing,” Ice said. “Just like every day.”
“It’s weird, right? I mean, I didn’t get the sense that these cult assholes were all that bright, ‘cause Gideon was surely the brains of the whole operation, but still… I thought for sure that they’d be doing something .”
“You and me both, man. The fact that we’ve been sitting here watching nothing is worrying me more than if we’d seen truckloads of guys show up armed to the teeth.”
Holt nodded again. It was true that in most cases, a lack of activity was fine, maybe even desirable. But when dealing with a group of people whose home and leader had both just been utterly obliterated , it was disquieting that they weren’t rampaging and raging – because it meant that they were probably methodically planning.
And careful, smart, patient planning was always harder to deal with than idiots running around half-cocked and pissed off and reckless.
“OK,” Holt said as Ice subsided onto the mattress in the back of the van. “We’ll give you a shout if we see anything worth your attention.”
He shut the van door, headed over the small hill to where Declan ‘Cain’ McGuiness was lying on his stomach, binoculars up to his face. Without a single word passing between them, without even seeing what Cain was looking at, Holt turned right around and hauled ass back to Ice. Something was up, and it was significant: he knew that tightness in Cain’s back, understood the unmoving tension in his large body, recognized the focus that was all-encompassing.
He opened the door again. “Ice.”
The MC’s ex-chief-Enforcer got to his feet right away, already locked and loaded. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. I have no idea what it is, but Cain is doing that fixed stare thing, the one where his hackles are up and he’s practically growling.”
“Got it,” Ice said. “Let’s go.”
Stealthily, the two men crawled the last few feet over the rise, lowered themselves to their stomachs next to Cain. Right away, the man handed the binoculars to Ice who raised them to his cold blue eyes, already ready to move quickly if needed.
“At last,” Ice breathed to Holt. “Three guys are getting ready to leave the compound, and according to the identities that Elle confirmed for us using my photos and videos, two of them are Guardians from the Utah cult.”
“What are they doing?” Holt asked, narrowing his brown eyes in the fading light, like he was taking aim. “What exactly?”
“Packing up a truck, doing lots of shoulder slapping and hand-shaking with a bunch of other idiots,” Ice said. “So let’s move. We’ll follow them, run them off about a mile down the road, and grab them up. We’ll do it at that sheltered place we found yesterday, just past the big rock formation. Then we’ll head to that abandoned warehouse Cain scouted out.”
“Got it,” Cain said, running his hands through his jet-black hair. “I can’t wait to get my hands on these dickheads. I’ve got some questions for them, boy.”
“Take a number,” Ice rasped. “ I’m the one who's been hiding in the desert for almost three goddamn weeks, waiting for these morons to do something useful. I get first crack at them.”
“Fair,” Cain conceded, following his brothers down the hill back to the van; he’d been on the job only a few days and he was already dying for his own bed, and a cold beer, and not-fast-food. “ Totally fair.”
**
Almost an hour later, the one asshole finally cracked wide open. Literally.
Ice stood back, rubbed his knuckles, watched with supreme disinterest as a torrent of blood ran down the guy’s face, dripped off his chin, and hit the cement floor in a steady stream. The idiot slumped over heavily, and the only thing that kept him semi-upright and in the chair was the rope binding him to it.
“Jesus Christ!” his almost-equally-bloody friend with the demolished knee – courtesy of Holt’s judicious kick – howled. “You cracked his fucking head open with your fists , man! What the fuck ?”
“I did do that,” Ice growled at him. “And I have officially lost my patience with you fuckers, so your head is next. Someone better start talking, and I mean now .”
“Shut up!” the guy with the smashed-in nose – thanks to Cain’s open palm – told the others. “Nobody says a goddamn word to these assholes or the Right-Guardian will kill you anyway!”
“Ah-ha,” Cain said, his dark-green eyes dancing. “So you Desert Bloom boys are in contact with Michael, are you?”
Smashed Nose paused, suddenly aware that he had given these three monsters a piece of information after all, and that they seemed to know far more about the Garden and the Desert Bloom than he’d assumed. Not that they could do much with what he’d said, to be sure, but Michael had clearly forbidden any of them to tell anyone that he was even alive.
That was when Smashed-in Head fought his way to an upright position and sputtered out: “The Right-Guardian is still in Utah.”
“Shut up !” said the man with the ex-knee. “ Stop talking!”
Without taking his eyes off the guy with the caved-in head, Ice back-handed the loud-mouth smartly, knocked him flat on his back. Flailing and twisting in the chair, the man screamed as his hands bound behind him both broke under his weight.
“ Now ,” Ice said to the first man. “You were so helpfully saying?”
“The Right-Guardian is hiding in Salt Lake City,” the man babbled. “With a motorcycle club. We were all waiting and hoping for our Right-Guardian to call us, and today he did, so we were going out for supplies in preparation for the compound all travelling to Utah in the morning.”
“ Which motorcycle club?” Ice said. “Give me the name.”
“I – I don’t know!”
“That’s a shame,” Ice said almost tenderly. “Here I thought I’d have to stop beating your head in to jog your memory.”
“Please don’t,” the man begged. “I’ll tell you everything that I know. Just please stop hitting me.”
“I swear to Gideon , Guardian Eli!” The man sprawled on the floor just couldn’t contain himself. “ Don’t ! Not one more word!”
“ Eli , huh?” Holt said. “Interesting name to have been given by your beloved Gideon… it’s really not very good for you in this situation though, is it?”
“Huh?” Cain said, who secretly loved Holt’s little bursts of weird trivia, all gleaned from his ferocious, copious reading. “What do you mean?”
“Well, Eli was a priest and judge in the Bible who had two really asshole sons… like really abusive to women. Anyway, Eli did nothing to rein in their behavior, which really pissed off God, who said that Eli and his house would be cut off from His favor forever. God told Eli as a sign of the truth of His words, both sons would die on the same day. And guess what happened?”
“The abusive pricks died?” Holt said. “On the same day?”
“Damn right they did,” Holt said. “ Then you know what happened?”
“What?” Eli asked, clearly not relishing the answer. “What happened?”
“Well, when Eli got the news that both of his worthless piece-of-shit sons had died because of his failure to do the right thing, he fell from his seat, broke his neck, and died instantly.”
“Really?” Holt said. “That’s a pretty satisfying ending. I mean, not for Eli, but you know… on the whole it is. Which book is that all in?”
“Samuel.” Holt gave the men a brilliant smile. “Book one, verses thirty to thirty-four.”
He switched his focus to Ice, who was giving him the enlightened look that he so often wore after one of Holt’s seemingly-random and -meaningless little stories. Without a word, with zero warning, Ice pulled out his gun, stood over Smashed Knee and Hands, and shot him in the temple.
“Shit!” The other two men shouted in unison. “What the fuck ?”
Ice pointed the gun at Smashed Nose, looked over at Eli. “Tell me something useful. Now.”
“I – I –” Eli sputtered. “I don’t – I can’t remember –”
A second shot rang out, and the other man now slumped in his chair, a thin blood trail trickling from the centre of his forehead. Eli’s mouth was opening and closing, gaping and gasping, as blind terror overtook him.
“Listen, Eli,” Ice said. “ I am your God here, and I am giving you every chance to do the right thing, but you are just fucking it up left and right, man. So here’s the last opportunity for you to have a prayer of getting out of here with nothing more than a bad concussion and twenty stitches in your brainwashed head… who is that fucker Michael with?”
“I – the guy is called –” He broke off, and the three men saw him desperately trying to recall the name that would save his life. “He’s the President of a Utah MC club – of the – the Highway something…”
That stopped Ice, Holt and Cain dead as realization crashed over them like a sickening wave. They all stared at each other, seeing the panic and shock in each other’s faces, then Ice said:
“Crusher Alcott? President of The Highway Hellions?”
“ Yes !” Eli said in relief. “That’s it… Crusher . Michael is with Crusher.”
“I knew you’d get there in the end,” Ice said, then nodded at Holt, who knocked Eli’s chair over, throwing the man to the filthy ground.
Eli’s neck didn’t break as quickly and easily as did the one of his Biblical namesake. It took a bit more effort – Holt had to stand on it for a little while – but it was done in the end. And thirty seconds after that, the three Road Devils were ready to peel the fuck out of the warehouse and get to the airport in record time.
“I gotta say,” Cain remarked, looking down at the dead cult members. “They were relatively tough fuckers. They held out way longer than I thought they would.”
“Yeah,” Holt agreed as he slid into the driver’s seat. He turned to Ice and said, “I thought you were losing your touch. Seriously, almost one full hour to finally break a head? You’re slipping, old man.”
Ice glared at him, then pulled out his cell phone to call Wolf, dreading everything that was lurking, and happening, and coming. He pushed the ‘1’ on his phone, heard the distant ringing, felt every mile stretching out between himself and Wolf. New Mexico shared a state border with Colorado, but Ice had never felt farther away from his club, from his family, from his home. From her .
Fuck, I hope we’re not already too late .
There was a click in his ear, and he braced himself to tell his President the newest round of terrible, horrible, no good, very bad news.