Sunshine and Blood #3
“We’ve got about as far as we can go without more intel about what the department’s doing tomorrow.
Burton and I can monitor their comms tonight.
Everybody, go enjoy your afternoon. Eric, you might want to take off now to get that burner unit before everything closes.
Brady, I suggest you stay here and wait for him—you don’t need to be on the roads any more than necessary.
Jai wasn’t far wrong. In fact, you look wiped.
Burton, would you mind if he napped next to Ernie? ”
Burton shook his head. “Nope. You and I can get going to set up comms.” He glanced at Brady. “If this place is ever searched, you can hide under the big pedestal bed’s mattress, or exit out the window into the swamp cooler nook—there’s two bolt holes back there.”
Brady and Cotton were staring.
Burton grimaced. “I gave Ace the money to build me a place. You don’t work covert ops without places in your place.”
Eric thought of the false panels in his closet and the one that went under the couch that folded into a bed and the fact that he could climb out of the shower onto the roof of the RV—or into the space underneath where he stashed extra guns.
“Solid,” he said, meaning it, and Brady blinked… and then yawned. “I’ll take off in five, then.”
Jason frowned. “You… I think we need to switch cars for Jai. He was stopped on the way to the garage today. I’m thinking we may need to come up with a plan.”
Eric grimaced. “Okay, then—I’ll go out and start with that.”
Brady turned toward him, looking wrung out, and Eric, not minding the others, ventured close enough to brush his cheek with soft knuckles. “Don’t worry. I’ll be back in a couple hours, tops. You get some sleep, and we can talk more tonight.”
Brady nodded and yawned and wandered in after Ernie. It was on the tip of Eric’s tongue to ask why Brady wouldn’t nap in Ace and Sonny’s room—they seemed perfectly open with all their meager possessions as it was.
But then he thought of how very private the two men were, and of how much Ace seemed to give of himself already.
They had so little, he thought, eyeing the stain on the carpet that nobody wanted to talk about. The least he could do was give them their privacy.
“You good to go home with Ernie?” Jason was asking the ethereally beautiful Cotton. “I have some stuff to do at the base tonight before I take you home for school.”
Cotton, who had pulled out what looked like a college student’s backpack and school books, smiled at him with disappointment in those angel’s eyes, but no recrimination.
“I don’t need to go back tomorrow,” he said.
“I can hang out for a couple of days to make sure there’s enough of you all left when this is over.
” He said it lightly, but there was an undercurrent in his voice that said he really meant it.
“Oh ye of little faith,” Jason returned. “You know, before you nursed me back to health, I was something of a badass.”
Cotton snorted. “Oh, I know it, Colonel Constance. You’re still a badass. But you need to make sure you keep my badass lead free, if you know what I mean.”
Jason’s snort of amusement wasn’t a match for the tenderness on his face. “I’ll make it a priority, Angel. Go study to pass some tests, okay?”
Cotton’s smile was pleased. “I’m good at it,” he said, as though it surprised him.
Their kiss was so painfully intimate, Eric had to turn away.
IT TURNED out Ace, Sonny, and Jai really were elbows deep in work—and George was writing up invoices and making calls for parts.
But that didn’t mean Ace and Jai didn’t appear vastly relieved to be outside and doing something with their hands as opposed to in the house, thinking of ways to get a phone out of a locked police station.
Burton and Jason hopped in Jason’s cherry red Maserati and spun around the garage, exiting on the hardpan driveway while Eric swung into the auto bay to get Jai’s keys.
The three men glanced up, and an expression crossed Ace’s face that was very clearly a warning. Then he spoke loudly to Jai, clearly for the benefit of a cop that Eric could see waiting at the driveway exit, probably for a ride somewhere else.
“You got that cop’s car fixed up?” he asked. “I want that shit out of my garage.”
“Da—is almost,” Jai said, before spitting. “But he had better pay up.”
Ace growled. “He’s trying to hide the damage to his oil pan from the sheriff. I suspect this’ll be out of pocket, ’cause otherwise they got a place to take their crappy Ford Explorers.”
From the pit came the echo of a long, weighty string of profanity, and Eric grunted.
“I was going to venture into Palm Springs for some groceries,” he said, and Ace caught his eyes and nodded.
“Pizza,” Jai said. “Four giant pies. At least three all meat. Cotton is the only vegan here.”
Eric startled, and then realized that, hey, they all had to eat. “I’ll make the fourth with olives, mushrooms, and artichoke hearts,” he said a little dreamily. “And garlic.”
Jai shrugged, obviously baffled. “If you want to ruin a good pizza, that is your problem.”
Sure enough, another SUV swung just enough off the road to let people pass, and the cop got in. They roared off, and Eric murmured, “He’s gone.”
Ace said, his voice normal now, “You need some green?”
Eric shook his head. “Nope. You and Ernie have been feeding us for two days. Our turn.”
“Fair,” Ace said, and then frowned. “Jai and I were thinking maybe you should switch out his car—we put in some registration for it with your name.”
Eric opened his mouth in shock. “In two hours?”
“They have software and a printer,” George said from the booth. “It’s like being the secretary to James fucking Bond.”
Ace grinned at him. “It was sort of a Christmas present from Burton and Jason,” he said. “I had a guy out in Barstow, but it was a helluva long way to drive when we were giving out vehicles so fast, you know. And we never knew when they were coming back.”
“Wow,” Eric said, full of admiration. “I’m… I mean, it pays to have connections.”
Ace grimaced. “It would pay better if we’d stop going through cars,” he confessed. “And boy, I hate to see this one go.” He gave Jai an apologetic glance. “Sorry, brother.”
Jai shrugged and fished the keys out of his pocket. “Get something sporty,” he said, and George cackled behind him.
“Drive safe,” Ace told him, and Eric nodded.
“Will do.”
He caught the keys Jai tossed him and pulled from the front of the house, around the garage, and onto the highway from the hardpan drive.
As he paused, making sure the way was clear, he saw the roadblock about half a mile to the west, directly in the path he’d need to take for any town but Vegas.
It had been in Ace’s explicit warning to “drive safe.”
Read: Stay off their radar.
Eric wondered how many times Ace, Sonny, and Jai had “stayed safe” by playing dumb and decided he didn’t want to know.
He’d come to the desert expecting to find a network—he’d thought a crime family.
He’d found a crime-fighting family instead, and it was occurring to him that while the emotional stability and trust was a lot easier on the heart, the precarious situation in the universe was no less difficult on the nerves.
And while it was maybe in the high sixties, low seventies, as he approached the roadblock, he was still glad the Crown Vic had air conditioning like a boss.
He lowered the window, using his body language, his aggressive elbow, his widened chest and stance in the seat, to own the fuck out of that vehicle, while he pulled out his ID.
“What’s doing, Officer?” he asked, noting that there were only local deputies lining the road. No California Highway Patrol or Los Angeles County PD, which pointed to what they’d suspected, which was a very insulated population taking their power very seriously.
The deputy with the clipboard leaned forward into Eric’s space, thrusting a tablet with a picture on it practically up his nose. “You seen this man? We suspect him of robbing a savings and loan out in Baker.”
Eric should have been ready for it, but he wasn’t. As he forcibly lowered the tablet—and the cop’s hand—so it was far enough away to see, Brady’s picture came into view.
It had been photoshopped badly, probably from his work ID. A hat—maybe his habitual baseball cap—had been “erased” out, along with the top of Brady’s hair and forehead, and Brady’s unsmiling cop face had been superimposed over the traditional measuring stick that marked an inmate’s arrest photo.
Eric wanted to howl. God, this was so unfair.
He had no love of cops, or he’d had no love of cops, but to take one of the good ones—one of the ones who didn’t want to hurt anybody, only wanted to keep people safe, to tie into his community, to be decent—and tell the world he was a criminal; that was fucking reprehensible.
And Eric couldn’t let on.
Come on, man, you’ve made a living being fucking inscrutable for the last twenty years. Where’s your cool now?
It would be a lot better served if I had a pressure syringe and some insulin for this asshole right here.
“You seen that dirtbag?” the deputy sneered, and Eric fought to keep his face impassive. Not a flicker around the eyes, not a tightening of the mouth—not even a flaring of the nostrils to give him away.
“No,” he said, wondering if anybody had even checked the video feed in the bank to see him there, fiddling with his phone and blanking out all the cameras.
“You sure?” He was close enough for Eric to see scum on his teeth.
Eric recoiled. “Sir, would you like a breath mint? Yes, I am certain.”
The deputy—a thirtyish man with coarse black hair in his eyebrows and knuckles who had missed a few spots shaving around his neck—gave him a dirty look, but he did step back self-consciously at the breath mint comment. “This car’s familiar. You live around here?”
“I pass through here for business,” Eric lied smoothly. “I’m meeting a client in Palm Springs for lunch.”
“It’s Sunday,” the man said suspiciously.