Chapter 14 Dues, Son. Dues.
Dues, Son. Dues.
brADY LISTENED to the reports coming off the radio and wondered if he could be any more useless.
He’d been so sure the phone would be in the sheriff’s office. Hell, as far as he could tell, it was the only thing he brought to the table—his knowledge of law enforcement, and his knowledge of the damned phone.
But the military covert ops people had figured out where the phone was, and the assassin had managed to get the info on their transpo and strategy needs. The Russian mobster had bailed them out of the shit, and the….
And the nice garage mechanic who had taken Brady in and let him eat at his table and who treated Brady like family when he hadn’t had that since his folks had died four years ago had just woven poetry and engine noise together to take out at least half the obstacles between the phone and actual daylight and public exposure in one terrible dance.
Brady was stuck holding the radio to his ear and….
“Shit,” he muttered, hearing the detested voice over the radio. “Cuthbert made it. I was hoping he’d at least crash the cruiser.”
“Too good for him,” Jai muttered. “When this is over, I will shoot a bullet up his ass. Will take half an hour to bleed out. Will hurt. A lot.”
“Buckwheats,” Eric muttered. “I saw that movie too. Never did it. Wasn’t my style.”
“Nor mine,” Jai said direly, “but I am well and truly pissed off now, and I am in the mood to be cruel.”
Brady wanted to laugh, because the conversation was funnier because they were both killers, get it? But he was stuck on the radio chatter.
“Okay,” he said. “Hang on. Guys, Ace is nearing the north-south roadblock. What do you think will—”
The radio erupted into chaos, and Brady had to hold it away from his ear.
“Never mind,” he muttered, because mostly what he was getting was, “Holy fucking shit that asshole went WHERE?”
“He is still fine?” Jai asked, and while he tried to make it sound casual, Brady knew it was anything but.
“Yes,” Brady answered, and at that moment, Jai peeled to the side of the road, where the highway workers were gathered, looking perplexed and worried.
Well, who wanted to set up a construction site in the middle of a bloodbath?
“You stay here,” Jai said thickly. “Have your gun ready, but mostly? I think this takes conversation.”
Brady pulled out his 9 mm and rested it on his lap, watching as Jai walked up to the burly bunch of construction workers and spoke briefly.
He didn’t even touch the gun at his hip, just gestured at the flatbed and held out his hand.
And was rewarded with the keys.
“How did he do that?” Eric muttered.
“I got nothin’,” Brady said. “I am about as useful here as tits on a bull.”
Eric let out a chuff of what could have been laughter—or could have been pain. “Don’t kid yourself, bull-tits—the big shit is coming.”
As if to prove him right, there was a sudden skidding of dust and speed to the left of the car as it sat facing the wrong way, and Brady looked up in surprise to see a… well, mostly illegal street machine leaning on its kickstand in a swirl of descending dust.
As if to punctuate the fairy-tale quality of this particular vehicle, the driver side door of the SUV opened and a phantom in black leathers slid behind the wheel, holding out a laptop and a phone.
“Holy fuck,” Brady said, because he’d eaten at this man’s table, and it was like sitting next to Batman after breaking bread with Bruce Wayne. “What in the hell are you riding?”
Burton chuckled, almost like a proud teenager.
“She’s glorious, right? Technically street legal, if it’s street legal to go 250 miles per hour fully loaded.
Anyway, I set up the laptop, and the phone is unlocked—I guess Ace did that for us.
All we gotta do is upload the phone’s info and let Eric send it to all the IPs in the browser. Eric, you still alive for that?”
“Mostly,” Eric said, sounding tired. “Nothing a few units of A-neg won’t fix.”
“I’ll have Amal stock some for you,” Burton said soberly. “You hang in there, brother.”
“Will do,” Eric said. “Hand me the shit.”
“Once he’s done with the upload,” Burton said, “you’re putting the spare helmet on and getting on the back with me. I’ll take you to the FBI office in LA, and that’s where your real work begins.”
Brady wanted to protest. “Leave Eric?” he whispered, glancing with tortured eyes toward the back. “Ace and Sonny? All of you all? Just leave?”
“You can come back,” Eric murmured. “Don’t worry, baby. My door is always open, okay?”
But I haven’t done anything! Brady wanted to shout, and at that moment, Burton said, “Wait a minute. What in the fuck is Jai doing? And who are those people coming in from the north road? And—oh shit. Oh shit! What in the hell is going on?”
Brady glanced out to the interstate, to the northeast, where he saw more lights and sirens, probably in pursuit of a dark green Forester, and to the west, where the last sorry batch of Arlen Cuthbert’s deputies was cherry-topping its way toward them.
And then toward the flatbed, which was now very specifically, very dangerously placed between both sets of vehicles.
“I think,” Burton said slowly, “Ace is about to pave the way for us. Eric, how you doing with that send?”
“I’m not gonna make it,” Eric muttered, glancing up and taking in the scene.
“Cop, you grab my helmet and get on the back of the bike,” Burton said. “Can you hang on to the bitch bar and shoot at the same time?”
“Sure,” Brady said, not sure at all if he could.
“You’d better not be lying. Much. Eric, if you’re still working on this when the big bang happens, you tell Jai to catch us running after we take off. Once we’re clear of the rubble, he can hand us the phone mid-run. You hear?”
“Got it,” Eric said, but he sounded like his concentration was elsewhere.
Brady slid out of the SUV and glanced back at him, eyeballs-deep in hacker shit that Brady had never mastered, and for a moment, he couldn’t do it.
“Charlie!” he called out, hating the neediness in his voice but so, so not ready to let the last few days with this man disappear like settling dust.
Eric looked up, bloodied and wearied but not broken. “Don’t worry, baby,” he said, his voice thick with Boston. “Like I told ya, you’ll know where to find me.”
“I….” His voice cracked. “I’ll come back,” he said.
“Just… God―” They hadn’t been supposed to happen.
They’d been an interlude, emotional support sex, two strangers on the outside of the hurricane.
But that’s not what it felt like now. It felt like it was real.
How could he leave this man bleeding on the side of the road?
“Go, baby,” Eric said softly. “We’ve both got shit to do, but we ended up here from two different places. We’ll end up back here looking for the same thing.”
Brady nodded, eyes burning, thinking there was more to say than that, but he took the helmet Burton was impatiently offering him and wrestled it onto his head.
Inside, Burton said, via Bluetooth apparently, “Don’t worry, son. They’ll get him help. He’s tough, right?”
“Right,” Brady said, tired of being rescued.
What he wanted to do—what he really wanted to do—was to get in the driver’s seat of the car and take Eric to the hospital and to wait, pacing like any other lover until he knew in his bones that his man would be all right.
He’d been shot—shot—and Brady was getting on a motorcycle and whizzing far, far away. “I—”
“Hop on.”
Brady did, grimly reaching back with his left hand to anchor himself to the bike while pulling his gun from the holster on his hip to ready himself. He had no idea what Burton had in mind, but if he’d learned anything this last week, it was not to be surprised.
Still, he was not prepared for Burton to head directly toward the flatbed Jai had placed in the middle of the road and to whirl the bike around so they were facing the oncoming wave of cop cars, still about two miles off but coming in fast. Brady had a heartbeat to contemplate the vastness of the desert and the long swaths of land and road between the action they saw and the action they would soon be in the thick of while he glanced around to get his bearings.
To his surprise, he saw that Jai had gotten out of the truck, which was apparently as locked in as he could make it, and was standing next to them. As Brady gave the SUV to the side of the road another nervous glance, Jai spoke up, his voice only faintly muffled by the helmet on Brady’s head.
“The trick,” the big man said thoughtfully, “is to not let them see where the phone is hiding. By the time he is done, there will be too much chaos for them to care.”
“He who?” Eric or Ace?
Jai gave that disturbing smile, with all the big teeth. “Does it matter?”
From far away behind them, Brady could hear the now-familiar cacophony of cop cars and Subaru Forester, heading for them at speed.
In front of them, the whirling lights grew closer as the sirens screamed.