Chapter 5 Eruption #2
"They followed you." His voice was flat. Reading from the screen. "Messages from someone coordinating the operation. They sent one man to 'silence the questioning farmer.' One, because one should have been enough for a civilian asking too many questions on the phone."
He scrolled further. His jaw tightened another degree.
"Then a second message, sent later. Someone spotted my bike riding toward the bar.
Phoenix colors. They knew my cut was at the same location as you.
" He looked up from the screen. "The sender tells the team they're sending three more brothers for the Phoenix.
Killing both of us is the priority now. A Phoenix and a rancher meeting at the same bar means we're connected. And connected is dangerous."
He set the phone down, and his eyes met mine.
"One for you. Three for me. They thought I was the bigger threat." The corner of his mouth twitched. Not humor. Something harder. "They were wrong. The farmer shot just as straight."
I holstered my Beretta. These men wore matching leather cuts—the same motorcycle club, organized enough to coordinate a multi-target assault based on phone surveillance.
Diego had called them Iron Wolves earlier.
A name I'd never heard, but the way he'd said it carried the weight of long familiarity.
"If they followed me from the phone call, then the staffing company flagged my number the moment I started asking questions. Which means they know my name, my address, the ranch—"
"Which means you can't go back."
My chest tightened. Everything I'd built—the ranch, the rescues, the land itself—was on the other end of a road I couldn't drive back down.
"My workers are still there. Danny's alone. If this group knows where I live—"
"Then going back is exactly what they expect you to do." Diego's voice cut through mine. "You walk back onto that ranch and you're dead before you reach the porch. Dead doesn't help the workers. Dead doesn't help anyone."
He was right. I knew he was right.
And I hated every word of it.
"So what do I do?"
"You come with me. Henderson. The Phoenix compound.
" He held my gaze. The brown eyes that had been cold during the fight were something else now—not warm, but certain.
Anchored. "We bring your intel to my club, we build the case, and we come back with enough force to take down whoever's running this operation.
Your workers are safer right now with you gone.
These people wanted to silence you, not them.
With you off the property, there's no reason to hit the ranch.
" His voice softened by a fraction. "This person you mentioned, Danny, plays dumb, keeps the routine, and your workers stay where they are until we can get them out properly. "
I stood in the wrecked bar and weighed the options. The glass crunching under my boots. The smell of gunpowder and spilled liquor and blood. Behind me, the bartender still hadn't moved, the shotgun lowered, but his hands were still trembling.
"I need to call Danny. But my phone's compromised—if they tracked me from the call to that staffing company, they're monitoring my number."
Diego pulled his phone from his jacket and held it out. "Use mine. Every Phoenix phone is encrypted and untraceable. We have a new tech guy who built the system from the ground up. Nobody's listening to this line."
I took the phone. The weight of someone else's device in my hand, the screen unfamiliar, Diego's fingerprint unlocking it before he passed it over. I dialed Danny's number from memory.
It rang four times. Five. I felt each ring in my teeth.
"Hello?" Danny's voice, cautious.
"Danny, it's Logan. I'm calling from a different number."
"Logan? Why are you—"
"Listen to me carefully." I kept my voice level, borrowing the register from the man standing three feet away.
"I'm going to be gone longer than I thought.
A few days, maybe more. Keep the routine.
Feed the crew. Don't let anyone from High Basin onto the property.
If the field rep shows up, the one in the clean boots, you tell him Logan seems to have disappeared.
You don't know where I went. You haven't heard from me.
You're just the foreman doing your job."
"Disappeared? Logan, what the hell is—"
"If anything feels wrong—anything at all—you call this number. Not my personal phone. This one. Save it."
A pause. Silence on the line. Then Danny's voice, quieter.
"Yeah. Okay. I can do that."
"Danny." I paused. "I'm going to make this up to you. I promise. When this is over, I'll explain everything."
"You're scaring me, Logan."
"Good. Scared is smart right now. I'll be in touch."
I hung up. Handed the phone back to Diego. Our fingers touched on the exchange—a half-second of contact, his skin warm and dry against mine—and neither of us acknowledged it and neither of us could pretend it didn't happen.
The screen went dark. Twelve workers and a twenty-three-year-old foreman on a ranch in Montana that was a node in a trafficking network, and I was about to drive in the opposite direction because the alternative was a bullet on my own porch.
Diego was already at the door, stepping over the bodies. "Let's go. Clock's ticking."
We moved out through the front entrance, past the two bodies piled in the doorway, past the blood spreading across the threshold in a dark pool that the gravel was slowly absorbing.
The afternoon sun was blinding after the dim bar, the heat pressing against my face like a flat hand, and I squinted against the glare as we crossed the lot.
Diego stopped.
His motorcycle sat where he'd parked it near the entrance.
Both tires were slashed, the rubber hanging off the rims in torn strips, the chrome of the wheels resting against the gravel at angles that spoke to blades applied with deliberate force.
They'd done it before they entered the bar.
Cut off the escape route before launching the assault.
Diego stared at the bike. His jaw worked, the muscles flexing beneath the skin, and for the first time since the fight began I saw something on his face that wasn't tactical calculation or combat focus.
It was loss. Brief, controlled, gone in two seconds—but real.
A man looking at a machine that meant more than transportation, the way a rancher looks at a horse that's been put down.
"Truck," I told him. "My F-250. Blue Ford, parked on the east side."
He looked at the bike for one more second. Then he turned away and walked toward the truck.
Five hours in a truck cab with the man who'd just killed three people in front of me and saved my life in the process.
I drove. Diego sat in the passenger seat with the Ka-Bar in his lap and his eyes on the side mirror, watching the road behind us.
He'd cleaned the blood from his hands with a rag he'd found behind my seat, the dark stains transferring from his skin to the fabric in long deliberate strokes.
Now his hands rested on the knife and the knife rested on his thigh.
The highway stretched south. The landscape flattening, the grassland thinning, the air warming through the open windows because the F-250's air conditioning had died two summers ago and I'd never fixed it.
The wind pulled at Diego's hair and flattened the collar of his jacket, and I watched from the corner of my eye the way the afternoon light caught the geometric tattoos on his forearms where he'd pushed his sleeves up.
The tattoos were new. At Bragg, his arms had been bare, the brown skin smooth, the muscles lean and quick.
Now the ink ran from his wrists to somewhere beneath his shirt, dark geometric patterns that shifted when the muscles underneath moved.
I wanted to trace them with my fingers the way you trace the lines on a topographic map—slowly, following the contours, learning the terrain.
I didn't. My hands stayed on the wheel.
"You okay?" Diego's voice broke the silence after the first hour. He wasn't looking at me, his gaze fixed on the mirror instead.
"I killed a man today."
"You've killed men before."
"Under rules of engagement that someone else wrote." I kept my eyes on the road. The center line dividing the blacktop in a steady pulse of yellow dashes. "This was a bar in Idaho."
"This was a bar where four armed men tried to execute you for asking questions about slaves on your property." His voice was level, flat, without judgment or comfort. Just the fact, laid down clean. "The rules of engagement wrote themselves."
I let that sit. Let the highway eat the miles while the logic settled into the space where the guilt was trying to build.
Diego's clarity in moments of crisis had been the thing I'd relied on most at Bragg—the ability to cut through noise and find the bone of a situation and hold it up without flinching.
I missed it. I missed him.
I'd told him so, at the bar, right before the windows exploded.
I missed you. The words had left my mouth and crossed the table and landed somewhere in the two inches between our hands.
Then the world had detonated, and the words were still there, unresolved.
He hadn't answered. He'd been about to. I'd seen his mouth open. Seen the word forming. Then the glass.
The truck hummed beneath us, the big engine eating the miles.
I shifted my grip on the wheel and my arm brushed against the center console, close to where Diego's arm rested.
The accidental contact sent a current through my skin that had nothing to do with static electricity.
The last time we'd been this close in a vehicle was a rented sedan, parked behind a gas station at midnight.
His hand on the back of my neck. His mouth on mine.
The certainty between us burning so hot it fogged the windows.
Six years. His arm an inch from mine on the console. The smell of him filling the cab the way it used to fill the bunk space—leather and steel and something warm underneath, something his skin produced that didn't have a name but that my body recognized the way it recognized gravity.
I wondered if he was single. The thought arrived uninvited and planted itself. He wore no ring. He'd mentioned the club, the compound, the work—nothing about a person. No name dropped. No casual reference to someone waiting.
But silence wasn't proof. The man sitting in my passenger seat with a knife in his lap and blood drying in the creases of his knuckles was not a man who lacked options.
He sat half-turned in the passenger seat, the knife loose in his lap, blood drying in the creases of his knuckles. The afternoon light through the windshield caught the planes of his face and the tattoos on his forearms, and I let myself look—not the half-second of the bar booth, but a full count.
The years had carved him sharper. Leaner where he'd been lean, harder where the boy in the supply closet had only been edged.
If someone else had found him in the last few years, if someone else had seen what I'd seen and touched what I'd touched, I would have no claim on the feeling that thought produced in my stomach.
But the feeling would be there anyway. Corrosive and hot.
"The compound is the better part of a day south," Diego said, breaking into my thoughts. "Hawk—he's our president—he'll want to hear everything. Your ranch, the workers, High Basin, the building on the north acreage. All of it."
"And the dead men at the bar?"
"Hawk's been at war with the Iron Wolves for way too long.
" He said the name with the flat acknowledgment of a threat that didn't go away.
"Four dead Wolves in an Idaho bar won't surprise him.
It'll confirm what he already suspects—that whatever they're running in Montana is big enough to kill for.
" He paused. "He'll want to know about you, too. Who you are. Why I trust you."
"And what will you tell him?"
Diego turned from the mirror for the first time in an hour. Looked at me. The flat combat stare was gone, and what replaced it was something older, something that lived beneath the blade and the tattoos and the years of whatever he'd built in Henderson.
"I'll tell him the truth."
He didn't specify which truth. He didn't need to.
He turned back to the mirror. I turned back to the road.
"Danny," Diego said after a while, his voice carrying a studied casualness that I almost believed. "The foreman. You seem to care about him."
"He's a good kid. Works hard. He's only twenty-three."
"Twenty-three." A pause. "You two close?"
I glanced at him. His eyes were on the mirror but the question wasn't casual. The tension in his jaw—subtle, controlled, a tell that took years of proximity to read—told me he was asking something he didn't want to need to ask.
"He's my employee, Diego. A ranch hand from Billings." I let that sit for a beat. "That's all."
He nodded. One sharp movement. His jaw relaxed by a fraction, and he didn't say anything else about Danny, and I filed the moment away in the place where I was keeping all the evidence that maybe, maybe, he hadn't moved on either.
The miles passed. The sun dropped toward the horizon, painting the desert in amber and gold. Diego's arm rested on the console, an inch from mine. Neither of us closed the gap. Neither of us moved away.
Four more hours. The highway south. The man beside me.
I drove, and the silence held, and the inch between our arms carried more voltage than the Beretta cooling in my holster.