Chapter 17 #2
And Gideon got ready for everything in his body to explode.
BACK DURING the Sons of the Blood thing, Joey and Gideon had taken a precious three days off—with Clint’s blessing—and ridden not one but two electric motorcycles from Manhattan to Boston.
Gideon could ride like a fucking champion, Joey discovered, although they’d both discovered that riding a motorcycle all day wasn’t as great for the sex drive as all the advertisements claimed.
Still, they’d enjoyed the ride, had eaten some great chowder as they passed through Boston, and had been a little sorry to see the outskirts of Joey’s father’s influence come into view in the form of the storage center where Joey kept their stuff.
There was a car rental place about a mile away—Gideon had rented a car to Logan airport there while Joey had driven first one bike then the other to his storage space.
Once again, he had to leave his clothes collection, but this time, since he only had to walk a mile to the car rental place, he managed to smuggle his old leather jacket out.
Only to realize that he didn’t really love it like he used to. He loved the one he’d bought in Manhattan more.
They’d given it to a homeless woman in Boston and had been in their apartment in time to take a shower, have a glass of wine, and have some rocking sex to celebrate that they were no longer on the back of motorcycles.
And most importantly, Joey had two motorcycles somewhere his father still hadn’t thought to look, somewhere that could get him into the reservation unseen and to the back entrance onto the property.
Where the young mountain lion was proudly terrorizing rabbits and deer and probably pissing pheromones to all the female mountain lions in the area.
Good for him.
Joey had picked Crosby and Pearson to go with him—apologizing to Garcia and Swan of course.
“Naw, I get it,” Garcia had said generously. “Cowboy there is built like a fuckin’ house. You’re gonna want some of that with you.” That he used “Cowboy” as an endearment and a nickname was actually sweet as fuck, but nobody on the team was going to tell Garcia that because it might make him mean.
“And you and Gail could take out an army with knives alone,” Manny Swan said generously. “So, you know. Go take out an army, brother.”
They’d been on the side of the road in front of the car rental agency, where the two SUVs they’d had waiting for them when they’d arrived at the quiet, federally owned airstrip only five miles away were parked on the side of the road.
After some grim bids of “good hunting” and some quick, hard back-thumping warrior hugs, Crosby, Pearson, and Joey slid away, running quietly in the woods alongside the road until they were out of sight.
In ten minutes, the SUVs would pass in front of the storage center, and the motorcycles would draft along for a few miles until Joey took them into the reservation.
With any luck, by the time Stevie knew of the SUVs, the motorcycles would be out of sight in the barren back quarter of the res.
Crosby was deft and powerful on the electric motorcycle, and Pearson was a fearless passenger behind Joey.
They ghosted offroad, through long, dry grasses and powdery dirt for a mile or so before Joey led them behind the little line shack, where they dismounted.
Neither of his teammates showed the slightest bit of “bike wobble,” as Gideon called it, both of them striding around like they chose that mode of transpo all the time.
Joey had sort of suspected that might be the case.
He was in the middle of pulling a tarp over the motorcycles while Crosby and Pearson re-fitted their flack helmets and adjusted their weaponry when it occurred to him that he might be kissing these two vehicles goodbye.
He’d had such plans, he thought now. Him and Gideon reclaiming them. Taking them to Lake Erie to meet Gideon’s stepmother and his father. Of maybe traveling a little, seeing more of the East Coast than places he got sent out to for calls.
And even if they did get Gideon back, there was no guarantee they’d be leaving this way.
He left the keys in the ignition of both bikes, and when Crosby cocked his head, Joey shrugged.
“If we don’t get back to them, I don’t want them to rot,” he confessed, thinking about the leather bomber jacket. It had started to crack after eight years in storage. That was a terrible thing to do to something useful and beautiful.
“We’ll get him back,” Pearson said, patting him on the back. “Don’t worry, Carlyle. It’s not just you here. Although—” She gestured to the break in the fence, which hung as rusty and as disused as it had that Christmas. “—you are the one who’s got to lead the way.”
They’d all brought water and food bars and salt tablets, which was important.
Because even though it was only ten in the morning (oh God, had they only gone dancing last night?
Had it only been that long before Gideon had been yanked inside Stevie Carlyle’s vehicle and dragged away?) it was already hot and humid, and they were jogging through some rough terrain.
But Joey and Gideon ran nearly every morning they woke up together, and he had the feeling Pearson and Crosby weren’t far off that mark either. They all used the fitness facilities in the office—and they all practiced combat almost daily.
The five or so miles to the mansion was no big deal, as long as they followed in Joey’s footsteps as he avoided the pitfalls of what was now barren rock and close trees.
About a mile in, Joey caught the pungent smell of large-cat urine, and he sucked in a breath and stopped.
“Recognize that smell?” he asked.
“It’s like cleaning the cat box times a thousand,” Crosby muttered.
Crosby and Garcia had adopted a giant fluffy white thing named Sampson.
The last time Joey had been over there, he and Sampson had spent an hour bonding, leaving Joey coated in long white hairs and cat drool.
In a million years, Joey couldn’t imagine that massive furry vortex of goodwill exuding this much acid.
“Keep your eyes peeled,” Joey said. “My path swings wide of the caves—we should be on the fringe of the big cat’s territory but not intruding.
” He started walking again, but he kept his eyes swinging, left to right, right to left, the hair on his neck standing straight up as they neared the stand of rocks where he knew the cave sat, the mountain lion’s lair.
There were enough boulders and rough terrain here to make getting this close to the place inescapable—another reason, Joey reflected sourly, that it had taken his father so long to get rid of the grizzled old warrior.
Stevie Carlyle didn’t like the woods. He liked owning them—and he’d definitely enjoyed gloating that he’d taken so much of them from the reservation—but walking through them, not so much.
Maybe it was that thought that distracted him, because he almost startled when his gaze swung toward the rise of rocks again, and he saw the quiet figure, sitting, back straight, observing the three SCTF agents as they jogged toward the house.
Joey stopped short, but when he heard Pearson and Crosby go for their weapons, he shook his head.
The gamekeeper watched them impassively, and Joey gave him a short nod.
“You are going to kill the old man?” the gamekeeper asked.
“Yes,” Joey said, not imagining this would end any other way.
“Good. The cameras are out until you get to the house.”
“Thank you,” Joey said, that tiny part of his back relaxing.
“I did not do it for you,” the gamekeeper told him, and he turned his head and watched as the young mountain lion, the one who’d taken the old one’s cave, poked his whiskers out. “He is kinder than his father,” he said thoughtfully. “But his father was my friend.”
“I was sad to hear of his passing,” Joey said, and the gamekeeper turned toward him, nodding.
“I know. Your friend is being kept in the basement,” he said. “You know the way.”
Joey swallowed and suppressed a shudder. Yes. He knew that basement.
“Indebted,” is what he said. “Should you need one, there’s two motorbikes by the break in the fence, keys in.”
The gamekeeper smiled. “Indebted,” he said, and then he turned back toward the young mountain lion, whom, Joey knew, wouldn’t come out while the three awkward humans dressed in loud armor still lingered.
He nodded toward Crosby and Pearson and took off, going faster now that he didn’t have to hop and skip between cameras.
“The basement?” Crosby asked, barely winded.
Joey grunted. “Lot of blood in that basement. Fucking cold. Locked me in there when I pissed him off.”
“What a fucker,” Crosby replied, parkouring off a rock to stay on Joey’s six.
“Yeah, well, you wanna know the good news about that basement?” Joey did the same off another rock and watched from the corner of his eye as Pearson leapt it like a gazelle.
“Tell me,” she said, less winded than him or Crosby.
“I know the secret way in—and Stevie Carlyle never found it.”
“That’s a good thing,” Crosby said, and then they were quiet as the terrain got really rough.
WHEN JOEY told the story of his childhood, he usually said, “Stevie shipped me to military school when I was fourteen,” and left it at that.
But there were six long years between the night Joey pissed on his teddy bear to kill the nanny cam and the day he got in the limo for the fuckin’ last time to go to military school.
Gideon had known. Gideon had asked him about those years one night, after a windfall of catching Bruce Springsteen at the Stone Pony in Jersey once they’d finally brought down the Sons of the Blood.
It had been late May, about two weeks before they’d hit the club, and they’d been driving back into the city.
“Why do you ask, Gid?”
Joey remembered the expression on Gideon’s lean face, the trouble in his eyes as he’d stared out over the highway, the removable splint still on his wrist from their last adventure.