Chapter 16
SIXTEEN
Wake up, sluts. It’s time to sin.
—Text from Thumper to Denver
DENVER
All avenues led to dead ends.
Every last one of them.
“It’s gotta be that she fell down that mountain.”
I looked over at Tack, then to Brute.
Tack and Brute had been traveling with each other for the last couple of hours, looking for any sign of Holly.
The rest of the club that wasn’t pivotal at work or was actually in town had been in pairs looking for Holly, too.
Bells, the one prospect that I actually liked, had been with me.
Thumper, the other prospect that I didn’t necessarily like, had been paired with a veteran of the club, Brogue.
“She didn’t fall down the fuckin’ mountain,” Thumper said, for once something I agreed with.
Thumper was a prospect and had been for almost a year and a half now.
Several other prospects had started after him and had already been patched in.
But there was just something about Thumper that rubbed me the wrong way.
He was brash, reactive, and always seemed to have something to say that usually was the exact opposite of what you were talking about. He couldn’t agree to disagree, and the man played devil’s advocate better than anyone I knew.
It’d taken me some time to figure out that that was what he was doing.
He could never agree with anyone, and I knew that he liked watching everyone else lose their shit when he came in spouting off information that directly contradicted what they were saying.
He reminded me a lot of Odin. Consequently, Odin and Thumper got along really, really well. It was like both of their antagonistic souls just kind of took a hike when they were around each other.
“You can see her shit down the mountain,” Brute pointed out. “Why couldn’t she be down there?”
“Holly grew up here. She would know not to park there. That’s a bad area, and everyone from around here knows it. Our parents taught us not to take that road from the moment we were old enough to listen. Not even to save twenty minutes would a local take that road.”
He had a point.
I’d grown up here, and I told my girls when they could listen why we didn’t take that road.
Honestly, the only people who took it were tourists and out-of-towners passing through.
It was one rockslide away from being totally and completely fucked.
But the county kept it open because it helped traffic flow.
That, and no tourists had been hurt.
Yet.
But the county did have to go onto that road at least once every other day to remove a boulder.
“She wouldn’t have taken it,” I agreed with Thumper. “She would’ve gone the long way like the rest of the locals.”
“If you ask me,” Bells said quietly in his melodic voice. “I think that Baron Kenswood has something to do with the disappearance.”
Brute grunted. “I don’t think…”
“I agree with Bells.” Thumper surprised me with a second agreement that night. “Guy’s shady as fuck. I think he had something to do with it.”
I reached over and lifted the gas pump off the holder and guided the nozzle into my gas tank.
I was running on fumes, and I was pissed that I’d had to stop looking for Holly.
When we’d gotten to the gas station, it was to find the others already there filling up.
Tack and Brogue came out of the gas station with a couple of bottles of water and handed them out to everyone.
I gave him a nod in thanks and sucked the one he’d given to me down.
When I was done, I tossed it into the trash, then hung the nozzle up and tightened the gas cap down.
The receipt printed, but I left it flapping in the wind as I remounted my bike and said, “Take a couple of hours to sleep. We reconvene in the morning. Tack, let the others know.”
Tack nodded once.
Tack, short for tackle, was his actual name.
His daddy had loved to fish. His mom had been in labor with Tack when she’d called her husband to tell him the news. Tack’s dad, in his haste to get home, slipped and fell, and conked his head on a rock and drowned in about two inches of water.
Tack’s mom had been broken, but she’d not been broken enough not to come up with Tack’s name.
He was sharp as a tack, too.
And sometimes, I wondered if he’d been named after the wrong thing.
I could tell that he was wondering why I wasn’t going to make the call.
“I’m not stopping,” I informed him.
He nodded once. “I think it’s good for the rest of us to have a couple of hours of rest. Or we’ll be useless in the daylight.”
Just then, Major came in on his own bike and pulled up to the pump opposite us.
When he was filling up, he walked over to us and said, “I think we need a couple of hours of sleep. I’m about to fall off my damn bike.”
“That’s what I was just telling Tack to do, call and let y’all know that we need some rest.”
He studied me, knowing that I wasn’t stopping, and nodded. “I’ll call the others.”
He did that, and I started the bike up and took off, not heading home, but to a place just down the mountain from where I’d been earlier in the day.
As I did, I noticed the number of vehicles that were coming and going from the property.
Not necessarily unusual seeing as there were a lot of rentals in this area, but not at this time of night.
Tourists didn’t tend to drive on the mountain roads at night.
They were scary to them.
Pulling to the side, I tucked the bike into some bushes and started to walk, using the woods as cover as I made my way deeper into the area that I knew was Kenswood’s place.
I checked my phone to see if I had any signal and found none.
Though I wasn’t surprised, I was annoyed.
As I got closer to where I could now hear quite a few people milling about, some of them were yelling and cheering. Along with the cheering and yelling, I could also hear other things.
Things that I somehow knew were going to turn my stomach when I got closer.
Because I knew what the sounds were.
Pained animal sounds.
Using the shadows as cover as best as I could since the sparse trees I’d been using had thinned out even more, I got as close to the fighting ring as possible so I could see what was going on.
And my stomach sank.
Dogs fighting.
Dammit.
I would not allow this.
Not in my town.
I had one gun with me, a Glock nineteen that held fifteen rounds.
I had two extra magazines in my pocket.
And there were over fifty people here.
I couldn’t shoot them all if I stepped out and…
The bushes next to the house exploded, and an angry white-haired woman burst out of the trees with a baseball bat in her hands.
She screamed and hit the guy holding a dog back by a leash across his forearm.
The bone in the man’s arm snapped and he let go of the dog.
The dog took off across the yard, straight up the mountain at my back.
I cursed and hurried forward, my gun already in my hand.
“This is despicable!” Holly screeched. “This is utterly and wholly horrific, and every single one of you should go straight to hell!”
Silence.
Then laughter.
The man whom she’d hit reared back with his good hand and aimed it at her face.
I stepped in and caught his good hand with my left hand, twisted, shoved backward, and heard the pop of his shoulder coming out of the socket in the next moment.
He fell to the ground, screaming in agony.
Holly looked over at me with wide eyes.
I brought my gun up and aimed it at them, waving it around to each of them as I said, “Every last one of you. Down. Don’t make me shoot you, because I will.”
Baron Kenswood started to sneak backward, but Thumper came out of the bushes and clocked him right up the side of the head with a meaty fist.
Kenswood hit the ground in a solid heap.
The gun in Thumper’s hand materialized out of nowhere, and he had his gun aimed at the others just like I did.
“Baby, go get that rope behind you, and we’ll start tying everyone’s hands.”
It took us fifteen minutes, but we got everyone tied up, hands tied to feet and on their bellies in the dirt and blood around the fighting ring.
Only when everything was finished did I send Holly inside Baron’s home to call the cops.
She came back a couple of minutes later looking grim. “I couldn’t call. He has no house phone.”
“He has to have a way to make phone calls up here,” Thumper pointed out.
Holly flinched at the sound of Thumper’s voice.
I chalked it up to her being scared, which she obviously had been and should still be, and dismissed it for now.
“Try his pockets for a cell phone,” I suggested.
Thumper did, coming up with a cell phone that was password-protected.
“Can’t get into it,” Thumper grumbled. “It’s a face ID, but he has to have his eyes open, and the blood on his face isn’t helping.”
“You can still make emergency phone calls on it,” Holly said. “Just hold down the side button and slide to call 911.”
Thumper grunted, then grinned. “It worked.”
He placed the phone to his ear and placed the call.
I looked over at Holly. “What happened?”
She moved so close to me that I could tell that she was holding on by a thread.
I had three girls.
I knew when a woman wanted a hug.
So in between her explaining her arriving and waking up in a cage, I pulled her into my arms and held her tight with the hand that wasn’t holding my gun.
Anger surged in my belly as I listened to her speak.
That anger took on nuclear levels when she whispered, “One of your men were here. One of them knew where I was, because they talked about me and what they were going to do with me. He was the one that moved my truck.”
That explained the flinch from earlier when she saw Thumper.
My thoughts immediately went to him.
But as Thumper turned and gave us his back, Holly wilted.
“What?”
“It’s not him,” she said softly. “That man doesn’t have all the patches on his back like the rest of you do.”
I frowned. “You’re saying it’s a fully patched member then.”
Which fucking terrified me.
If one of the men I considered a brother did this, what else was he willing to do?
“Did you see him fully?” I asked. “If I bring you to the club, can you identify him?”