Chapter 15
Pax got to the store the next morning before the sun had fully cleared the mountains. Bree opened the back door before he could knock, a mug of coffee already in her hand, and the sight of her, sleep-soft and smiling in the early light, settled him more surely than the coffee ever could.
“Morning, sailor,” she said, holding out the mug.
He took the coffee, set it on the shelf inside the door, and kissed her properly, taking his time about it.
With a watcher somewhere out there in town, he’d learned to hold on to the good moments whenever they offered themselves.
She leaned into him, her fingers curling into his shirt, and his jaguar rumbled its deep approval of beginning every day exactly this way.
“Good morning to you, too,” she murmured when he finally let her up for air. She was laughing a little as she rescued the mug and pushed it back into his hands. “Now drink that. You’ve got the look that says today is going to be a long day.”
She wasn’t wrong. She almost never was.
The bar was approached next. Word came from Alan, one of the older Clan men, who had been the closest thing the town had to a night watchman for years, though nobody had ever formally given him the title.
Two men had sat with the bar’s owner for an hour the previous evening and left him with a business card and a lot of unspoken implications.
The bar owner was human, and frightened, and had called Alan the next morning, because Alan was who people in this town called when they were frightened.
Pax and Ari drove past the bar twice and didn’t stop.
They noted the car parked behind it, the unfamiliar plates, the way the two men moved when they stepped out for a cigarette.
Professional. Coordinated without needing to talk about it.
Cartel soldiers, or close enough to make no practical difference.
“Four vehicles in town that don’t belong,” Ari said, looking straight ahead through the windshield. “I’ve counted two. Alan’s counted two more.”
“Hernandez called for backup.” Pax watched the street slide past. “Which means he’s moving from assessment to action.”
“Or he’s building infrastructure separate from his main objective.
” Ari turned the truck back toward the reservation road.
“The cartel footprint is its own operation. He uses it as cover. The town becomes a distribution point, the soldiers are already in place, and when he needs muscle for anything else, there it is. Waiting.”
“Two birds,” Pax said.
“He’s efficient. Everything Cole sent us says he’s efficient.”
They drove for a while without talking. Red rock and scrub rolled past, the mountain line hazy in the distance.
“We need to tell Rodrigo,” Pax said.
“Tonight,” Ari agreed.
The watching had gone on for days, and it took a different kind of patience than any operation Pax had ever run.
This was their home ground. Their own town.
And the men they were watching moved through it like they’d already decided it belonged to them.
The anger that stirred up was dangerous, because anger wasn’t helpful when planning strategy.
Pax managed his anger by spending time with Bree at the store.
He was there every morning and most afternoons.
There was always something to fix, a delivery to unload, or prep to be done for Mr. Leeland’s growing workshop program.
He came in through the back door, Bree would hand him a cup of coffee, and slowly the anger settled.
She knew he was watching for trouble. He’d told her enough that she understood what was going on, and she had started reporting anything she happened to notice.
The unfamiliar cars. The men who came in and didn’t buy anything.
The changed feeling at the diner, where two strangers had claimed a permanent table and made everyone nervous.
She’d clearly decided that being useful mattered more than being protected, and he took every report as seriously as he’d ever taken intel from a trained source.
Because that’s what she was, essentially. Bree knew this town better than any operator he’d ever served with knew their area of operations. She knew every business owner by name, knew the habits of the regulars, knew when something sounded wrong.
“Don’t be alone in the store,” he’d told her more than once. “Tomás is with you when I’m not here, right?”
“He doesn’t leave unless I make him.” She picked up her own cup. “He figured out something was wrong. I didn’t give him details, but he stopped leaving me on my own.”
“He’s a good kid,” Pax said.
“He is.” She watched Pax steadily over the rim of her cup, smiling mischievously. “He’s a lot like his older, wiser, even more handsome cousin.”
He held her gaze a bit longer than he needed to, and his jaguar stretched inside him, pleased with her, pleased with the morning and everything about this arrangement except the danger that kept circling.
Then Pax went to deal with the squeaking hinge on the supply room door that had been bothering him, and while he worked, he ran down the list of everything that could go wrong, the way he’d been trained to, until the list felt manageable.
The hinge took ten minutes. The list took considerably longer.
Rodrigo received the twins’ report on the escalation of activity in town that evening. His house was quiet, and his wife brought refreshments, then slipped out again, which was her way.
Pax laid out everything they’d learned. Rodrigo listened without expression. When Pax finished, the Alpha asked a few questions.
“Has he moved on any of our people directly?”
“Not yet. The bar owner is human, and the approach was to him.” Pax made himself say the next part.
“The tattooed man who came into the hardware store may have been sizing up Bree directly. Whether Hernandez knows she’s connected to us, or whether he’s just noting the traffic between her store and the Clan, I don’t know. ”
Rodrigo’s eyes sharpened. He turned to Ari for his input.
“He’s still watching,” Ari said. “But I agree, he’s moved on slightly, to building infrastructure. He’ll move when he thinks he has enough assets in place.”
“And what does he think he has now? Do you know?” Rodrigo asked.
“Enough to be uncertain,” Pax said. “That’s why he called for more men. He wants weight behind him before he moves. It’s his pattern.”
Rodrigo looked at the window and the darkness beyond it.
“We need to get Pedro in on this,” he said at last.
“We were going to him next,” Ari supplied.
Pedro almost never used phones and eschewed almost all modern technology. If he didn’t, this would have gone a lot faster, Pax thought. But things had always been done this way in his Clan and he had to honor the Alpha’s wishes.
Rodrigo nodded. “Let me know what Pedro says.” He regarded them both. “Do not move without talking to me first.”
“No, sir,” they said together. They weren’t in the military anymore, and Rodrigo wasn’t their commanding officer, but some men simply earned the word, and the respect. He was one of them.
Pedro opened the door before they knocked. He looked at the two of them, then turned back into the house. They followed.
The old shaman sat in his chair by the window and stayed quiet for so long that the desert outside went from orange to full dark before he finally spoke.
“He’s been at the edge of my wards for a while now,” Pedro said.
Pax winced. “What’s he doing out there? Can you tell?”
“Still feeling the shape of things.” Pedro’s hands rested loose in his lap, his gaze on nothing in particular.
“He’s still just learning where everything is.
” He paused. “I think he has an unusual sensing ability and it feels self-taught, mostly. Probably a wild talent with a thin coat of schooling, built on a natural gift, trained late. That makes him harder to predict.”
“Can he get through your wards?” Ari asked.
“No.” Pedro said it without heat, just stating a simple fact.
“Not the inner wards. The outer edge, what he’s feeling now, I allow to be felt.
It gives him something to read that isn’t the truth.
” His gaze settled on Pax. “He’s started acting.
The extra men.” Pedro tilted his head as the twins exchanged a glance at Pedro’s advance knowledge.
“He’s decided he has enough of the picture. He doesn’t. But he doesn’t know that.”
Pax turned that over. Hernandez settling into a false certainty was an advantage. It also put a time limit on their preparation. It was a ticking clock. The moment the man stopped assessing and started moving for real, their time would compress fast.
“How long before he makes a direct move?” Ari asked.
Pedro considered. “He’s disciplined. He won’t spend his cartel assets on the jaguar business until they’re properly in place. That buys us a little more time.” A pause. “But not unlimited time.”
“We need a plan,” Pax said.
“You need several plans.” Pedro had been making plans in this desert since before the country existed, and it showed in the calm way he said it. “Come back when you know more about how he moves. I’ll be here.”
They drove home through the dark with the windows down and the desert air pouring through the cab. Pax thought about the analogy of a blind man feeling along a wall, and about the fact that Hernandez had been closer than any of them had known.
“He’s going to move on the town before he moves on us,” Ari said.
“Yeah.”
“Which means the town is in this whether we like it or not.”
“Yep,” Pax agreed again.
Ari seemed to consider his words. “Rodrigo needs to know that.”
“We’ll tell him.” Pax turned off the main road. “And then we figure out how to use what Hernandez doesn’t know he doesn’t know.”
Ari looked out at the dark. “I hate it when you sound like Pedro.”
“Pedro’s usually right.”
“That’s the part I hate,” Ari said. Pax almost smiled, and they drove the rest of the way home in comfortable silence.