23. Dragon #3
I looked over at her where she stood with one heeled foot in the back of a car, the other on the pavement, a uniformed driver holding the door and one of her hands.
The car was nice. Expensive. Subtle silver, reinforced glass, ambassador in enemy territory kind of car.
Her hair was also polished and coifed more than usual.
She looked like an heiress, not a secretary or event planner.
She used her remaining free hand to gesture at my middle area. “You’ve really let yourself go. You always had a few extra pounds, but now? No one would let you in front of a camera looking like that.”
I had my leather jacket on over Horse’s t-shirt, which I was pretty sure covered up the open button of my leather pants.
Was I really getting fat like I’d been as a kid?
Panic, hurt, and other feelings I didn’t want to look at too closely had me grabbing the handles of the bike and throwing my leg over the seat.
“It’s not how I look, but how I can drive. For some people, doing is more important than looking.”
Her lip curled. “Because what you do is so marvelous. The world knows what you are. And soon enough, Horse will know it too. Hopefully he’ll survive your family.
I guess you can’t help being what you are, coming from where you do.
Pity you never told him exactly the kind of family you have.
” She climbed into the car and the driver closed the door before I could say anything.
I hot-wired Pansy, pulled on the helmet and took off, swerving around the silver car and roaring out into the street, narrowing missing a minivan out in the road.
Felicia should be calling me back any… My phone buzzed, and the com picked up in my helmet.
“He’s in some junkyard thirty minutes out in the desert,” she said, sounding annoyed.
“Why would some rich boy go out there? It’s nowhere near a shooting range.
Which means someone took him there. And why do you take a nice little money bag out to a junkyard?
Because you’re taking out the trash. It might already be too late, chica. ”
I cursed. “Which direction?” I said as I revved the engine and roared down the street too fast, too upset, but Janice did good work. She’d intentionally antagonized me, and everyone knew she was good at what she did.
“South.”
I nodded. I knew that place, a low spot surrounded by higher terrain. It had a solid fence, but the real defense were the rises around it. “Ah. That junkyard. I’ll make it in fifteen if the traffic agrees with me.” And on Horse’s bike, it would because if it didn’t, I’d use the sidewalk.
I hung up and turned a corner to find that the tourists were clogging the road. As usual. I definitely should see if Horse needed his entire roof garden or if we could turn some of it into a helicopter pad. Fifteen minutes might be too slow.
I saw an opening on the sidewalk and took it.
There were screams and curses, but I was in my element, and a calm feeling swept over me the way it always did when I was in control of a beautiful machine.
I made it off the strip in record time, and then I hit the dirt roads and left a long plume of dust behind me.
I took a turn in gravel and spun out just the right amount before swerving back on the track.
Horse’s bike was so sweet, so perfectly tuned, like it knew my soul.
Because I’d tuned it. I should tune all of his vehicles so I could steal them and feel like this.
It was better than a drunken spree. It was virtue married to adrenaline.
I’d save Carmichael, repay his family’s vile acts with salvation.
I wasn’t my family. I’d come clean to everyone about Horse and let the chips fall.
I wouldn’t let selfishness ruin someone with a bedroom like that.
I relaxed, sinking into the seat as I flowed through the desert like a leaf in a river, effortlessly going along with the current.
In thirteen minutes I came up to the rusted front panels that closed off the yard, and the three rows of barbed wire strung across the top.
It was put together well for a junkyard.
Maybe it was more than that. It would be a good place for a meth lab, very off the beaten track.
I turned right off the road and up the hill so I could drive along the top of the surrounding plateau.
Inside the fence, a big truck was pushing a nice red Ferrari towards the crusher.
Nice car. Like Horse’s, but red instead of blue.
Looked like someone was in the driver’s seat, slumped over the steering wheel.
At the rate the truck was moving, I had about a minute and a half to get in and get that truck stopped.
If I’d brought a truck, I could have rammed through the front gate, but on a bike, I could go over, assuming there was somewhere to land.
There. A nice, solid-looking flat truck container, twenty feet long, painted orange, close enough to the fence that I should be able to land it.
How much speed would I need… and I’d have to line up the jump with this terrain.
The plateau ended forty feet with a good drop down, shale, so I’d need to keep away from the edge or I’d get torn to pieces.
Eighty or a hundred feet would be better to get that jump right, but the bike was good, and I’d been sitting in an apartment wanting Horse and not being able to admit that I wanted him for two weeks while he seemed entirely oblivious to how irresistible he was.
And now it was over. I was moving out, and I’d never get the chance to have him make me another turkey sandwich.
I’d make the jump.