Rain Shadow Read online

  “I told them I was going undercover and that’s all. Just in case.”

  I stopped the truck, and the three men held securely onto their guns as they waited for us to get out of the truck. We fist bumped below the dashboard.

  “Let’s do this,” I said.

  We hopped out and Dex went right into his routine. “Beautiful day, ain’t it?” he said loudly.

  The men didn’t answer.

  We walked up in front of them.

  “Yep, after this gig, my partner and me,” Dex inclined his big head my way, “are going to take some of our hard earned cash and buy us some glittery pussy down in Vegas.”

  The man without the MC cut scowled at Dex. He had an ill-fitting glass eye that had a yellowish cast to it as if it had fallen into a toilet bowl of piss. “We don’t give a fuck about that.” The deep crevices in his face showed he’d spent a lot of his life in the sun. He even had a slightly fishy smell to him as if he’d just gotten off a boat, which he very likely had. “Arms behind your heads so we can search you. If there is so much as a ball point pen on you, we’re going to shoot you where you stand.” We’d come completely naked of electronics and wires. We had only our clothes, our wits and our fists.

  Dex dropped the stupid motherfucker routine and grew uncharacteristically quiet as we lifted our hands behind our heads. The man with the glass eye stepped closer, and his stench grew stronger. He patted me down and then moved to Dex. With one eye, he stared long and hard at Dex. It seemed that the zipper tattoo on the side of Dex’s arm had caught his attention. He had gotten the tattoo after he’d suffered a nasty compound fracture riding motocross. He thought the zipper would look cool over the scar, but it had almost cost him getting hired at the department. Normally, he had it covered, but today we’d dressed for the weather and for our roles of two clueless couriers picking up drugs. The one-eyed creep searched Dex and then nodded his assurance to the other two that we were clean. Tension radiated off of Dex, unusual for him. I could not figure out what had darkened his mood so drastically.

  The Bent for Hell guy, with an equally recognizable tattoo of a skeleton hand tattooed over the top of his hand, hopped onto a forklift.

  “You,” the one-eyed man pointed at me, “back that truck up over here.” I followed his orders. Dex walked up next to me. We headed back to the truck.

  “I know him,” Dex said quickly. “I arrested him three years ago.”

  I didn’t look at Dex, to avoid making it look as if we were having a conversation. “You sure?”

  “Can’t miss that ugly glass eye.”

  We reached the truck.

  “You think he recognized you?”

  “Can’t miss this fucking zipper tattoo,” he answered, ominously.

  “You!” the man called again. “The big stupid one, you come back here and help with the cargo.”

  Dex glanced briefly at me. Scared shitless wasn’t a look I’d ever seen on my best friend’s face. Never. He walked away, and I climbed into the truck. My pulse pounded in my ears. I looked up into the rearview. The forklift was waiting with its load. Dex carried a large crate toward the truck. The grimace on his face made it seem as if he was holding the whole damn world in that wood box. We’d combed through every detail and taken every precaution. But it looked as if we were going to be done in by a tattoo.

  My mind darted around to the different ways we had out of this, but there was nothing solid. Once we drove off, we could only hope that the guy hadn’t recognized Dex. My friend wasn’t always known for his intuition. He had always been an ‘act before you think’ type of person. I parked the truck and looked back in the mirror. Dex looked grim as he stiffly carried the cargo to the truck. He didn’t need intuition this time. This whole fucking thing had gone awry.

  The one-eyed man acted as if everything was going as planned. The truck was filled. I climbed back into the driver’s seat. Dex climbed into the passenger seat, and the two Bent for Hell guys climbed in back with the cargo. The one-eyed man stayed behind. I watched him in the side mirror. He waited for us to get down to the end of the road and then went inside the old house.

  Dex didn’t say a word. He kept his eyes straight ahead and so did I. The plan was to drive the drugs fifty miles to a warehouse where some of the Hell crew were waiting to unload. Once emptied, Dex and I were to drive off with the courier truck. And as the truck pulled through the gate, the other agents would storm the place in their armored SUVs.

  Fifty miles seemed fucking long all of a sudden. We could hear the two men talking in the back but it seemed like a casual chat. After about ten minutes on the road, Dex relaxed some, and I released my white knuckled grip on the steering wheel.

  Neither of us were in the mood for conversation, but I knew we were both thinking the same thing— let this be over soon. The two lane highway was nearly deserted, and I was just as glad not to have a lot of traffic to deal with. A cell phone rang in the back of the truck, but neither of us paid it much mind.

  “How are you doing?” I asked quietly.

  “I’ve been better.”

  The sliding door to the back slid open. I glanced up in the rearview. It was the guy with the skeleton tattoo. He held the phone with his ghoulish hand. He was just finishing his conversation. He shot me a cold glare in the mirror. “You’ve got it, Boss,” he said and hung up.

  “Change of plans,” he said sharply. Dex flinched and I had to work hard to keep my cool. “We’re not going to the warehouse after all.”

  I looked up in the mirror at him and forced a casual tone. “Uh, our boss said we had to stick to the coordinates you gave him. Otherwise we’re not going to get paid, and I can’t afford—”

  The cold barrel of a gun pressed against my temple. “You don’t have a boss anymore, Narc, but you might want to talk to the man upstairs cuz you’re going to be meeting him real soon.”

  “Fuck.” Dex stared down at the tattoo on his arm. We’d all had a good laugh about it when he’d gotten it. He’d even scored a few dates because of that tattoo. That fucking zipper tattoo.

  Chapter 8

  Luke

  Gunner managed to hit every pothole in the road, and my head smacked the metal wall of the truck each time. The lump on my head didn’t help. The ridge Dreygon had left on my flesh hurt plenty too. But none of it mattered. Angel had come out to see me this morning, and her plea to get her out of the compound played over and over in my head.

  Strangely enough, every time I did something that I was sure would get me strung up in the dungeon or even killed, Dreygon shocked the hell out of me by showing appreciation for it. In his own creepy way, he seemed to like me. Gaining his trust was key. It was the easiest way out of the compound, other than dying. I’d gone through an escape scenario in my head a dozen times. It had all started with gaining enough of Dreygon’s confidence that he would allow Angel and me to drive out of the compound together on some brief excursion. From there I’d contact the agency tell them where we were and they could come pick us up. It would be messy from that point on but with my protection, I was sure I could keep Angel safe.

  Keeping my true identity hidden hadn’t been a problem yet. Up until the night before, I’d been cautious and there’d been no real missteps. But rage had gotten the best of me. The asshole had been bleeding badly from his nose but his eyes had definitely rounded as I leaned down to threaten him. It was hard to know if it had been my warning or the face of a dead man that had stunned him. My only hope was that the two clubs had little or no communication. It was obvious from Dreygon’s reaction, to the two men invading what he’d obviously deemed his personal watering hole, that there was no love lost between the clubs.

  The truck slowed and then turned sharply. The lack of windows suddenly made me sympathize with the lizards I used to carry around in shoeboxes. The motor turned off, and the driver and passenger doors opened and shut. For a second my heart beat faster thinking that Bent for Hell might already have alerted Dreygon. Maybe I was being tak
en to a far away location to be shot and dumped. The doors to the back swung open and Jericho motioned me out. There was nothing murderous in his expression. For now, it seemed, I was still part of the crew.

  The sun had just started its long climb into the sky. A chill still lingered in the air. We were in an empty parking lot behind a building I didn’t recognize. In fact nothing about the place was familiar. Two doors rolled up on the building. A box truck that matched the one we’d driven in rolled out. This one had small windows placed strategically in each side and in the back doors. We moved quickly. The man who’d pulled the truck out said nothing to us as we climbed inside. He climbed into the empty truck and pulled it into the building. The doors rolled back down and the transaction was complete. I played my part and kept watch around the area with my weapon ready.

  Seconds later we were on the road in the matching truck. Only this time, the box wasn’t empty. Dozens of large wooden crates were piled in the center. The wood smelled moldy as if the guns had traveled a good distance.

  I sat down on a crate and watched out the back window of the truck. Keeping an eye on all three sides wasn’t going to be easy, but it was still early enough that the highway was mostly deserted. The main scenario that had played out in my head during the ride over was that the feds or ATF agents would be on the trail of these weapons. It would be a fast way out of this whole thing, but I would be leaving Angel behind. And once I left, it would be hard to get back to her. She might even be swept up in the whole damn thing. Dreygon was a fool, and he took way too many chances with her life.

  I glanced through the slats on the crates. It looked like there were two submachine guns in each container. I was sitting on about a hundred weapons with a street value of a hundred grand, a sizeable haul for someone like Dreygon, but not necessarily big enough to get the attention of the feds.

  Lack of sleep, a long night and the rhythmic movement of the truck made my lids heavy. It was a struggle to keep my attention on the windows.

  Jericho slid open the door between the cargo space and the front seat. “How’s it going back there?” he asked.

  “It’s going. How much longer? I’m fucking starved.”

  “We’ve got about ten more miles until we hit the turn off to the compound.”

  “I wasn’t given a lot of details about this. Are we worried about cops or something else?”

  “Dreygon’s usually pretty thorough and clean when he does something like this, so we’re not too worried about cops.” I smiled thinking about the fact that he had one guarding his valuable cargo. “Rival clubs get wind of this though and they try to sweep in and reap the rewards without doing any of the leg work . . . “ He looked back into the box. “Or up front costs. Pure profit if they can get their hands on it. Dreygon put just about everything he had into this load. Hopes to double his money.”

  Gunner laughed but stayed his eyes on the road. “There aren’t too many banks that can give you that kind of return on your investment.”

  “Unless you’re robbing it.” I glanced out the back and side windows. There was a small trail of dust kicking up in the empty landscape outside the side window, which could have been caused by any number of things. I kept my eyes on it. After a few minutes the stream of dust subsided. A gust of wind or a coyote running through the shrubs, no doubt.

  Jericho left the sliding door open, and I was thankful for the flow of air. “So what did you say to Belkin last night?” he asked. “Cash said he looked as if he was about to have a stroke after you leaned over him.”

  “I take it Belkin is the jerk with the skeleton hand tattoo?” I stalled for time on my answer.

  “Yeah, that’s him. He’s a real asshole.” He laughed. “But you gave it to him good. What did you say to him?”

  My mind had drifted away from formulating an answer to a new unexplained cloud of dust in the landscape. I went to the window and peered out.

  Jericho glanced back. “You see something?”

  “Don’t know. It’s weird but I keep seeing trails of dust being kicked up out there, and I can’t figure out what’s causing them.”

  “Probably just some animals,” Gunner said. “This time in the morning they’re all out hunting. What the hell?” He slowed the truck. I leaned down to look through the front window. “Is that that fucking chicken farmer?” Gunner sneered.

  The pick-up truck was sideways across the road, and there were empty animal crates strewn across both lanes.

  Jericho shook his head. “Stupid old fool.”

  My mind raced. I was a mess that day, the day the chicken farmer had yanked me out of his truck and dumped me to die, but chances were he would recognize me. Then two pieces of a puzzle came together, and I was stunned I hadn’t seen it right away. “Don’t stop,” I said quickly.

  “I can’t drive through all those fucking crates,” Gunner said. He pulled the truck to a stop and went to open his door. I put my hand on his shoulder. He nearly turned around and hit me.

  Now there were two streams of dust in the landscape. “It’s an ambush,” I said.

  Gunner’s face paled. Jericho and Gunner pulled out their guns and I squeezed through the crates to the side window and slid it open. There were three streams of dust now, and they gathered together overhead in a giant cloud. They were firing on us long before the jeeps busted through the dusty haze. A bullet shattered the driver’s side window but missed Gunner.

  “Do any of these UMPs have ammo?” I asked.

  “Don’t think so,” Jericho said quickly. He opened his door and slid out and Gunner dropped out behind him. They ducked behind the truck and maneuvered into positions that would allow them a few wild shots but not much more.

  Three jeeps were heading toward us. The chicken farmer had already jumped back into his truck. He turned the truck back onto the road and took off, leaving a mosaic of chicken crates behind.

  I lifted my weapon and waited for their vehicles to get close enough. It was the Bent for Hell club. The first jeep was within striking distance. I fired and the windshield disintegrated. The jeep came to an abrupt halt, and both men jumped out and raced around to take cover behind the vehicle. Their gun barrels came up over the back seat. I dropped to the ground as they sprayed the truck with bullets. In the lull, I jumped up and peered out. One of the attackers looked straight at me and aimed his gun at the small window. I fired first. A red hole appeared on his forehead. His eyes went wide as if he was shocked that he’d gotten hit. Then he dropped.

  The other jeeps quickly became shields for our attackers as they nearly fell out of their vehicles and ducked behind them. Jericho fired a few shots over the front of the truck, but his position made it tough for him to take clear aim. Angry bullets flew from behind the jeeps. They were shooting wildly, quantity over quality, hoping a bullet would land somewhere of importance. I was trained differently. I peered up through the window and shot straight into the front grill of a jeep. Fluid oozed out of the front of it. I scanned the angry faces peering over the seats, but none of them looked familiar. Belkin, as Jericho had called him, was most likely nursing a very broken nose. Which was fine. When I took him out, I wanted him to see my face as I did it.

  The cargo box on the truck had been fortified with extra sheets of metal but some of the bullets managed to pierce through. I stayed low beneath the window and dropped flat when they sent another volley of bullets my way. It ended abruptly. I peered up. It seemed they were figuring out what to do about the invisible asshole in the back of the truck. I wasn’t going to wait around and find out what they came up with.

  “Hey Reno,” Jericho called into the truck, “you still alive?”

  “Yeah but they’re making Swiss cheese of this truck. Be ready,” I said.

  I stretched up and took aim at a tire on the second jeep. The vehicle tilted to one side as the tire blew apart. There was only one more vehicle to disable. It had no windshield but it was still mobile. And it seemed that notion was finally dawning on them. They m
oved toward the one good jeep and piled in. They yanked in the dead man.

  “Keep low and get in,” I called out to Gunner and Jericho. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Gunner slid into the driver’s seat, and Jericho fell into the cab after him. Gunner started the truck. “We’ve got two flat tires,” he said.

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “Just plow through those crates.”

  The jeep, now loaded down with men, was moving slowly through the loose dirt. I moved to the back window. As the jeep climbed up onto the road I fired a shot into the engine. The box truck limped down the road on two flats, but it didn’t matter. Our ambushers had no way to follow.

  The last few miles seemed to stretch on forever, and the journey over the crude path to the compound nearly ended with the truck in a ditch. By the time we pulled through the compound gates, Dreygon and Cash were waiting with Max. For the first time since I’d met Dreygon, the stone exterior had cracked. He looked anxious, but I was sure he was far more worried about his cargo than his men. Jericho opened the back doors, and I hopped out. Gunner was already filling Dreygon’s head with the details.

  Some of the icy facade had returned as the old man surveyed the damage to the truck. I got the sense that Gunner had left out one very important detail. And I was sure there was nothing too nefarious about his motive for withholding it other than the fact that it was a huge deal. I’d taken out one of the Bent for Hell crew members. There would be retribution.

  Dreygon looked in the back at his cargo and then walked to where we were standing. “You did good. Everything is here. I’ll make some calls to see who double crossed us.”

  “Dreygon. . . “ Gunner scrubbed his hair back as he spoke and then he looked at me.

  “There was a casualty,” I said.

  Dreygon turned to me.

  “I took one of the men out.”