Protect & Serve(213)

“I wonder,” I murmured, walking past Hunter.

“Hmm?” He glanced over. “Do you have something, Sarah?”

I lifted the butt of my gun. With a steady whack, I hammered it into the back wall.

“What is it?” He asked curiously, rising to his feet and leaning near me.

I smacked the wall again.

“Do you hear that, Hunter?”

He tilted his head curiously, gazing between the wall and me. “No. What are you doing?”

“I noticed something when Arturo dropped,” I noted. “This floor isn’t connected to the back wall.”

Hunter’s eyes flared wide open, and he grabbed the gun from me. With a quick swing, he bashed the wall again. At the reverberating sound, a sly smile crossed his lips.

“Detective, you’re a genius,” he chuckled…

“He was guarding something in here,” I realized, pressing against the wall and feeling the click of a latch.

A few bikers had filed in behind us, and they started helping Hunter pull the shelves away from the wall, exposing the wide doorway.

“Well, look at that,” Hunter grinned, turning back to his fallen adversary. “You were holding out on me? That’s no way to treat a friend…”

With his pistol held high, he pushed the door open. I backed him up, my glock at the ready. Fumbling along outside the doorway for a light switch, I felt a slight bump beneath my fingertips. With a quick glance at the biker president, I flicked the switch on and doused the room in light.

It was surprising how similar Arturo’s secret chamber was to Hunter’s war room. Dominated by a large table in the middle, with no windows and little in the way of décor, the walls and tabletop were covered in maps, diagrams, and notes – all scribbled in Spanish.

The men around us seemed more interested in the huge stacks of hundred dollar bills piled neatly against the far wall.

“What is this?” I asked aloud.

Hunter surveyed the area. “No idea…” He lifted a few pages up, gazing at the scribbled text, and his gaze drifted across a couple of maps of Mexico.

“This looks too important to leave behind,” I commented. I noticed how conspicuous red marks were chiseled into the maps, highlighting what appeared to be areas of interest.

Hunter’s gaze met mine, and he nodded in agreement. “It does. We’re going to have to take this all and have it translated back in El Paso. We could have stumbled across something pretty good here…”

As if drawn like moths to the flame, more and more of the Outlaws were pouring into the room, carting out armloads of money as we studied the table. I pulled out my phone and snapped some pictures of the arrangement. “Just in case the positioning matters,” I mentioned offhandedly to him.

“Good thinking,” Hunter nodded with a sly smile.

“I’d like to think you love me for more than just my body,” I told him, laughing. “Now let’s go ahead and round up the kidnap victims and get the fuck out of here before it’s too late.”

“Anything you say, Detective…” Hunter replied, pulling me into a deep and heavy kiss.





20





It wasn’t long before we were pulling back up to the dilapidated bar that marked the headquarters of the Devil’s Dragons motorcycle club.

The ride back had been filled with unanswered questions. The more I thought about the events that had transpired over the night, the more that I worried about the aftermath…

Hunter pulled to a stop in front of the doors. As we dismounted, bikers surrounded us. They cheered in victory as we walked into their midst, but there were so many scattered thoughts in my head that prevented me from joining their revelry.

“We’re not done yet,” Hunter’s commanding voice rose over their jubilation. Everyone in our midst calmed down as they watched him carefully.

Their gazes followed him as he walked towards the back of the white van the Outlaws had liberated from the compound south of the border. It had barely fit through the tunnel on the way back, and I knew it was filled with teenage abductees… And a wounded friend.

As he approached, Hunter snapped his fingers and pointed at the van’s back doors. Several of the Devil’s Dragons unbarred and opened the back, and they reached in for their wounded biker.

Hunter ordered: “Talk to me, Grizz.”

The burly biker, slumped against the inner wall of the van, grumbled something into his ear. “Good to hear it, brother,” the biker president laughed and clasped his shoulder. “You’ll be in good hands soon. Ready to leave the back of this godforsaken fucking van?”

Grizz nodded softly.

“Bring him inside,” Hunter told his Dragons. It took five of them to carry his heavy, lumbering form through the crowd. Someone from another club propped the door open and flipped on some light switches as they carried their wounded comrade.