Rain Shadow(22)

“Hold this.” I handed the gun back to Jericho and headed toward her. She crossed her arms against the cold. We were surrounded by cold night air but the space between us heated instantly. Her disillusioned blue gaze went straight through my chest.

“I’m sorry, Angel. I should have told you.”

She stared down at the ground, and I waited for her to say something. Her arms uncrossed and she wrapped them around my neck. “Don’t do it again, Reno.” My arms went around her and I held her tightly. She was so solid and real in my arms, as if she was meant to be in them. Gunner smacked the side of the truck door to summon me.

Angel was still in my arms. “Be careful,” she said, and then she pressed her mouth to my ear. “Take me away from this place, Luke.” She dropped her arms and headed toward her cabin without looking back.

Dragging my gaze away from her was always impossible. I watched her disappear inside.

“Let’s move,” Gunner said sharply.

I walked back to the truck. Jericho handed me the gun, and I climbed into the back. He looked in at me. “Guess you’ve never done anything like this before.”

“Yeah,” I answered weakly. Unfortunately, I had. And the irony of it all was that that incident had landed me here at the compound. And now I was climbing back into a box truck, ready to transport illegal cargo. It was a little like walking circles when you’re lost.

Jericho shut the door and in the clammy darkness of the box, my mind went straight to Dex and how I’d gotten here in the first place.





Chapter 7

Luke

One month earlier



Dex glanced out the tinted window of the truck. “I’m just glad we’re traveling over land instead of underwater.” He looked over at me. I was always amazed at how relaxed he could be when were heading into a sea of shit. We’d taken painstaking steps to make sure everything was in place. Pulse, the snitch who’d decided to give up damming information in exchange for protection, had hooked us up with the underground courier service that provided trucks and drivers for the transport of illegal goods. The guy who ran the operation didn’t much care who his drivers were as long as they were willing to face possible death for a nice chunk of pay. His drivers never had knowledge of what they were hauling or who they were transporting for. It was a ‘the less you know the better’ kind of job. As long as you had some courage and could drive a truck, you were in. Dex and I had gone undercover as men who’d done this kind of work before. But unlike most drivers, we knew plenty. We were moving a boat load, or a nacro-submarine load, of cocaine to a warehouse owned by Troy Griffin, the president of the Bent from Hell MC.

“I mean have you seen pictures of those narco-submarines?” Dex continued with his philosophizing. They look like something I might have built in the backyard out of my dad’s spare car parts.” He shook his head. “You’d have to pay me a lot more than they’re paying us to get me to travel from Columbia to Mexico in one of those snap together submarines.”

“You do realize that you’re not actually going to get paid as a courier, right? Especially because this job is not going to end successfully.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He drummed a beat on the dashboard. He was amped up. Dex loved stepping into risky situations. He thrived on danger, and even though everything had been carefully planned, this could go a million different ways. Only one of those ways had a happy ending, the one where we make a successful bust and Dex and I walk out with our lives.

We were nearing the abandoned Christmas tree farm where the meet up was to take place. “Who’s playing the dumb, loud mother fucker role today?” Dex asked.

I glanced over at him. “You always do the part justice, you take it.”

He clapped his hands once. “Awesome.”

“And stop acting like a kid on his way to Disneyland. When you’re this pumped up you make mistakes.”

“Right.” He made a pathetic attempt at relaxing.

I glanced over at him. “Now you look like a kid who’s wearing the itchy wool sweater his aunt knitted for him.”

He leaned back on the seat. “Hey, remember that time your dad took us to Disneyland?” he asked.

“Sure do. You puked on my churro.”

“I’d never been to an amusement park. I wasn’t used to those wild rides.”

I smiled over at him. “We were in the Small World ride.”

“Yeah, that boat action was too much. Another reason I’m glad we’re in a truck and not one of those submarines. Shit, they probably use that fucking white school glue to hold those things together.”