Page 37 of Mace
And so off I went, once again with Alicia standing on the front porch of our clubhouse, watching me leave. At the last minute she ran out to give me a kiss. I bent my head down and gratefully accepted what she was offering. Her last whispered words to me were, “Be careful. I know my father is in Mexico, but I don’t trust him, some of his men might still be here.”
Her words unsettled me but spurred me on. She stepped back and I slammed my helmet into place and took off, with anger eating away at me for all that she’d endured. If I had ever harbored any doubt that she loved her old man on some level, her whispered words shattered that all to hell. He’d have to be one ruthless son of bitch to kill his own wife out of spite. Then again, Alicia knew her own father better than any of us. If she was convinced he’d kill her so easily, I had to believe her.
***
Storm had sent us all in different directions to search for any signs that her father or his men might still be here. We wanted to know which camps they used and get as much intel as possible before the meet-up. We were in small groups. Mine consisted of Celt, Hornet, and Coyote. The four of us would draw notice riding together but such a small number wouldn’t cause the kind of alarm that a dozen of us riding together would. It wasa compromise between safety in numbers and not alarming the locals.
Our job was to ride out to the location where my club brothers had found the bodies of the five gang members. The bodies were long removed, but when we arrived there was still police tape sectioning off a square piece of land, attached to three trees and a large boulder. Inside were dark patches where the bodies had bled out on the ground.
Glancing down, I muttered, “The next good rain should wash that way.”
Celt walked by and slapped me on the back. “Don’t ye start grieving over the lads who died here. They were feckin’ gang bangers.”
Celt’s thick Irish accent seemed never to fade away in the years that I’d known him. Much like Alicia, although he was speaking English, his heritage was evident in his speech.
Coyote stooped down to pick up one of the numbered yellow cones the police had used to mark the ground where clues were found. “Celt’s right. When criminals kill criminals it’s like the trash taking itself out.”
I grimaced because even criminals were people, who had families at home waiting on them. When did we become so uncaring and callous? Something about taking a life never sat right with me, I knew in our way of life it could be unavoidable, but still, it unsettled me.
Hornet spoke up from behind me, “It was probably for the best. The gang those assholes belonged to sold drugs to kidsand trafficked women. There are five less of those fuckers to prey on the innocent people of this town.”
I reluctantly let go of any angst in my own mind. “Yeah, you’re probably right. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
Celt took a guess. “Ye were thinking that even criminals are humans. I get that. I truly do. The thing is, I don’t feckin’ care, especially if they’re trafficking women. If someone did that to my Dusty, I would rip their feckin’ head off and let the good lord decide how wrong it was, come judgment day.”
I heard Coyote make a sound for us to be quiet and he waved us over. Only he was on the other side of a little creek, clearly a tributary of the river I used to escape the area with Alicia in tow. I barely remembered it was there because it was inconsequential to our escape at the time. We treaded through the water and looked to the area he was pointing to.
There were muddy footprints and what appeared to be drops of blood leading away and forming a trail. The initial drops were larger but then became smaller, someone had been running trying to find cover. Excited, we followed it. It led to a small cave. We drew our weapons and inched forward.
Celt started to take the lead, but I quickly stepped in front of him because he had a family waiting at home for him, a wife and kids. He frowned at me but allowed it. When I approached the cave, the smell hit me, and I lowered my gun. Whoever had come this way hadn’t made it out again. I ducked into the cave and what I found made my blood run cold.
“Take a look in here,” I shouted to the others.
They all crowded in, and we stared down at the dead body. It was a man in cowboy hat with one hell of a gunshot wound to the stomach. His face was unrecognizable as he’d already become food for the forest critters, but what I could see suggested that he might have been Latino. Though to be fair, I don’t know if his own mother would have recognized him now. He had opened a small first aid kit and tried to give himself first aid. I could tell because some bandages were bloody and cast aside like he’d lingered for days and didn’t make it through changing out his dressings. I guessed he’d gotten caught in the crossfire between Ramirez’s men and the gang bangers—though which side he belonged to was anyone’s guess.
Celt squatted down with his handkerchief held over his nose and mouth. After looking the man over, he announced. “I’m gonna say he’s been dead at least a week, maybe more since the cave is cool and doesn’t get a lot of sunlight.
Coyote thumped his hand on top of one of the crates. “Looks like drugs.”
Celt pointed to a couple that were shaped differently, longer than they were wide. “Those are crates for rifles or shotguns.” After rummaging through a couple of boxes to get a feel for how much was in each crate, Celt was silent for a moment. “I’m not sure of the exact street value of this stash but I think we’re looking at half a million dollars. Maybe more, depending on how pure the drugs are. Then there’s the guns on top of that.”
Hornet whistled. “That’s a lot of drugs. Too bad we have to destroy them all.”
“Yeah, too bad. But we can’t let Griffinsford get flooded with this shit.”
Celt gave a jerky shrug. “That’ll be up to Storm and the other club officers. Our job is to find shit. Their job is to figure out what to do with it. This is too much for us to carry out of here ourselves. I’ll call it in to Storm and he can send a van and some extra muscle.”
He turned and pulled out his cell phone. Within moments of him getting Storm on the line for a video call and panning his cell phone around for our club president to see the loot, another phone started ringing. In the dimly lit cave I could see a phone beside the dead man. The caller ID flashed up as Ramirez.
Almost without a conscious thought I walked over, picked it up and answered it.
“Yeah.”
“Hernando. Damn it I thought you were dead. From now on when I call, you pick up the damned phone.”
I glanced over at Celt who was looking at me like I was crazy. He started making a slashing motion across his neck with his free hand. It took me a second to realize that he wanted me to hang up, so I did.
“What the actual fuck, Mace. Why would you answer the dead guy’s phone?”