Priest was waitin’ with a smile like an open wound, red and ugly as he took Paula from me and made quick work of tapin’ her mouth shut, then bindin’ her hands and feet. He laid her gently in the back of the van and then rounded to the driver’s seat, takin’ off without sayin’ a word.
Phone vibrated in my jeans, and when I checked it, I had a text from Nova.
Nova: Curtains will be there in a minute.
I grabbed Cress and kissed her hand. “Goin’ back in to talk to the Staff Sergeant. You get home now, yeah?”
“Yeah,” she agreed. “That was fun as heck, though.”
I grinned at her, slapped her ass just to feel it move under the leather, and kiss her once more like a stamp of possession to her lips. “Want this on ya when I get home.”
“Yes, sir,” she said with a sassy mock-salute I felt in my balls. “Be safe.”
I nodded and watched her walk out of the mouth of the alley straight across the street to her parked car.
A moment later, Curtain drew up in his obnoxious red Dodge Challenger, Bat already in the passenger seat.
“Good?” he asked immediately as I slid in the back.
I nodded. “Priest’s got her. How’re the other crews doin’?”
“Heckler, Wiseguy, and Lab-Rat got that rookie Officer Windham, takin’’im back to Angelwood Farms now.”
It was a simple plan really, divide and conquer the weakest links in Danner’s armour. He was goin’ after our women, so we got no compulsion about targetin’ him and his. Priest would work his dark magic, and I had no doubt that by the mornin’, we’d have two turncoats in Danner’s rotten to the core operation.
I wanted it to be enough, but the word of a biker bitch and a rookie against the word of an RCMP officer wasn’t ironclad, not even a little, so we were on our way to Danner’s house to break in usin’ the alarm code Susan Hobbs had so kindly given us.
B & E wasn’t somethin’ I’d add to my resume, but I’d been good with a set of lock picks since I was a kid the way most children were good at baseball and card games. There was somethin’ satisfying about findin’ the right combination of tools to open a locked door, a box filled with potential treasures. Zeus had locked up everythin’ when we were kids—his guns, his cash, his fuckin’ porn—and I’d made it a habit to get to all of it.
So it was easy enough to break into the swanky apartment he was renting downtown with a view of the water. He had an office space, door locked, a desk with three locked drawers, and lock box hidden in a bench seat.
Bat, Curtains, and I worked through everythin’ carefully. If we found somethin’ it had to be enough to know it was there or give us something tangible to go off to offer to the Internal Affairs Department in Vancouver that Lion and Officer Hutchinson were tryin’ to convince to look into the Staff Sergeant and his voice.
We found fuck all.
I cursed viciously under my breath as I packed Danner and Susan’s divorce papers back into their folder and shuffled a random list of seemingly random women’s names into another. My gaze nearly slid straight off the page again until I caught sight of two familiar names.
Honey Yves.
Lila Meadows.
“Fucking fuck,” Bat cursed as he peered out the drapes into the front drive. “We got company.”
Adrenaline sluiced through me, but I swallowed the metallic surge of it on the back of my tongue and finished puttin’ the shit away, lookin’ at Bat for a plan.
He pointed at the bench, then back at me, turned to Curtains and motioned toward one of the two large gun cabinets on either side of the desk against the back wall.
Silently, heart pounded so loud and strong in my throat I thought I’d gag, we moved into hidin’.
It took a few minutes for the door to unlock at the base of the stairs and the sound of feet clompin’ up the stairs, but I used the time to regulate the harshness of my breathin’ and get as comfortable as I could crushed down in the bench.
“You and your husband made me promises,” Danner was sayin’ when he finally got close enough to hear his murmur. “I expect you to deliver.”
“Ah well, Sergeant, I could say the same of you,” Irina Ventura drawled.
A shiver ripped viciously down my spine.
If one of the brothers so much as fuckin’ breathed wrong, we were all dead.
Irina was the wife of Javier Ventura, the Canadian representative of the biggest Mexican cartel on the West Coast. She was fuckin’ beautiful, but she was also goddamn poison, the woman behind the man, the one running an underage pornography ring outside Entrance.