Hunter walked over to Arturo Alvarez and kicked the gun from his hand.
“And the second you let your guard down, he’d have taken your head off with that holdout up his sleeve,” I replied, nodding to the body. Hunter reached down and pulled the sleeve back, exposing the little silver nine millimeter.
“He was never going to take the offer,” I said.
“We haven’t destroyed the real men in charge Sarah. They’ll keep coming back if I can’t stop the other brothers…”
I wasn’t listening. My ears were still ringing from the gunshots, but my eyes were trained on the wall behind Arturo… And the small scratches on the floor.
“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.
Chapter 50
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.
Hunter popped into the back of the van and checked on the girls. He lifted each of their chins in turn, gazing into their eyes and flicking his fingers lightly to draw their attention. When they were all vaguely responsive, he jumped out and locked the doors back up.
Smacking the side twice and gesturing to the driver, Hunter stepped aside as the engine immediately ignited and the van peeled rubber out of there.
“Where is he taking the girls?” I asked him.
“The hospital,” Hunter answered me quickly, before quickly addressing the rest of them: “Go inside, bring the maps to the empty back room, and leave behind everything we lent you for this. The money is yours to keep. Sleep well tonight, because you fucking deserve it.”
The bikers properly parked their motorcycles around the sides of the bar, and strolled indoors with their weapons, their bulletproof vests, and the entire contents of Arturo’s room spread between a dozen of them.
“The hospital?” I confirmed with him.
“Right now, those girls don’t know their ass from their elbows,” he told me. “They’re going to be suffering one hell of a hangover in the morning… better to let the authorities take over on that front.”
The authorities…
“Oh god, we’re so fucked,” I muttered into my hands. I felt Hunter step closer, and his arm w
rapped around my shoulders.
“What do you mean?”
“What we did tonight…”
“What we did tonight was save lives, Sarah – three of those lives belonging to that pack of missing cheerleaders you came here so desperately to find…”
“We crossed the border illegally. We’re anonymously dropping a bunch of drug addict girls to a local hospital. I can’t take credit for this. If word gets out on what we did…”
“Word won’t get out on what we did,” Hunter reassured me.
I looked up into his eyes as he stroked strands of hair from my face. It was so hard to grasp his conviction.
“But the girls,” I insisted. “They might not remember anything now, but when they regain their coherency, they’ll sure as shit remember an army of bikers ripping them out from that shithole and dragging them back across the border...”
Hunter’s eyebrow rose.
“You’re not worried?” I asked, trying to make sense of all of this. “Aren’t you worried that the cops will come crawling all over the Devil’s Dragons for what we did tonight?”
“You leave that to me,” he smiled cryptically. “We can handle the police around here…”
“You can handle the police?” I asked. My wrists wrapped loosely around the back of his neck, and I grinned into a powerful kiss on his lips. They felt firm but soft against mine, tasting of power, strength, and beneath all the rest, tenderness.
“We should get out of here,” Hunter whispered into my ear. “The others know what to do… they can govern themselves for a little while without me.”
“But what about your prisoners? You have Fang down in your cellar…”
“My Dragons can handle him,” he shrugged. “He can wait until the goddamn morning.”
“Well… if you think so,” I murmured, kissing him on the neck. “Seeing as I’m out of a job and don’t exactly have to hurry home… Do you think your men can handle everything for few hours?”
“Everyone here is a brother right now,” Hunter chuckled. “I think that they can make do without me for a single night…”