Vice(9)

“Did he speak Spanish when he was with you?”

“Of course! Why the f*ck would he have been speaking in English?”

I want to pistol whip the motherf*cker for being rude, but I don’t think I can hit his head again without him losing consciousness. “Any recognizable scars? Tattoos? Any other defining features?”

“No. No, nothing! He looked…”

“He looked what?”

“He looked like an accountant or something. He wore nice clothes. Glasses. He wore glasses!”

Glasses? Strange, but then again what’s to stop a kidnapper and probable rapist from having bad vision? I shift my weight over Julio, scowling. “You have three seconds to tell me something useful about this guy, Julio, or I’m burying this knife in your carotid artery and I’m watching you bleed the f*ck out. Do you understand what I am saying to you right now?”

“I don’t know…damn it, Cade. You’re gonna suffer for this, I promise.”

Ignoring his panicked chatter, I hold up three fingers, and then I tuck the first into my palm. “One.”

“I can’t tell you something I don’t know!”

The second finger goes down. “Two.”

“Isn’t this enough? You’ve already taken my damned finger…”

“Three.” I’m bringing the knife down, fully intent on following through with my promise, when Julio shouts, stopping me in my tracks.

“WOLVES!”

The tip of the balisong stops, less than a milimeter from penetrating his skin. “Wolves?”

“Yes! Yeah, that’s right. Wolves. Manny kept talking to him about wolves. They were whispering together about a house for wolves. It didn’t make any sense to me, and this guy was spending a lot of money—I didn’t want to ask too many questions.”

“A house for wolves?” My incredulity colors my voice. “What the f*ck is that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know. I seriously don’t know. But they talked about it for hours. That’s all there is, Cade. I promise you. I swear it.”

Pity floods me. Julio, a thorn in the side of the Widow Makers MC for years now, looks like he’s about to burst into tears. There’s nothing more pathetic than watching a fat man cry. I nod my head, letting out a deep breath. “Okay. All right. I believe you. I suppose this means our conversation is at an end, then.” I sit back on my heels, releasing the pressure of the knife’s blade against Julio’s throat.

A visible tidal wave of relief washed over the man underneath me. “You really are going to regret this,” he snaps, anger returning to his eyes. “You’d better find my f*cking finger, before I—”

I plunge the knife forward, sinking the metal into his neck, watching all four inches as they disappear into his flesh. Shock registers on Julio’s face, his eyes growing wider and wider as he realizes what I’ve done. And what that means.

“But…I….told…” he splutters. Blood pumps out from between his fingers in thick, powerful spurts, almost strong enough to hit the high, grimy ceiling overhead. Julio scrambles with his four-fingered hand, trying to scoop the vital fluid back into his body, but the truth is there, written all over his face; he knows he’s already lost.

“You said it yourself,” I tell him, watching with a blank look on my face. “That’s all there is, Julio. That’s really all there is.” It takes just a few moments for a man to die like this. I sit on top of his chest, enjoying every single one of them. Maybe that’s wrong of me. Perhaps I’ve become unhinged. A normal person wouldn’t stab someone in the neck and observe with cold, disconnected interest as their life force flowed out of them and they died. On the other hand, Julio should never have told me he knew where my sister was and he planned on obtaining her for his own purposes. That was a pretty big f*cking mistake. What was he going to do with her, if this glasses-wearing accountant had made good on his deal and sent Laura back to him? Taunt and bully Rebel, for sure. But he would have taken his pound of flesh before he struck any kind of bargain with Jamie. He would have taken more than he should have from her, and for that he deserved to die.

He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone…

It’s not often that quotes from JC himself play out in my mind. I’m not a religious guy, and I don’t often find myself in situations that lean themselves toward righteous thinking, however covered in the blood of the lives I have just taken, I find myself feeling pretty f*cking pensive. I’ve judged Julio and found him short. I could have just gone, taken the small fragments of information he gave to me and left him, injured and squealing like a stuck pig in his bed. I didn’t, though. I doled out the punishment I saw fit for his crimes.

One of these days, someone will judge me, and I will fall short of their expectations. I’ll gladly accept whatever penance they decide to serve upon my head when the time comes.

Until then, I’m going to keep on doing what I have to do in order to get my sister back.





CHAPTER TWO





MR. AMERICA





The woman with the needle hanging out of her arm is dead. I want to bury her and the dog in the back of Julio’s yard, and I also want to finish off those four coke heads in the downstairs living room, but I have time to do neither. I have to get on the road; I have to hit Santa Clarita before dark, and the sun is already bobbing lower in the sky than I like. I duck low and weave my way through the long grass back toward the scrambler, planning the next step of my journey: ride for six hours, find somewhere to wash properly, store the scrambler somewhere safe, and get my ass on a plane.