Move the Sun (Signal Bend #1)(80)

“CJ—you stay with Wyatt, make sure he’s contained. Show and Bart—you go to Lilli’s place. Don’t think she’s there, but I need to be sure. Be careful—she’ll be on alert and maybe suspicious of anybody but me right now. She doesn’t know how the vote went. The rest of us, we’re going to Ray’s. I think there’s trouble, and I think it’s there.” He met each brother’s eyes. “We clear? We good?” They nodded as one and geared up.

oOo

They didn’t bother with stealth; instead, they roared up to Ray’s house and ran in, full-bore. Isaac didn’t have the patience for stealth.

The door was standing open; Isaac was first in. Rover was lying at the far end of the short hallway, a thickening pool of blood making a crimson halo around his head and shoulders. Isaac went to him and squatted to check his pulse; the rest of the Horde fanned out to check the small house. Rover was dead, shot just to the side of his right eye. Isaac hoped he’d gone instantly.

Len was standing immediately behind Isaac. “We’re clear here.” Isaac looked up at him, and Len nodded at Rover’s body. “You think that was Ray or Lilli?”

Standing and turning fast, Isaac almost grabbed Len. “It was Ray, and you know it. No way Lilli would’ve shot the kid.”

“Not on purpose, but we don’t know what went on here.”

Isaac did. He could see it clearly. He’d put Rover on watch detail, and Ray had taken him down after Wyatt warned him about Lilli. Jesus Christ, this was a mess.

He needed to find Lilli. She wasn’t in the house, and Ray’s car was in the yard. He knew damn well she wouldn’t have just driven up—she’d given him enough detail about her surveillance to know that her car was probably several miles away. It all added up to bad, but Isaac was convinced she had to be close. But where? Pushing his panic and worry back so that he could f*cking think, he went through the narrow back door and out into the overgrown yard.

Like any good country boy, Isaac was an experienced hunter. That made him a decent tracker. But good tracking skills weren’t required to be able to see that a major fight had gone down at the far corner of the house. The tall grass was flattened and matted and, as Isaac investigated, he saw blood staining the trampled growth—a couple of smaller but still noteworthy smears, a trail of drips and streaks, and then a much more sizable stain that had clearly been a pool before the earth had taken it in.

Squatting at the largest stain, Isaac breathed slowly, fighting for calm. It was Lilli’s blood. No earthly way he could know that, but he felt its certainty like he felt the ground under his feet. If it had been Ray’s blood, if Lilli had bled him like this, the Horde would have come upon a vastly different scene, he just knew it.

Ray had Lilli, and she was badly hurt. She was either already dead, and he was disposing of her body, or she would die soon. Despair was crowding in with the worry and panic. Isaac dropped his head to his knees and pushed it all back. Focus. Focus. If he had her, where were they be? With a deep breath he lifted his head and looked around. There—a vague trail of displaced grass and weeds. He went toward it and saw that it looked like someone was possibly dragged in that direction. Maybe it was wishful thinking, Isaac seeing a lead where there was none, but he had no better options, so he followed. He didn’t even call his brothers.

But Len saw him go; Isaac heard him hailing the rest of the Horde to follow. Now, though, now he wanted stealth. If there was a chance Lilli was alive, Isaac didn’t want to blow it because Ray saw most of the MC bearing down on him. Isaac turned and gestured for his men to fan out and stay quiet.

They followed the trail for almost ten minutes before Isaac understood where they were headed. By then, it had become much more obviously a trail, and had, in fact, begun to show signs that Ray was following what had been an actual trail trodden into the reedy grass and wildflowers of the lightly wooded field. Soon, they were in a thick stand of trees, and Isaac followed Ray’s progress easily. He came across one of Lilli’s running shoes in the path, and his heart skidded.

They were headed for an old deer blind. Isaac knew it because he’d hunted the woods all around here his whole life, as had all the men behind him. The blind was on Corin Petersen’s property—which was now a bank’s property. When they came upon it a few minutes later, Isaac ducked behind a cluster of wild growth, and gestured for everyone to stop and be still. He cocked his Glock. The rest of the Horde followed suit.

The blind was sized to accommodate four men for a day of waiting. It was elevated, its floor about four feet off the ground, and had once been painted in a camouflage pattern. Age, weather, and disuse had taken its toll, though, and its color was almost uniformly the grey of dying old wood. Most of the windows were still closed, their board shutters latched with hooks. Weeds had grown up all around it, and it was the weeds that told Isaac they’d found Ray’s destination. The growth was disturbed in a path directly to the basic set of steps leading into the blind, and tall, strong weeds had been broken sharply off at the point where they grew up in the empty spaces between each step.

At first, Isaac neither heard nor saw anything. Then, just as he was preparing to step out of cover and advance on the blind, its floor creaked, and he saw the building shimmy slightly. He stopped. He had to get in there, and he needed to surprise Ray when he did so. He had no idea what state he would find Lilli in. He needed to think.