Shelter From The Storm (The Bare Bones MC Book 6)(14)

I’d seen where the lowrider had disappeared through the trees on foot, so I took the same path. Only then did I allow myself to think a little bit about my ex-wife. Pippa did remind me of Lola, but only superficially. They were both from Texas. They were both sassy and brash, full of piss and vinegar. I didn’t like that Pippa reminded me of Lola, though. I would not have my buttons pushed the way Lola had. Pippa was nothing like her.

Then I started wondering why it mattered so much to me. If I equated Pippa with Lola, it’d be so much easier just to pop her off, wouldn’t it? But I’d decided not to, and let the chips fall where they may. I’d worm my way out of it with Jones. Pretend I couldn’t find her, something along those lines. Not that I’d ever lost a mark I was tracking before. I’d dye my hair black if he made me go into New Mexico.

There. The hair-netted Ochoa pendejo had approached a tall, electrified, barbed wire fence. Floodlights and security cameras topped some of the poles. This place was secure like Fort Knox, so what was he hoping to gain? I held back behind a pine tree and watched while he cased the joint, as if he was about to make a prison break.

The cholo hadn’t been following Pippa at all. She was right—he’d been following June Driving Hawk, and she had led him right to her pot plantation.

On the one hand, it might be considered overkill if I buried a guy who was just scoping out whose indicas were choicest. He was probably just checking out who had headier, more cerebral selections. Or he could be eyeing the security system, figuring a way to breach it. I was a sicario, a paid hitman. Not someone who got a thrill out of offing random guys who were trying to figure out if someone’s sativas had been pinched or topped.

Like me, he had a piece in the waistband of his chinos, but no rifle. A South Korean fragmentation grenade was clipped to his belt. I could get the drop on him, put my barrel to his head, and demand to know his f*cking business. Lytton would probably appreciate me finding out why the guy was here. I was just starting toward him to do that when my dilemma was answered for me.

A large caliber round went zinging past both our heads, nicking the pine I’d been hiding behind. Was the Leaves of Grass guard shooting at me? What the f*ck? In the one point five seconds it took me to sling my rifle from my back to my side, the cholo turned and regarded me with wide eyes. It was hard to detect whether he was full of terror or rage, but one thing was for certain, he whipped that Glock from his waistband and leveled it at me, gangsta tilt style.

As another bullet from the plantation guard went winging past my ear—they were more like warning bullets, I gathered—I squeezed the trigger of my rifle and nailed the pendejo right in the chest with about four, five rounds. He jiggled around a bit like a marionette, now definitely looking surprised he’d been shot. But a strange thing happened.

Another few rounds, coming from somewhere behind me, hit the Ochoa man in the head. Bone and brain matter splashed the electrical wire of the fence. Before I could get a grip on what had just occurred, some moron came leaping out of the underbrush behind me. I mean he seriously jumped like a springbok with unnecessarily high steps, gripping his rifle as though he were in an ROTC training film.

Of course, I leveled my piece on him now. I didn’t need any f*cking competition for making the hit, and this newcomer was really confusing the issue.

“I got him!” the guy yelled jubilantly. “Bam! Pow! I sure gave him the business!”

The interloper—I now realized it was that annoying Wolf Glaser who, according to Santiago Slayer, was “a good man to have in a hard place”—went right up to the sprawled body, put his boot on the cholo’s chest, and took a selfie, smiling the whole while. His belt fairly dragged down his pants with all the implements hooked there. Bowie knife, taser, two grenades, a radio, brass knuckles, nunchaku—I mean the only thing missing was a Walkman.

I was just open-mouthed with disbelief. Still wearing that wide grin, Wolf Glaser kicked the Ochoa for good measure and bounded over to me. “I’m just here to meet my girlfriend. Well, she doesn’t know it yet. But she lives in the ranch house, the office for Leaves of Grass. Tracy’s a smoke show.”

“Is that so?” was all I could think to say.

“Well, right now she sort of lives with this nerd Tobias. He’s not a cool outlaw like we are. He’s just some bowl-headed, Game of Thrones-watching, Bloodborne-playing byte-boy, if you ask me.”

I said, “So she lives with another guy, and doesn’t know you’re coming?” Wait a minute. Why am I talking to this cockhead like this? “How the f*ck did you come to take a detour up this road? You know, I didn’t need your f*cking help to ace that Ochoa pendejo.”

“Oh, it that who it is? All I saw was this beaner about to shoot you, so I got him first.”

“No, I got him first. So why don’t you just continue down the road to the chick who doesn’t know you’re coming and doesn’t want you?”

That seemed to get to Wolf Glaser. The smile turned into a frown. He looked like a bowl-headed nerd whose joystick had broken. “It’s been so dull since I patched into the Bones. We haven’t had a good shoot-out in a long time. I just saw that guy about to shoot you, and did what comes naturally.”

I wasn’t falling for it. I waved my rifle in his general direction. “Just trundle down the road now, Poindexter. The Leaves of Grass guard knows where I am, so I can take it from here.”