Through A Glass, Darkly (The Assassins of Youth MC #1)(64)

Carradine sounded extremely happy to hear from me. “Fortunati! Hey, how long did it take you to get out of Black Rock City? Took me about four frigging hours—”

“Yeah, there’s been a kidnapping. I just got home from Bullhead City and Mahalia’s been taken by the fundies.” I told him the basic story. It was only a bare bones story with not much meat, not much to go on. But I knew what I wanted Carradine to do. “Look. Make your raid now. I know you said the wheels of justice turn slowly. But I also know you’ve been planning this raid for weeks so you must have some of the wheels in motion. If you don’t f*cking do it, I will.”

“It’s not that simple, Fortunati. Most of these guys will be coming from Salt Lake. I understand your need to have this take place right away. You want your woman back. But we need to work with protocol and within the existing parameters—”

“Carradine, I know you’ve been working on this for awhile. Don’t tell me you can’t at least get a few guys together and go arrest that f*cking multiple-wife-raping son of a bitch. You can get him on bigamy if nothing else.”

“Yes, but we want all our ducks in a row. Wouldn’t you rather have him charged with fraud, money laundering, and child sexual assault?”

“Go into the coffee shop just like Vonda told you,” I roared, near my breaking point. “If you bring undercover vehicles and not those giant black SUVs with the letters ‘SWAT’ blaring from the doors and roofs, if you just manage to dial it back a bit and go low-key, you can get Chiles today, you can get him tomorrow, I don’t f*cking care, but I want my f*cking old lady back!”

I should’ve known better than to rely on some f*cking fed. At the very least I figured Carradine could create a giant diversion while I went searching for Mahalia. I didn’t care—I’d hold a piece to a Morbot’s head to get my intel. Whatever the f*ck it took.

Carradine sounded like he was getting irritated with me. “We already have a low-key raid in place, Fortunati. And I appreciate all your information about the bookmaking op and all. But we want to f*cking do it right. Right now I could muster two, maybe three other guys at the drop of a hat. The team is in Salt Lake—”

“And it takes four hours to drive here from there,” I bellowed. I’d gone out onto the front deck by now, but I knew Vonda could hear me. I knew I was upsetting her even more. I couldn’t care. I was doing what needed to be done.

“Look,” Carradine bellowed back. “I’ll step up the urgency level of the raid, and now I can add kidnapping onto the charges for the warrants. I’ve got a bunch of John and Jane Doe warrants so I can just add extras onto there as they pop up. But I can’t just alter a finely-tuned op because your old lady got taken.”

“Yes you can,” I shouted. “I was in MARSOC. We conducted combat ops in Eastern Afghanistan. You can be ready to deploy at a second’s notice and you f*cking know it.” I paused to take a breath. Carradine wasn’t overly eager to interrupt me, anyway. I said what needed to be said. I didn’t want to step on Carradine’s toes and throw a wrench in his op, but I was an outlaw. I couldn’t wait for the f*cking law to come to my assistance. We were used to taking things into our own hands. “I’ll give you twenty-four hours. Can you muster enough men by then?”

“We’ll see,” Carradine said skeptically. “Let me hang up now so I can call my superior. Don’t go off half-cocked.”

I was so filled with rage I didn’t even have the bandwidth to laugh at the term “half-cocked.” “I’ll give you a day to get your men in place.”

I might have been lying. I wasn’t sure I could wait that long. Twenty-four hours during which Mahalia could be tortured, or moved to that fabled Texas compound. For all I f*cking knew, her name was a password already.

I spent the night tormented with gruesome images. Of course I couldn’t sleep. I stayed up drinking with Sledgehammer, Dust Bunny, and Dingo, plotting our moves. Naturally they wanted to participate in a raid of our own.

Looking back, this was the start of our new Assassins chapter. Sledge was the muscle who would encourage action. Dust Bunny was the theorist who could also devise bombs. And Dingo was the eager recruit, becoming more knowledgeable in technology every day. This tragedy was the catalyst for them to come together, giving us our first common goal.

I couldn’t say no to an Assassins raid. There were advantages and disadvantages to each side. The more men, the more we drew attention to ourselves. Any covert activity would be detected with more men. However, more men meant more firepower and muscle. We had to gauge how easy it would be to scare those polygs into doing our bidding. That wasn’t easy to gauge when they were such f*cking whackamoles to begin with.

I wound up falling into our bed about an hour before sunup. But I felt ready to roll. The angrier and drunker I got, the more I wanted to go in there with all barrels blazing. Maybe I was brash because I’d pretty much gotten away with killing Breakiron, even if in self-defense. I felt inviolable because I had the sense of right on my side. I was an enraged, pissed-off man in love, and no one got between Mahalia and me.

I think I managed to sleep a little. A couple of my men did, because we didn’t get rolling until about eleven. I hated that Vonda was seeing us off at the front door. She knew we were on our way to bury some human beings, whoever got in our way. That wasn’t something a teenaged girl should already know about.