Mad Lizard Mambo (22 page)

We were at the edge of the forest, an outcropping of looming trees and moss-riddled
hapu
ferns. The dirt road dipped, throwing us out around the bend, and we emerged out of the dank and into the crimson-orange fields beyond. The fields spanned a few acres, with a tall dark building sitting in the middle of them, a slow-turning wind vane mounted on its peak.

“Where are we?” Malone gurgled. “Is that… opium?”

“Those are flowers,” I corrected, then muttered under my breath at the surrounding poppy fields. “That can be turned into opium. Maybe. I don’t know. And if you’re smart, you don’t ask.”

“Stalker rules or your rules?” Ryder quipped.

“Common fricking sense rules. Don’t stick your nose into somebody else’s business. You get to keep your nose longer,” I replied. The poppies turned into scrub and canyon, and the road roughened beneath the truck’s tires. A bend in the road and we were at the edge of a thicket with a heavy metal gate blocking the way. “And we’re here. Don’t get out of the truck. Wait for—”

A blast of buckshot took out one of the transport’s side mirrors, and I swore when Malone grabbed my arm. Shaking him off, I grabbed the sawed-off shotgun I’d shoved between the two front seats, then went out the door, yelling for Ryder to keep Malone down.

“Dutch Truitt!” I rested my shotgun on the window frame of the open door, aiming toward the low bushes where I thought Dutch was hiding. “It’s Kai! Kai Gracen!”

The bushes rustled; then I got my reply. “That asshole Dempsey with you?”

“Why is it everyone you meet hates that man?” Ryder asked from his crouch between the seats. “It is nearly universal.”

“Yeah, long story. Okay, so it’s always a long story.” Raising my hands, I held the shotgun over my head and stood up. “Dempsey’s not here. Just me. And a couple of clients. I’m looking for a gun, Dutch. Hoping you can do a ride along.”

The bushes broke, and one of the largest dogs I’d seen gamboled out of the shadowed tree line. It ignored Dutch’s shouts for it to come back. Its wide mouth, set into a black-lipped grin, and its brace of teeth were more to hold back its long pink tongue than a threat to bite. Shaggy with a thick yellow-brindle coat, the dog was mostly leg and chest, with a long, looping tail thick enough to knock a man to his knees with a single wag.

“Whoa, puppy,” I cautioned, but the damned canine, like its owner, didn’t care one bit what I wanted. “Hey, slow down—”

The dog hit the door at a full run, slamming its massive paws against the metal hard enough to shove me into the truck and pin me in. I dropped the shotgun, my fingers numb from the hit, and my legs buckled, caught along the back of my knees by the inner frame. Unable to move, I half sat, half stood while the enormous sorghum-colored beast proceeded to lick the skin from my face.

“Maggie! Damn it, worst watchdog ever,” Dutch grumbled, working out of the bushes. “Hold on, boy. I’ll come to you.”

He hadn’t changed much. Hells, I was fairly certain he was wearing the same torn overalls and plaid shirt I’d seen him in the last time I’d passed through. Taller than me by a foot, he was wide and grizzled, his broad tanned face embellished with a shock of frizzy white hair poking out of an old black cowboy hat and a full beard, yellowed from years of cigarettes and bad coffee. He limped, his prosthetic leg whirring and groaning over the uneven ground, and while his right eyelid drooped, it did nothing to hide the crafty, skeptical gleam in his hard blue gaze.

Dutch shooed the dog as he leaned his shotgun against the truck. He yanked the door away, then folded me into a fierce, back-pounding hug. My eyes watered a bit as I caught a whiff of Dutch, a mix of bitter nicotine and old dirt, but it was a familiar scent, one I knew nearly as well as Dempsey’s or Jonas’s. I hugged him back, then felt him stiffen.

“Goddamn it, you brought one of those cat-bastards with you,” he spat into my ear, then let me go, shoving me back against the truck’s solid frame while Maggie lumbered after a glass-winged butterfly near the edge of the road. “Where’s my fricking gun?”

“Clients, Dutch,” I reminded him, rubbing at the small of my back where the door latch dug into me. “No killing the clients. Or me.”

“We don’t take—” He stabbed at my chest once with a hard finger. Then his face dropped. “Shit, I forget, you know? The war took a hell of a lot from me, and it’s hard to remember you’re one of them too.”

“War’s a shitty thing,” I murmured, grabbing Dutch’s shotgun just in case his remorse was as short-lived as his control over his temper. “And yeah, I forget sometimes too, but usually there’s someone right there to remind me. Now, you going to open the gate so we can get out of the damned road, or am I going to have to pitch you out here?”

“Might as well come in. Bring your cat-bastard client too,” Dutch mumbled, taking a good look at Ryder over my shoulder. “And while you’re in there, you should air that truck out. Smells like someone puked.”

I MADE
Malone scrub the truck out while Ryder, Dutch, and I sat under his ranch house’s covered porch and drank coffee. Malone wasn’t having much luck, mostly because he was still green around the gills and smelling his own vomit made him gag. Combined with Maggie’s insistence on grabbing at the end of the hose and dragging it away with her, the truck’s interior wasn’t going to be cleaned out any time soon. I didn’t care. It was a good learning lesson for Malone on the consequences of his actions and gave Maggie something to do while we hashed out the job for Dutch.

Dutch heard us out, lit the end of a hand-rolled cigarette, then said, “You all are nuts.”

“That goes without saying.” I shook my head at Ryder, who looked like he was about to protest the slandering of our sanity. “Question is, do you want to do the job?”

Dutch tapped his fake knee, a dull rap of plastic and steel. “Forgot I got this? Don’t see so good either. Used to be I could snipe a hit from a mile out. Now it’s closer to half of that.”

“Yeah, these guys can’t hit the broad side of a barn.” I frowned at Ryder’s slap against my thigh. “It’s true. His Lordship here’s better than Malone, but I’m not going to bet on it. I need someone to help me get them back to San Diego if things go wrong and maybe cover us with fire if we need it. We’re going through Mercury Valley, Dutch, and then there’s this small problem of—”

My words were lost in a popcorn spit of hot steel and screams.

I shoved Ryder down as I reached for the shotgun I’d brought up to the porch for Dutch. The sidhe lord bitched at me, but Dutch began to shout for Maggie to hide, then hooked his finger into a knothole by our feet.

The smell of gun oil hit me, and my mouth watered.

Dutch passed me a Desert Eagle and ammo. Then I was over the porch railing, cutting through the gunfire to get to Malone. Maggie was nowhere to be seen, and the ground spat up chunks of dirt over my boots where bullets dug down, but I couldn’t risk stopping. Counting on Dutch to get Ryder inside, I couldn’t see Malone anywhere until the side door slid open and he sat cradling one of my Glocks, ducking his head every time another shot went off.

“You okay?”

He nodded. Malone was alive and sporting the same number of holes as when I’d left him to clean out the truck. A damned sight better than I’d hoped for.

“Move over,” I said, jostling in to sit on the doorframe. The truck wasn’t taking as much fire as I’d expected, but that was going to change. Whoever was shooting probably spotted me sprinting toward the transport. Elbowing Malone, I put the ammo down my back pocket. “Going to need you to do something for me, Robbie.”

“What?” Terrified, he looked up at me. I didn’t blame the kid. So far he’d been in my presence for less than a few days and had two gunfights and a black dog attack under his belt.

“There’s no magazine in that gun. I didn’t load it, so it’s not going to do you any good, so put it down.” I caught a piece of wind ruffling my face, a whisper of a bullet angled a foot away from the truck. From the porch came an answering volley, Dutch laying down a steady spread toward the bushes near an old broken-down shack on the edge of his property. “There’s armor built into the sides of this thing, so wedge yourself between the backseats and stay there. I’m going to go take care of that asshole shooting at us.”

“Shouldn’t I load it? Or you load it?” Malone held the Glock out to me.

“You shot me the last time you had a gun,” I reminded him. “So no, it stays as it is. Go get behind the damned seats.”

The Eagle was a heavy piece, throwing me a bit off balance, but as weapons went, it was a glorious, deadly gun. I liked Glocks because they were easy to toss around without worrying about it going off because someone looked at it wrong. With a safety built into the trigger, it needed a deliberate squeeze to get a round off. The Eagle made no such promises. Its safety was a flip latch, and from the looks of the gleaming monster I held in my hand, Dutch welded it permanently to
off
. Since the Glock’s ammo was tucked away near the driver’s seat, I was going to have to go in with the Eagle, using Dutch’s fire to give me a bit of breathing room.

With as erratic as the gunfire was, I couldn’t be sure if whoever Marshall pissed off was incompetent or, like Malone, didn’t know what the hell they were doing. Still, a bullet through the head killed, regardless, and any second, the asshole shooting at us was going to hit someone.

Dutch gave me another volley, and I headed for the tree line.

“You want a piece of me?” Dutch screamed from the porch, planting a bullet in the shack’s tin roof. It sang and rattled, covering the ground in a sprinkle of powdered rust. His shouting was a distraction, more to draw the attention of our shooter than any ego. “Want me to come out there and put one in you?”

“I’d like that,” I muttered, ducking into the tangled brush.

I hated sage, and California was ripe with it. It grew in places nothing else could grab on to and flourished in everything from sand to clay. No matter where I was, it was right there beside me, grabbing at my face and clothes, but while it was softer than it looked, it was a bitch to climb through, especially when left unchecked for a few seasons of growth.

The sagebrush around Dutch’s place looked like it’d been planted by Balboa himself and blessed by Gaia, because I’d been through death-spider webs less clingy.

“You out there, maggot?” Another shout from the porch, this time one slathered with sidhe. Ryder, probably prompted by Dutch, considering the language. I wasn’t even sure Ryder knew what a maggot was.

“Great, they’re over there bonding while I’m getting my ass shot off,” I muttered, circling the shack. I saw something move and brought the Eagle up. It was like slinging a small bag of rice up from my knee, and I steadied it in a firm grip. “Thing’s like hefting a cannon.”

The sun was dropping fast, turning the tree line into a curtain of maybes and darkness. A shot blew, aimed away from the ranch, or so I thought, but in the pines and sage, it was hard to gauge direction. The shape I’d spotted moved again, and then someone—a man—swore, followed by a very manly scream.

I broke into a run. The shape I’d seen was too big to be Maggie, but I couldn’t rule out another kind of dog. For all I knew, the pack followed us from Rainbow to Changa’s then on to Dutch’s. Or at least I hoped it was the same pack. Having three roaming in the area would be nearly too much to leave behind, and Ryder’s little trip past Old Vegas would have to wait until I collected their pelts.

“Bitch!” someone shouted. Sounds of fighting cut through the air, and I could hear Dutch yelling at me for a report.

There was another scream, and I sprang from the bushes, tearing through the sage. My legs hurt from the healing shotgun blast and
ainmhi dubh
’s bite. The Eagle’s weight dragged my hands down, but I couldn’t let it drop. Another twist and I stood at the shack’s rear wall, gun drawn and aimed straight at the Latino-German woman standing over a sprawled-out, bony man I’d caught a glimpse of at Sparky’s.

But not as familiar as the woman.

She glanced up at me, an eerie combination of her mother’s soft, pretty features and her father’s steely, grim expression. Her hand was steady, her weapon’s muzzle aimed at the middle of the man’s forehead, and her boot heel lodged into his crotch. He squirmed when he saw me. I’d have squirmed too with a hard rubber wedge pressed into my balls, and he whimpered when he spotted the Eagle.

“
Cari
.” I dropped the Eagle down, pointing it at the nearly gibbering man on the ground. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Apparently”—she grinned at me, jerking her head at her captive—“I’m saving your ass.”

“SAYS HE
works for some guy named Oscar Bennett.” Dutch wiped his hands on a rag, cleaning gun oil from his fingers. “Sound familiar?”

I sat on the opposite end of the porch from where Cari and Dutch had handcuffed our shooter—one Johnny Garcia—to an old metal and vinyl kitchen chair. The railing was hard under my ass, but it felt good to let my legs dangle, and it gave me a good view of the ranch grounds. I’d gone back to my Glocks, holstered across my shoulders and on my thigh. With the floodlights on, the yard was blindly bright, blue shadows flung out in all directions from under the vehicles, fences, and the random chicken confused by the inexplicable daylight.

“I know an Orin Bennett. Runs the Diamond Kitty. It’s a elfin fetish club in the understreets. Could be related.” I snuck a peek at Garcia. “Doesn’t explain why this Oscar guy is on our ass.”

I’d left Malone in one of Dutch’s spare bedrooms, worn down from the day and his injuries. By the time I’d peed and got some coffee, they’d already wrung Garcia out. As interrogations went, Garcia was either a disappointment or the best of subjects. He’d started blabbing as soon as they’d sat him down and closed the bracelets over his wrists.

“Get off the damned railing and ask him yourself,” Dutch ordered. “Seems he’s got the willies around the elfin. Ryder got within two feet of the guy, and he began telling us every damned bad thing he’d done since he stole his first lollipop.”