Page 63 of Ride or Dies

Chapter Thirty-Five

Mason

The moment we turned onto Evie’s street, I could see something in her driveway, something that was too big to be her. I didn’t want to believe it could be my friend, but as I came to a stop just behind Levi, I recognized the patches on Sweeper’s jacket.

And then I saw the blood pooling around him.

“Fuck!” Levi growled. “Someone’s gonna die for this.”

“You two check the house for Evie,” Tucker said, moving toward Sweeper. “I’ll get him. See what he needs.”

I hoped it wasn’t gonna be a coroner. Either way, Levi’s words were still true.

Someone was going to die for this. And it was gonna hurt.

As much as I wanted Sweeper to be okay, Evie was at the front of my mind. I pulled my Desert Eagle and saw Levi reach for his weapon as we made our way toward the house. Because I was closest, Levi came up behind me, watching my back while I kept my attention on what was ahead. There were a couple lights on, and nothing looked disturbed from out here. No broken glass. The door was closed. When I tried the doorknob, I found it unlocked and my heart sank. No way in hell would Evie have left the door unlocked if she was inside.

The house was silent, but Levi and I cleared it room by room all the same. The last thing we wanted to do was rush and miss something or get ambushed.

I made a mental note of everything as we went. I wasn’t as smart as Tucker, but I had my own skill set, and it wasn’t just beating the shit out of people.

No visible signs of a struggle. No blood. Nothing broken or turned over. No drawers rummaged through or pulled out. Nothing that seemed out of place except the two wine glasses and a half-empty bottle on the table in front of the couch. One of the glasses had a smudge of lipstick the same color that my sister wore.

Everything I’d observed about Evie since she’d come back said that she was still the sort of person who liked to pick up after herself right away. Came with having grown up with a mother who rarely cleaned unless someone complained. Those glasses and that wine told me that Evie hadn’t had a chance to put things away after Jenna left.

The rest told its own story.

“No one broke in,” Levi said as we met at the front door, lowering our guns but not putting them away.

“She wasn’t taken in here,” I added. “She was already outside. Probably didn’t even come back inside after Jenna left.” A thought occurred to me. “I’ll bet she was out there, talking to Sweeper, when it happened.”

As we walked outside, he asked, “You don’t think she heard the gunshot and came out to investigate? We both know if she thought Sweeper was in danger, she wouldn’t have just hidden in the house.”

“She wouldn’t have,” I agreed. “But I don’t think she would’ve taken the time to shut the door behind her.”

Tucker had rolled Sweeper onto his back, and now I could see the blood, dark against the white of his t-shirt. He was breathing, but his eyes were closed. Tucker had taken off his own shirt and torn it to try to slow the bleeding, but from what I could see, it was a hell of a lot more serious than the graze I’d gotten.

“Ambulance is on the way,” Tucker said. “One bullet went straight through his shoulder. The other one is in his thigh, and I can’t find an exit. I got his arm and leg both tied off, but he lost a lot of blood before we got here. He hit his head when he went down, which is probably what knocked him out.”

“Shit shot, or you think they weren’t trying to kill him?” Levi asked.

“Clayton,” Tucker growled the name. “It was Clayton Pierce who did this. Sweeper woke up when I rolled him. Not long, but enough to say that Clayton took Evie.”

“I’m gonna kill him,” Levi announced, as matter-of-fact as if he were talking about the weather. “Slowly.”

“We gotta find him first,” I reminded him. I wasn’t any less furious than he was, but we had to think.

We knew Clayton was jealous of Evie, but that hardly seemed like enough of a motive to go to all this trouble. Ruining her reputation with that sex tape was one thing, but kidnapping her? And doing this himself, when he’d made Rikki handle planting the camera?

I felt like we only had half the picture, like trying to put together a puzzle after a dog had eaten part of the box.

The sound of sirens amped up the urgency. It didn’t seem like anyone around here had called the cops when the shooting happened, which wasn’t really a surprise since there’d been a lot of talk about raccoons making a mess of things and people shooting them. But, as soon as the ambulance saw that Sweeper was shot, they’d call the police—if BPD wasn’t already on their way.

And we had guns. And we’d been at another shooting.

The very least we’d be looking at would be hours crammed into the tiny room the police department used for interviews while they tried to figure out if we had anything to do with Sweeper being shot.

That couldn’t happen.

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