Page 75 of Lone Star

“A what? I dunno. But I couldn’t move, man. I couldn’t even blink. I couldn’t talk. I pissed myself,” he said, too rattled to be ashamed of himself. “I could feel it running down my leg, but I couldn’t have stopped if I’d wanted to.

“Someone grabbed my head, and turned it, and there was another table, next to mine, and there was a guy on it.” He shivered – and then kept shivering, big shudders that forced him to set his drink down. “He was tied up, like me, and his eyes were open, but he musta been on the same shit as me, ‘cause he didn’t move even a little bit. He didn’t even beg when the priest guy cut his throat.”

Jesse pressed the heels of his hands to his eye sockets. “They killed somebody in front of us.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know.”

“The guy said it was a sinner,” Benny said. “That he’d sinned against the Chupacabra cartel – our new Lord and Savior.”

~*~

Nickel the prospect was tasked with finding their three guests something to eat and getting in touch with Cantrell. The rest of them crowded into the chapel.

“I don’t know about the other two, but I know for a fact Benny’s not that good of an actor,” Gringo said. “He looked genuinely scared.”

“Yeah,” Candy agreed.

“Too bad we didn’t interrogate them separately,” Blue said.

“Who says we aren’t gonna now?” Candy asked.

“Ah. Fair play.”

“They started from the bottom up,” Candy said. “Picked the lowest, least involved in the business, and scared them first. Benny’s a notch above Jesse and Eric, and we know they’ve gotten to Patty at this point, too.”

“They’re removing our support system,” Cowboy said.

“Cutting us off,” Candy agreed. “And my guess is they’ll just try to close us in tighter and tighter.”

“And drop something big on us,” Talis said.

Candy nodded. “We need to stop them now, and stop them hard.” For the first time since all of this started, he felt all his anger and frustration moving through the right channels: the head-punching, rival-stomping, getting-shit-done channels of his brain that had enabled him to lead this club for as long as he had. He had a target, finally; now all he had to do was get sites on him.

“The trick is finding them, now,” he said. “We’ve gotta get out and cavass. Talk to all our contacts. Fox, you and your guys need to start doing your spy shit and find me some answers. We’ll go through the rest of our contacts. When I talk to Cantrell–”

His phone buzzed in his pocket. When he checked the screen, he saw that it was Melanie Menendez calling.

“Actually, first I’m gonna talk to Pacer. Everybody else: get on it.”

~*~

“I don’t normally do this sort of thing with women.”

Eden regarded her partner of the moment as they walked across a weed-choked parking lot. She supposed there were women who found Jinx attractive, but the bare arms, the writhing tattoos, and the beard were decided turn-offs for her. Leaving that aside, she would never have chosen to do any sort of uncover work with someone like him: he was too noticeable, too distinct. He wore Biker like it was a fashion label as well as an identity, from the little silver hoops in his ears to the flashing wallet chain, to the skull-printed laces of his boots. He couldn’t have blended into a crowd; couldn’t have slipped into the accent, the mannerisms, the persona of someone else.

She hoped that, in this case, his lack of artifice would serve as an asset. That was the plan, anyway.

“How unfortunate for you,” she said, as they reached the door.

He opened it, and his other hand settled in the small of her back, just like they’d discussed. It needed to look real, and attraction or not, Eden was a damn good actress when she wanted to be.

By the time they were inside, she’d relaxed her spine and her ankles, had tilted her hips and leaned into him, subtly: the portrait of a woman who didn’t want to be separate from her man, not even for the practical purposes of walking. She softened the tension in her face, smiled, tried to look vacuous. Fox would have laughed if he could have seen her.

The building they’d entered – a massive corrugated steel box with soaring, uninsulated ceilings – was an auto garage, the kind that serviced everything from commercial vans, to panel trucks, to the big tractor cabs of eighteen-wheelers. The front door, a dinky metal sign with the company name hanging above it, led into a waiting area that hadn’t been designed for customer comfort. An office stood off to the side, a smaller box with a small window in one wall, and the entire rest of the width of the building was contained behind a long, high counter. A few chairs and a water cooler stood along the front wall, but it was obvious no one spent time hanging around for an oil change here.

A radio up on the counter blasted rap music that couldn’t compete with the echoing of hammers, air hoses, and hydraulics in the workspace beyond.

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