Silence.
“I didn’t figure. That’s fine.” He heard the crunch of gravel as the van arrived, and pulled slowly off the shoulder. He glanced over and spotted the prospect, Nickel, behind the wheel. “This part goes better with a chair and some duct tape anyway.”
~*~
“I’m assuming you know what this looks like,” Cantrell said as he snapped on a pair of gloves.
“Fuck you,” Candy said. He couldn’t even attempt a clever rejoinder, and the fact seemed to surprise Cantrell, if the way he lifted his brows was any indication.
He nodded toward Pacer’s body. “Tell me what happened.”
Candy had barely been able to look away from the man who’d been his father’s friend, his own friend. Who’d been alive only a few minutes ago.
Fox had been the one to clear the house, and the one who’d taken the call from Reese and told him about the crash. Candy had the presence of mind to omit that, now.
“There was still dust in the air when I pulled up,” he told Cantrell, his voice oddly toneless. “They’d just left. He was – he was still warm.”
Cantrell stared at him a moment, his gaze palpable, then nodded and crouched down beside Pacer, flicking the end of his tie over one shoulder. He probed the wound lightly with gloved fingers, delicate even, but Candy felt the urge to snarl and slap him away.
“Deep, but a clean cut,” Cantrell said, straightening. The gloves came off with another set of snaps. “He didn’t struggle.”
“He was acting real out of it the last time I saw him,” Candy said. “I think he must have taken something.”
“Sedative?”
“I dunno. I looked through his medicine cabinet, but couldn’t find anything like that.”
The agent glanced toward the open front door of the house; two uniformed officers waited on the porch; the crunch of gravel in the drive announced the arrival of either lab techs or the coroner. In a low voice, he said, “We got the tox reports back on the first five vics.” When he turned back to Candy, his gaze was imploring. “They’d been dosed – and heavily – with something the machines didn’t recognize straight off. It looked a little like ketamine, but it wasn’t. A sedative. A designer one. Something new, our lab guys think. Just like in Nevada.” His brows lifted for a second time, in clear question.
Candy stared him down. He’d make him say it, the bastard.
Cantrell sighed. “Any leads on your end?”
Candy took one last look at the lifeless form that had been a friend. He said, “You might wanna pull some Chupacabra case files, ‘cause the cartel’s back in town.” He walked away with Cantrell spluttering in surprise behind him.
The uniforms gave him dark looks as he passed between them and went down the porch steps. When he was swinging a leg over his bike, Cantrell called out to him.
“How the fuck would you know that?”
“You might wanna check down the road a couple miles,” he called back. Then Candy started his engine, and drowned out whatever else he said.
He became aware, on the long ride to the hospital, that a creeping numbness had overtaken him. Every time he blinked, he saw Pacer’s body, but it was with the hollow refrain ofhe’s dead. He didn’t feel anger – not yet. Not panic, nor grief. A faint buzzing, under his skin, and in the roots of this teeth, told him he would feel them, and soon. But for now, his mind was shielding itself, ready to power him through what came next.
There were bikes in the parking lot, when he arrived, and he took a brief moment to wonder why so many of his brothers had come to escort the van that had dropped Melanie off. Later, when he thought back on it, he would have realized the dusty GTO his eyes had raked over on his way past had been parked at his clubhouse overnight; it didn’t register in the moment.
He walked through the automatic doors of the ER, already scanning the array of plastic chairs for Fox’s face. He found it, over leaned up against a vending machine in the alcove along the far wall.
He halted in his tracks, though, when he recognized the slight, blonde figure talking to Fox.
His wife.
~*~
Michelle stared down at the Snickers she’d just bought, rethinking her decision. It had sounded like an absolute must-have to her post-adrenaline, low blood sugar self only moments before, but now that she was holding it, her stomach soured.
And that was before Fox said, “Oh. Well. This should be interesting.”
She glanced toward him, found him as she’d last seen him, with arms folded, and a boot braced negligently on the wall behind him. “What?”