Page 165 of Lone Star

Chuckles all around.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, big guy,” Fox said, as he was being freed, “but infiltration and subterfuge aren’t exactly in your wheelhouse.”

“He means you’re big and stupid-looking,” Colin chimed in.

Mercy shot his half-brother the bird. “Walsh may or may not have installed a scanner in his truck. And there may or may not be two cops tied up behind a Seven-Eleven.”

Candy snorted, and stood, hands braced on the seat backs around him. “Okay, geniuses. How are we getting out of this convoy?”

Mercy turned to face the front, fingers lacing through the grate. “Mikey?” he prompted, expectantly, grinning again.

They were approaching an intersection. Michael reached for the radio on the dash and brought the receiver to his mouth, thumbed the switch. His voice was appropriately bored and flat when he said, “We gotta stop for gas.”

A crackle of static, and then an officer from one of the other cars said,“What? You didn’t gas up before?”

“Sorry.”

Mercy glanced over and waggled his eyebrows. “Y’all ready?”

The van slowed, and turned right. The two cars ahead kept going, but a quick check proved the one behind followed.

Just two officers to deal with, then.

Mercy took a spare pair of cuffs off a seat and squatted down to secure Cantrell’s unconscious form.

“They’re gonna have your photo up in every precinct in Texas,” Candy said, chuckling, cracking his knuckles.

Mercy shrugged. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

~*~

Eden grabbed an extra magazine off the dresser in the dorm she’d been sharing with Fox, slipped it down into her boot and then sprinted back down the hall and through the common room. Threw up a hand in passing at Jenny’s question, grabbed her helmet off the peg in the foyer, and pelted out the door.

Albie was just climbing onto his bike beside Reese, Walsh, and the uninjured twin – she couldn’t keep them straight and didn’t care to try.

“Wait! I’m coming with you.”

Albie gave her only a fleeting, dismissive glance as he buckled on his helmet and slipped on his shades. “No.”

“There’s only the four of you,” she said, aiming for reasonable. “You need all the guns you can get.”

He lifted his head, and she could tell by the set of his jaw that he was glaring at her through his mirror lenses. “What part of ‘no’ didn’t you understand? Go inside. Help Jenny.” Savagely, lip curling: “Bitches ride bitch; they don’t go out on jobs.”

The obvious grief and panic in his voice softened the sting of the words, but she glimpsed Walsh’s brows go up, and felt her own do the same.

Before she registered doing it, she’d closed the distance between them, and had a finger aimed at his face. “That’s beneath you, Albert Cross,” she hissed. “You’re not a sexist fucking pig, so don’t start acting like one just because you’re scared. We’re all scared.”

He stared at her through his glasses, unmoving save the flaring of his nostrils as he inhaled.

“Walsh,” she said, appealing to the more reasonable of the two of them. “I’m armed, I’m trained–”

“You’re bloody stupid,” Albie interrupted. “I’ve already gotten my old lady and my niece taken off to be murdered,” he spat, gesturing violently toward the tire tracks in the yard. “But oh no, that’s not enough. Let me tell Fox I got his old lady murdered, too!”

She recoiled a fraction. What kind of answer could she give to that? She had no way of soothing or comforting him now. Though she couldn’t see his eyes, she could envision the look in them, the emotions turning that Devin Green blue hard and cold, and ready to crack.

She glanced toward Walsh again. He wasn’t spitting and hissing like Albie, but he was hurting, too; she knew these brothers well enough to read the stress lines at the corners of his eyes, the tension in his mouth. “Let me come,” she pleaded. “I can help. Iwantto help.”

He stared at her a moment – long enough that Albie huffed in annoyance, mutteredlet’s goand cranked his bike. Then Walsh gave a fast jerk of his head in acquiescence.

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