Page 18 of Switch

Switch turned to me and took my face in his hands, quick and rough.

“This is Shade. He’s got you,” he said. “Whatever he tells you, you do it.”

“Go,” I said. “I’ll be right here.”

He looked at me like he wanted it in writing. Then he kissed me once, hard enough to hurt, and he was on his bike. He and the rest of them went down the back lane toward the wash with their lights off, and the sound of them faded into the dark.

Shade put me in the kitchen and stood on the porch. I sat at the table with the camera feed open on my phone. Switch had sent me the link before he left, so I could watch, though I didn’t know how long it would keep working if the cartel men found the camera.

The house was too quiet. I could hear the fridge, the clock over the stove and the horses shifting out in the paddocks. Through the screen door I could see Shade’s back, easy, a rifle leaning against the post beside him like a broom, but his hand hovered near it. He kept his back to me the whole time. That helped more than it should have.

On the camera feed, the trucks reached the bottom of the switchbacks. Men got out. They started pulling every camera they could see off the posts. On the culvert feed, one of them walked straight at the lens, and then that picture went black.

On the camera down by the old trailer slab, headlights came out of the east. The club, on the county road side. Bikes spread out across the track, blocking it. Men ran. I saw a flash on the screen that might have been a gunshot, and my heart lurched.

The SUV didn’t stop.

It swung off the track and cut across open scrub, bouncing wild, no lights. Away from the culvert. Away from the club. It dropped off the edge of one camera and came up on the one by my back gate, and it went straight through my fence beside it. The wire snapped on the screen. Then it was climbing the rise, heading north across the back section.

“Shade,” I said. My voice came out wrong.

He was already in the doorway. He’d heard it too, an engine howling somewhere out behind the hay barn, coming fast.

Headlights swung past the end of the hay barn. They missed the house. They swept across the yard and pinned the open door of my barn, and the SUV slewed to a stop right in front of it in a spray of gravel.

Two doors opened. The driver came out with a gun in his hand and started toward the house. The other one went around to the back of the SUV, and when he came out from behind it, he was carrying a red gas can.

He walked into my barn with it.

Shade was off the porch and moving at the driver, low and fast, yelling at me to stay down.

I was already on my feet.

Six horses were out in the paddocks where I’d put them. One wasn’t. Deuce was in there. Deuce, who couldn’t walk ten feet, who couldn’t be led out of that barn for anything short of it burning down and even then it’d be slow.

I’d promised Switch I’d stay in the house.

I went out the back door and ran for the barn anyway. I had no choice. I couldn’t leave Deuce.

CHAPTER 6

SWITCH

Gunfire in a wash comes at you from everywhere at once. Off the rock, off the sand, off the steel of that culvert, till you can’t tell who’s shooting at who.

I was crouching behind my bike with my pistol up over the top of it. Gage had cut the lead truck off at the crossing, rode straight at its grille and made the driver choose between his bumper and the ditch. The driver chose the ditch. Havoc came in behind the second one and boxed it against the bank. Preacher walked out of the scrub from the east like he was strolling in off his own porch, gun in his hand, and told the lot of them to get on the ground.

Two did. One ran. One fired.

The round went off the culvert a foot from Havoc’s head. I put two into the dirt at the shooter’s boots and he threw his gun like it had bitten him and went down on his face.

Then it was quiet. Just engines ticking and a man somewhere in the dark saying Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.

My phone went in my pocket.

Shade. Shade didn’t call. Shade texted, if he did anything at all.

“SUV came up behind the hay barn,” he said. He was breathing hard. “I’ve got the driver. There’s a second man in the barn with a gas can.” A beat. “She went in after the horse.”