“We gotta go,” Opie said, starting to turn. They needed to be in the woods on the other side of the highway and hidden deeply before the cops arrived.
Jax stayed to watch the Russians, who had all begun to retreat. Sensing his hesitation, Opie waited as well. The first group kept their guns out as they backed awkwardly into the pine grove, then turned and hurried back through the trees to their vehicles. Three of the newcomers kept their weapons trained on the fleeing group as the rest climbed back into the Lexus and the Escalade. In moments, all four vehicles were pulling away.
The sirens grew louder, but with the open highway, Jax thought the police could still be miles away.
Maybe.
“Come on,” he said, leaping the guardrail and running back the way they’d come. He wished he could toss the Glock away but knew how foolish that would be, with his prints all over it and the cops certain to search the pine grove.
A car swerved to avoid killing Opie, the driver laying on the horn.
The two of them ran through the trees, Jax gambling that none of the Russians were suicidal enough to have stayed behind to finish the job when the others had taken off and the sirens were growing louder.
Opie’s pickup remained where they’d left it, jammed against a couple of pine trees, most of the windows blown out. The engine choked a bit as Opie turned the key in the ignition, but then it growled to life, and he threw it into drive, pulled back onto the side road, and hit the gas. They were headed away from the sirens, but Jax was sure cops would be coming the other way. No way they could stay out in the open with windows blown out. “There!” Jax said, pointing to a narrow, tree-lined street on the right.
Opie spun the wheel, and the pickup groaned and slewed in gravel as they turned onto the back road. In seconds, they were out of sight of Highway 99, driving a curving lane that climbed gently into the same hills they had left behind such a short time ago.
Two miles up that lane, they found an old logging road that had been transformed into a hiking trail. Opie drove down it until they reached an unfamiliar leg of what Jax assumed was the river they’d fished in that morning.
Opie backed the truck up to the water, where they wiped down their guns and hurled them as far out into the river as they could. Only then did Jax take out his cell phone and call the clubhouse. Chucky answered but put Bobby on the phone as soon as he heard the urgency and anger in Jax’s voice.
When Jax ended the call, phone clutched in his hand, he turned to Opie. “Only thing we can do now is wait.”
Opie nodded toward the hiking trail. “You think we oughta wait up that way, in case the cops get here before Juice does?”
Jax took a deep breath and then nodded as he exhaled, trying to make sense of the shitstorm they had just been through.
“What was that?” Opie asked as they started walking up the trail.
“You asking me why we’re still alive?”
“I’m asking why double the Russians didn’t mean double the bullets headed our way.”
“That first bunch wanted us dead because they think we killed Putlova,” Jax said. “Maybe the second bunch didn’t like Putlova as much as the other guys did. Maybe we did those guys a favor.”
“I thought we had solved our Russian problem,” Opie said, his boots scuffing the ground as he walked. “At least for a while.”
“It’s a tough economy, Op. A job opens up, every asshole and his brother rushes in to try to fill it.”
“So what do we do about it?”
Jax smiled. “If we’re smart enough, we steer clear and hope the morons kill each other.”
3
John Carney saw the redhead coming from fifty yards away. Not that he was a perv or anything. Hell, he hadn’t been on the prowl for twenty years, not even after his wife, Theresa, had left him back in ’04. Carney’d had a girlfriend or three, but always someone he’d met through friends. No online dating for him, and he certainly wasn’t going to pick up women in bars.
Bars were off-limits if he wanted to keep his fifteen-year chip in his pocket. Sober life might get boring at times, but boring was preferable to dead.
The Summerlin Gun Show had seen a dip in business the past few years, but he continued to set up out of loyalty to Oscar Temple, the fellow who’d run the thing from the beginning. This year Carney’s loyalty had paid off—the first two days of the Summerlin show had brought booming business. Americans had been growing paranoid about their right to bear arms being curtailed or taken away entirely, and any time that happened, business picked up. Nothing helped gun sales like talk of gun control.
They were in an open field on Oscar Temple’s ranch, just at the western edge of Summerlin proper, spitting distance from Red Rock Canyon in one direction, and not too far a drive from downtown Las Vegas in the other. Ground zero for tourists and easy enough to find for gun enthusiasts.
The redhead didn’t look like your typical gun enthusiast. And now that she’d come a little closer, he realized she wasn’t precisely a redhead. More of a strawberry-blonde. Lovely hue.
She moved through the crowd like a shark, barely browsing the tables and tents as she studied the faces of the dealers more closely than she did the weapons they had for sale. Sunshine turned her hair into a reddish-gold halo. Her bottle-green tank top and tight, faded jeans showed off a shapely figure, but Carney noticed the confidence and determination in her walk more than the fullness of her breasts or the swing of her hips. At fifty-five, he certainly wasn’t beyond appreciating a lady’s attributes, but he’d always appreciated a formidable woman—even if she looked like she was barely more than a girl.
The strawberry-blonde stopped at Hal Burlingame’s table, rapped on top of a glass case to get the old man’s attention, and cocked her hip as she asked him a question. Her smile was a mask of sweetness that appeared only as he turned toward her and vanished just as quickly when she had her answer.
Burlingame turned and pointed to the rows of gun dealers.
Only when the strawberry-blonde turned and spotted Carney—and smiled that same masquerade grin—did he realize Burlingame was pointing at him.
He frowned in puzzlement as the young woman strode toward him. Customers were perusing his wares, and a guy who’d been asking him why he didn’t have a Barrett M82 .50 caliber sniper rifle for sale had started complaining about the government’s infringing on his rights, but Carney ignored them all.
The cute little thing sauntered up to him, but the saunter didn’t fool him. This wasn’t a girl who sauntered.
She turned her right hand into a finger pistol, and pointed at him as if she might shoot him with it.
“You’d be John Carney?” she said.
Even in those four simple words, he heard the Irish accent, and it took him back. His parents had been from Carrickfergus, just up the coast from Belfast, and he still had a bit of a brogue himself.
“I’d be him, yes. What can I do for you, miss?”
Lass, he told himself. If he still had any of the old Irish left in him, he’d have called her lass.
Her smile was deadlier than any of the guns at his table.
“Mr. Carney, a friend told me that you could help me, and I surely hope he was right. A lot’s ridin’ on it.”
For the first time, Carney noticed the two men moving through the crowd behind her, cruising without shopping, just as she had done. They were hard men, almost as young as the Irish lass, with flinty eyes and thin lines for mouths. Cops? he wondered. Or the opposite?
The urge to warn her bubbled up in his chest, but then he saw that she’d noticed him looking past her—seen the flash of alarm on his features—and seemed unconcerned.