Fire & Dark (The Night Horde SoCal Book 3) Read online

  “I’ll check around and let you know. Call me if he comes home or calls, si?”

  “Si, si. Gracias, mija. You’re my good girl.”

  Yep. She was the good girl.

  ~oOo~

  After three hours doing the Hugo Velasquez Tour, Pilar found his rusty pickup. From its location, she knew he was with his friend Jaime, and that meant that he was hanging with the Assassins, either up in the roach motel Jaime called home or down the street at the High Life, the bar where the Assassins held their court.

  Either way, she was deep into Assassins turf and not a moron. She drove her old Honda Element past Hugo’s truck and parked in the lot of a Vons supermarket. For about the thousandth time, she texted her brother, this time saying that she knew where he was and he needed to get his ass out.

  Like all the others, that text went unanswered. This wasn’t Pilar’s first rodeo; she knew that the most likely scenario was that Hugo was high out of his mind, either passed out with the bedbugs on Jaime’s rancid couch, or with his head down on the bar at the High Life. But she’d been texting for hours, and it was unusual for him not to respond at all. A thin thread of anxiety wove through her frustration and anger. He could be in real trouble. The kind of people he was hanging out with made real trouble on a daily basis. She couldn’t just shrug her shoulders and drive off. She had to know he was okay and get him home.

  Alone, though, she couldn’t. Jesus, an uninvited woman walking alone into either place would be lucky to be in one piece when she limped out. Hugo wasn’t a member, so even if he were in a position to stand up for her, he could offer her no coverage. And if he was in trouble with them, or just passed out? Fuck. No.

  She ran through her mental list of male friends, all of them strong, all of them good fighters, and any of them would be willing to help her out. But she’d be asking them to take on possibly life-threatening risk for her reprobate brother when they spent their working life at that kind of risk. She was a better friend than that.

  The cops were out of the question—she had friends in law, sure. One of her fuck buddies was a San Bernardino County deputy. But ratting on the Assassins brought the kind of trouble best avoided. Nothing good would come from that.

  Fuck. She knew no one who could help her, no one she’d be willing to put at risk.

  And then a new thought rolled into her head. She maybe knew one person. Well, not knew, exactly. Except in the biblical sense. Connor. He was Horde. And she’d picked up a heavy protector vibe from him. Plus, the Horde had a rep for helping people out around town. Would it be completely loco to see if he could help?

  Yeah. Completely loco. Besides, she didn’t have his number or his last name or anything.

  Then again, she knew where the clubhouse was, and it was only a couple of miles away, back inside the Madrone city limit. They had a big bike shop. If he worked there, maybe he’d be around.

  Wait—what was she going to do? Amble in and ask her random fuck from a few nights ago to drop everything and come with her and save her brother from a fucking street gang? Her brother who might well not want to be saved? Yeah, that was beyond loco. That was just stupid.

  But what other option did she have?

  While she grappled with that question, her phone rang—her grandmother again. Her finger hovered over the “dismiss” button, but instead she answered. “Hi, Nana. I’m still looking.” Mostly true.

  “Oh, Pilar. I’m real worried now. His boss called the house. He didn’t go to work or call or anything.”

  While Hugo was quick to quit a job and had been fired quite a few times, he never took a sick day, and he was never a no-show. That was a point of pride for him. When he decided he didn’t want to go in, he’d call and quit without any notice, but he didn’t, as he said, ‘puss out’ and just bail without a word. So they had the next anomaly in an otherwise familiar search mission.

  “Okay, okay. I’m getting close, I think. I’ll be in touch soon.

  “Okay, mija. Call soon.”

  Pilar put her phone away and pulled out of the Vons lot, headed toward the Night Horde’s bike shop. She couldn’t remember the name of it, but she knew where it was.

  ~oOo~

  The name was Virtuoso Cycles, and it was a gleaming, beautiful showroom, with gleaming, beautiful custom bikes arrayed across a glossy floor. Pilar had a bike of her own, one she loved, but it was just a stock Victory Hammer. She’d never been to this shop.

  It was a Saturday afternoon, but still early enough that they were open, and she could hear the muffled sounds of power tools coming from some point beyond the back wall. The showroom, though, was empty except for an attractive young woman sitting at a reception desk. When Pilar walked toward the desk, the woman looked up and smiled a bright, professional smile.

  “Welcome to Virtuoso Cycles. Can I help you?”

  Still not believing she was going through with this, Pilar answered, “I’m looking for Connor? Is he around?”

  The woman’s smile changed a little, took on a knowing tinge. “Let me call back and see if he’s available. Can I tell him who’s asking?”

  “Pilar.” No point in saying more; her first name was all he knew—and he’d said he’d never known anyone else with her name.

  While the woman made her call, Pilar turned and went to the ring of bikes. God, they were gorgeous. Some were just modified stock bikes, but a couple were obviously entirely unique builds. One was a spectacular black and brass—could it be brass?—piece of art that looked like a Renaissance-steampunk mashup. On the floor in front of it was a plaque that read: Best of Show, Rat’s Hole Bike Show, Sturgis, S.D. 2022. Designed & Built by Patrick Stavros. On the plaque was a photograph of one of the bikers she’d seen the other night at The Flight Deck, and had seen there a few times, with long, dark-blond dreads and a bushy blond beard. He stood next to a guy wearing an ugly-ass green rat suit, like a debauched Mickey Mouse. The unsmiling biker was holding a big metal version of the ugly-ass rat, which was apparently the trophy that came with the win.

  “Hey.”

  She turned at the gruff voice behind her and wasn’t even three feet from Connor. He was wearing a black coverall, opened to the waist and showing a white, v-neck t-shirt, stained with grease. His sleeves were rolled back to his elbows. She’d seen a lot of his ink when he’d been in the ring at The Deck. Much of it seemed to have a Celtic flair, including the big piece on his right forearm, like a leather bracer carved with Celtic knots. In an arc just below his collarbone he had row of different knots. The hair on his chest obscured that ink slightly. Down his spine, she knew, he had the word HORDE in thick, Celtic-looking letters.

  Around his neck he wore a gold crucifix, slightly larger than, but otherwise not unlike, the one she herself wore.

  Damn, he was hot. Right in her wheelhouse, too: tall, brawny, and just the right kind of furry—the well-kept kind, only where it ought to be. Also apparently Catholic—of the Irish persuasion, she guessed.

  Not that that should fucking matter.

  “Hey,” she answered, the picture of eloquence.

  He smiled that melty smile, and for half a second, Pilar just about forgot that she was here because she needed help for a possibly dangerous problem.

  “You need something, or d’ya just miss me?”

  There wasn’t any point in dancing around the problem—it was time sensitive, anyway. So she got to it. “I need something. A favor. Pretty big one.”

  His eyebrows went up, but he didn’t say anything. He simply waited for her to continue.

  “Um, okay.” She was nervous—well, shit, of course she was. She was about to ask a near-stranger to rescue her idiot brother from the lair of a notorious gang. “I’ve got a problem and nobody to help me with it.”

  To that, he did respond. He reached out and took hold of her elbow, pulling her toward the seating area. She noticed that the actual ugly rat trophy was under glass on a square pedestal nearby.

  Before he could push her into a leath
er chair, she pulled her arm back, careful not to be abrupt about it. She didn’t need to sit; it wasn’t that kind of problem. “My little brother isn’t answering his phone, for almost a whole day now. I’ve been looking for him. I found his truck outside the Cypress Court Apartments.”

  Connor reacted to that, his head going back in a kind of reverse nod. A sign of recognition.

  “You know it?” she asked.

  “I do. That’s Aztec turf. He in some trouble?”

  “I don’t know. He hangs around with some of those guys sometimes. His dad was an Assassin.”

  Again, his dark eyebrows lifted. “But he’s not in?”

  “No. He wasn’t as of last night, anyway.”

  “When you say ‘little brother’…”

  “He’s twenty-five.”

  “That’s a man. If he wants in, then that’s his call, isn’t it?”

  Yeah, she guessed it was. But Hugo wasn’t a man, not really. The calendar didn’t matter. He was still a child. “I know. But my grandma is worried, and I am, too. I just need to see that he’s okay, and I can’t go in on my own.”

  That earned a dry chuckle from Connor. “No, you can’t.” He sighed deeply and looked away, out the showroom window. “What help do you need, Pilar?”

  She really did like the sound of her name in that gravel voice. “I need to be able to get into where he is and at least make sure he wants to be there. I need to try to get him out.”

  “You know where he is, or just where his truck is?”

  “His friend lives in the Cypress. And the High Life is just down the road from there. He’s in one of those places, I’m sure of it.” She huffed in frustration and admitted the truth. “But no, I don’t know where exactly. Because he won’t answer his phone.”

  “It’s on, though?”

  “What?”

  “His phone—it’s on, ringing before it goes to voice mail?”

  She thought about that for a second. “Last I checked, yeah.” Pulling her phone out of her pocket, she dialed Hugo. It rang five times. “Yeah, it’s on.”

  He nodded and took her phone out of her hand. “Okay. That should make it pretty easy to nail him down, I think. Come with me.” And then he took her hand and led her across the showroom and through a black door at the side.

  ~oOo~

  She’d been sitting at the bar in the Night Horde clubhouse, drinking a bottle of beer that Connor had handed her before he’d gone off somewhere.

  The room she was in looked like a big, ratty bar. Grungy and a little smelly. The opposite of the high-end gleam of the showroom fifty feet away.

  There weren’t any guys around except one kid, whom Connor had called Jerry, who was stocking the bar and putting clean glasses away. He ignored her, other than to eye her bottle every now and then, as if waiting for when she’d need another.

  Otherwise, she was basically alone. There were a couple of women around, but they were in the kitchen, talking and laughing, and Pilar knew she wasn’t invited—not that she would have wanted to be, anyway. So she sat, she sipped, and she waited.

  Jerry had just handed her a second bottle when Connor came back into the room, now dressed in jeans and his kutte, and trailing another biker. This one had a heavy, dark beard and inch-wide gauges in his ears. Industrial piercings, too. And a ring through his bottom lip. Kind of punk. Cool. And he had vivid, bluish-green eyes. These Horde dudes were hot.

  “Pilar, this is Sherlock.” As Pilar and Sherlock nodded their greeting, Connor went on, “He got a lock on your brother. He’s at the High Life.”

  “Fuck.” She’d been holding onto a slim hope that he was wasted at Jaime’s, playing some stupid video game. If he was at the High Life, then he was wound up somehow with the Assassins, most likely.

  “Yeah. You know, we don’t have a relationship with the Aztecs. We barge into their house, they’ll take it poorly.”

  She couldn’t ask them to do that. She’d just have to go in on her own and take her chances. Her family, her problem. “I understand. Thanks for finding where he was, though. That helps.” Intending to go out the nearest door and find her way back to her Element, she slid off the barstool.

  But Connor wrapped his big paw around her arm. “Hold on. I talked to our President, and he okayed it, so we’re going in. Three of us. I just want you to be aware that this could turn into a clusterfuck, and I don’t see a way of keeping you out of there—your brother doesn’t know us, so you’ll have to go in with us.”

  Jesus, the whole club was going to help her? That was more than she’d expected—a lot more. It was on the tip of her tongue to back out, to apologize and say she didn’t want to put them at risk. And that was true. But she’d come here, and she’d asked, and they’d stepped up. It seemed disrespectful to say ‘no, thanks’ after all that.

  And she needed them.

  “I understand. Thank you.”

  Connor nodded and gave her that smile. “Always happy to help a lady in need.” Then he winked.

  Normally, she’d have side-eyed a smarmy line like that. But right then, in this moment, this context, while he was sliding a Glock into a holster, and after he’d helped her with a different kind of need a few days before, it wasn’t smarmy. It was just funny and charming.

  So she laughed and winked back.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Madrone was a quiet, picturesque, mostly bland little town. Until urban sprawl and crazy real estate prices had pushed the workers of Los Angeles so far out, this part of Southern California had been little more than desert broken up by a few small towns and the lands of a few intrepid ranchers. Aside from a core area that had been around since the 1800s, when a little one-horse town had risen up around a train depot, and one area on the western edge of town that was on the seedy side, the rest of the Madrone city limits bounded middle-class and upper-middle-class developments, the kind that had gates at their entrances or at least brick pillars holding brass plaques with names that started with “The” or ended with “Estates”: “The Commons,” “The Meadow,” “Mountainview Estates,” like that. The commercial district was mostly strip malls and office parks designed to suit the architecture of the neighborhood. A city ordinance required that all signage be low to the ground, so as not to disrupt the view.

  Because that was what Madrone had going for it more than anything else: three different mountain ranges rimmed the horizon in three directions. On a clear day, you could stand anywhere in town and feel like heaven itself was in reach.

  In the odd way of community development, a couple of towns that abutted Madrone were nowhere near as well-heeled. It was thus possible to cross a street that served as a city limit and leave a tidy, landscaped neighborhood to enter a desiccated husk of a town that had been obliterated by one or more of the cyclical state downturns.

  Aztec Assassins turf was in one such area. As Connor, Sherlock, and Diaz rode, taking positions around Pilar’s little SUV, they crossed Calaveras Road and dropped about four tax brackets. The view at the horizons was the same, and just as close, though the roads here weren’t designed so carefully to make the most of it. The buildings had been erected with a desultory attention, and their care had only dwindled from there.

  The High Life was housed in a single-story building at the end of a block that had mostly been abandoned. There was a bakery, a laundromat, and an electronics repair shop, but otherwise the storefronts on the block were empty. A major factor for the lack of vitality was the High Life itself, Connor knew. It wasn’t the kind of bar you happened upon. It wasn’t on anybody’s barhopping itinerary. It didn’t attract the kind of people that kept a neighborhood vibrant. Though it ostensibly did business as a bar, it was really the Aztecs’ clubhouse, and anyone who drank there was a friend. Everybody else stayed away.

  The Horde had no beef with the Aztecs—yet—but they had no working relationship, either. They stayed out of each other’s way, letting Calaveras Road serve as a kind of force field. The Aztecs dealt drugs, but th
ose drugs came from a different source, one that had a stable truce with La Zorra.

  As Pilar and the Horde pulled up across the street from the High Life, Connor knew that what they were about to do, if it went badly, could ripple out and cause a lot of problems. Beefing with the Aztecs could, if it got bad enough, disrupt a truce between two drug cartels, and that could mean open warfare in two countries.

  All because Connor was feeling chivalrous.

  That wasn’t entirely true; it wasn’t just on him. This was what they did, why they were respected in Madrone, and why people looked the other way at some of their less savory activities: the Horde helped where they could. Pilar had come asking, and the club had obliged. Still, this Saturday afternoon was likely to be a lot more exciting than Connor had expected.