Page 13

Atlas

R ain drums off the roof of the truck in a steady beat. It washes down the windshield in a torrent and rivers vertically down the side windows. The sun is setting, and with the rainstorm, it’s washed the sky in pinks and reds that are magnified on every surface.

“He’s ten minutes late,” Wizard remarks, checking a stopwatch. “If I had that much money on the line, I think I’d make an effort to be on time.”

“Maybe he got lost.” I recline in the passenger seat of Wizard’s cage.

It’s not an old classic like Raiden’s, or a big jacked up monstrosity like the twins ride around in. It’s just a regular old nineties pickup, beat up and battered because it spent most of its life on a farm as a workhorse.

Raiden and Tyrant are parked together in his truck, though there was a mighty amount of groaning about bringing the classic out in the rain. It’s already thoroughly rusty, so not sure what Raiden’s point was there. I’d shit myself if I had to take the Mustang out, but that car is flawless . Raiden’s truck is so old that’s it’s more rattletrap than working vehicle. The doors barely close. It’s not going to get worse from a little sprinkling.

We’re arranged in a semicircle, blocking off a backroad ten minutes east of Hart. I’m glad I wasn’t in the truck with Grave and Decay to hear the whining that would have gone on when they turned onto gravel. Grave will probably be under his truck later, examining it for road rash, in a foul, cursing mood for days.

Raven and Odin complete the semi-circle of vehicles.

“We are kind of in the middle of nowhere.”

Wizard rolls his eyes. “Any asshat could use technology. An old fashioned GPS would still find this place with the right coordinates if cell signal was lacking.” He pops his phone out of his black fatigues. “Which it’s fucking not.”

Wizard slides down a few inches in the seat to get his phone situated back in. One of many, probably. His fatigues have a ton of pockets and no doubt each and every one is stuffed full.

Wizard has a sort of geeky look about him. He rocks a set of heavy framed glasses, though whether he needs them or not is a mystery. I think he just likes the look. They’re probably not even prescription. I didn’t come up with that theory, but no one is willing to try and wrangle them away. Wizard is tall and thin, but he’s also wiry with muscle and probably has some serious martial arts training. He’d likely snap anyone’s arm in half if they reached over to his face.

It’s been a few days of a packed clubhouse and though everyone has been good about it, especially my family, I know that everyone is impatient to have things back to normal. Agatha would like to return to her house. Willa is raring to get back to the store. My parents can only call in sick to work for so many days, and Georgia would really like to get back to Seattle, though she’s having a far better time hanging out with the old ladies and their kids than she thought she would.

“I just wanted to put it out there that if you need some help with security sometime, I’d be happy to uh- to get in your way and probably drive you insane with a thousand questions.”

Wizard is a great guy, he truly is, but even at the best of times, and that means the times when he’s not overworked and stressed to the max, he can be touchy.

It seems today that he’s in a good mood. Or maybe he just likes me. He’s never snapped at me once, but he’s taken other guy’s heads clean off.

“I appreciate a good distraction every now and then. You did a great job setting up the cameras as Agatha’s.”

“Just so I’m clear…” I’m embarrassed to ask, but there’s no way I can give Willa that surprise I promised if I don’t know where all the cameras in her place are. I’d never let another person see her naked, especially not naked, tied up, with me doing filthy things to her. “At Willa’s, in the back room, there’s only one camera?”

“Yeah.” Wizard runs his hand over the key in the ignition. It looks as though he’s debating turning on the truck for music. We’ve been sitting in silence for a while.

“I’ve been thinking about setting up a few more there too. Just to be sure, with all this shit going down.”

“Sounds good. I can show you how to do that.”

“Thank you. I know you’re busy.”

“It’s my job in the club. Plus, if you want to help out, being in the field would be a great way to do that. Better than sitting watching screens, but also because I can’t be in twelve places at once.”

I feel slightly guilty about the deception, but it’s also the truth. I’m not going to leave an inch of Willa’s space unattended. I won’t be able to sleep worrying about her. I’m already planning on asking Tyrant later tonight if I can spend the next few weeks there keeping guard at night.

Ostensibly.

And not so ostensibly.

Wizard strokes the keys again. Not to turn the truck on, but because he’s nervous . We’re all on edge. But this guy running behind doesn’t help.

“Do you think it’s weird when he called in that he used a scrambler?”

“Nah. I expected something like that. Just like I knew they’d call from a burner. Anything else would be stupid.”

“Something about this feels off,” I mutter, stroking the butt end of the 9mm that I have resting on my knee.

“This whole thing is weird as fuck.”

“Doesn’t it feel too easy?”

“Only because we’re making it easy for this guy. It could have gone much worse. We didn’t have to give that money back.”

We separated it up between all four vehicles so that if anything went down or went sideways, we could scatter in different directions and the fucker would have to track us all down.

I hope it doesn’t come to that.

And I hope this guy comes alone.

Because it just rained all day, there’s no trail of dust to announce the vehicle that approaches.

Wizard sits up straight as soon as he catches the flash of black in the distance.

“It’s showtime.” He checks his gun, and I check mine too, even though I’ve done it at least twelve times in the past ten minutes.

No one gets out of their vehicles.

Not even when the black sedan comes to a stop thirty feet away and the headlights go dark as the engine gets killed. The door opens. The car is tinted and there’s no plate on the front—probably not the back either. I can’t see who’s in there until the guy emerges from the interior.

“What the fuck?” Willa would laugh at me for being a chauvinist right now, but fuck me.

That’s no man.

The woman is as tall as Lynette, probably around six feet, and clad for the runway in a tight black dress cut low between her ample breasts and riding up high over a set of long, creamy legs. She’s got at least six inches of heels under her, but she makes walking on wet gravel look like an artform as she catwalks confidently down the middle of the road.

She crosses her arms, tosses back her sleek, black, shoulder-length hair, and slowly peruses the parked vehicles from left to right.

“I want my money!” she yells, her voice thunderous.

The hair on my arms all stand up in an instant.

“Christ,” Wizard hisses, shuddering.

Tyrant, to his credit, rolls out of Raiden’s truck like it’s an ordinary day. He approaches cautiously, his leather jacket bulging where he’s got his gun tucked. He says something to the woman that we can’t hear. It goes on for a few minutes, and then he gestures to us.

One by one, we exit the vehicles, each of us holding a suitcase in hand.

Silently, we creep towards the middle of the road. We set them down in the gravel and edge back, not taking our eyes off Tyrant. He’s wearing a vest under his jacket, but that won’t save a guy from a headshot.

I watch as Wizard, Grave, and Raiden train their guns on the figure.

“I put trackers in the money,” Wizard drops casually. “Wherever she goes, unless she finds them, we’ll know where she is.”

“She’ll find them. She’s got to launder that somewhere.”

“How the hell did she come across almost half a million dollars?”

“Crime family, criminal connections, she could be a Donna in her own right. Or maybe just a really good businesswoman doing some dirty work. It’s the modern age. Women are just as capable of being villains.”

“I don’t know. She’s so… hot,” Grave says.

Laughing right now would be inappropriate.

It’s not funny to watch her tote all those suitcases, two at a time, and set them in the trunk of her car. It’s impressive. She doesn’t falter in the wet gravel once.

“How has she not snapped an ankle yet? Those shoes look like murder. I wouldn’t mind them wrapped around my waist, though.” Grave is still looking at the woman appreciatively.

“If she doesn’t find the trackers, you could always look her up. There’s been stranger matches made in the club. If she’s come into that money through nefarious means, she might need a savior.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, brother.”

Done with the suitcases, the woman gets into the driver’s seat and starts the car. She backs up slowly, keeping her eyes on us the same way we watched her. She reverses all the way down the road, until she’s down a hill and out of sight, and only then does she do a three point turn and race away. We catch the blur of black speeding into the distance before Tyrant gives us the signal to roll out.

Wizard doesn’t mutter anything except curses about the mud and stones that Grave’s truck is throwing all over us. Even after we turn off onto the paved road, the gravel pelts us.

“I’ve seen a lot of weird shit,” Wizard states as we pull back into Hart’s city limits. “But that was right up there.”

I just nod, because that pretty much covers it.

I’m sure that this one will be something the club talks about for years to come.