Page 19 of Warrant (The Berserker’s Rage MC: Wyoming Chapter #1)
Warrant
“ S hut up,” I barked at Demo as he talked to me at the same time as the guy on the phone.
“What?” the voice coming from the cell asked.
“Not you,” I sighed and moved away from Demo. “Where are you?”
“We came to your damn town and there’s fucking nothing here. Some piece of shit old gas station,” Steel muttered. “And a population of one hundred and twenty on the welcome sign.”
Ainsley had run the plates on the vehicle they stole when they dumped Riggs’s SUV and it’d been found in north Cheyenne, abandoned.
Another car had been reported stolen in the same parking lot so she’d sent over that information as well.
She didn’t know what she was helping us with, but I appreciated it more than I could tell her.
Sure, the tech twins—Glitch and Switch—could have run the information down, but they were busy trying to figure out what Jared’s mother had taken these kids for.
If it was even her that did this. It was faster and more efficient to have Ainsley look it up.
And I hadn’t been lying about not wanting to bring Owen in on this and get him in trouble.
Besides, this was a way for me to test how receptive she’d be to us being…
work adjacent…in the future. Not that I could tell her about the missing kids.
Not yet anyway. She’d be pissed that the cops hadn’t been brought in.
But this had gone over state lines, which meant the FBI would get involved and no one had time for those incompetent assholes right now.
I sighed again. “Listen closely. Like I told you before. Sen-tin-el. With an S,” I said slowly enunciating the name, “Wyoming. Not Centennial. You’re in Centennial, asshole. You should have gone North on twenty-five when you got to Cheyenne, not west on eighty.”
Steel swore over the phone and I heard him relaying the directions to the others riding with him. “We’ll be there soon.”
Rolling my eyes, I shoved my cell back in my pocket. “I see why women bitch about men being bad about directions.”
The others chuckled. We were kicked back, waiting for the Austin guys to get here. Toxic, Butcher, and Hush were here already and there may have been a bit of drinking going on. It’d been months since we’d seen our friends.
Except Glitch of course. He was busy trying to track down these kids. If there was anything the rest of us could do, we’d be doing it, but short of breaking into every house in Sentinel, we had to stand by and wait for the techies to get some kind of idea where these pieces of shit were hiding out.
Rat and Glitch had tracked the car that had been stolen out of Cheyenne, so we knew they were heading north at least. Whether they stopped here remained to be seen.
So Cypher had doubled our patrols of the town just in case one of us spotted them.
Jared and Aella—his sister—had been missing for almost forty-eight hours now.
The window that the police used to determine if a child would be found once they went missing was closing fast. It didn’t matter.
We weren’t bringing the cops in on this.
We had our own fucking window, and it wasn’t closing until we had those kids safely here with us.
Sure, letting Ainsley and Owen help us out might get us further in the beginning.
They had resources we didn’t, at least not until Glitch, Switch, or Rat hacked into them.
Hacking took time, time we couldn’t afford to waste.
In the end we were handling this our way.
And that didn’t include jail cells and court hearings.
My sexy sheriff wasn’t going to like that, so I was keeping her involvement as minimal as possible for as long as possible.
“I still say we just break in places,” Butcher said. “Probably be faster.”
“And have the cops on our asses in a hurry,” Jury replied with a laugh. “We’re trying to keep them out of this.”
Toxic snorted out a laugh. “Like Denison would do shit. He’d send his deputies in the opposite direction.”
“You’ve been gone too long, Friend,” Scythe said with a grin. “Denison’s gone.”
Toxic’s eyes widened. “Someone offed him? I mean the fat bastard deserved it, but damn.”
“He retired,” Cypher said with a sigh that told me he was already sick of dealing with our shit. Secretly, I was pretty sure he loved it, but there were days I wondered. We did push the boundaries more often than not.
“Got ourselves a new sexy sheriff,” Rotor said with a smirk in my direction.
“Fuck off,” I told him. “If you think I can’t make it over this table before you can move, you’d be wrong.”
“So Warrant is into the new sexy Sheriff,” Hush said with a chuckle.
“Who isn’t Warrant into?” Toxic asked with a laugh. My brothers all laughed with him.
He wasn’t wrong. I loved beautiful women. But not like this. Ainsley had somehow embedded herself inside my brain. Which I didn’t mind one fucking bit. Other women didn’t have this kind of effect on me. Never had. Never would again.
“‘Bout time,” Butcher said, scowling at me.
I may have hit on his old lady once…or twice.
The first time I had no idea she belonged to the psychopath.
Or that she was one herself. And she’d proven that she could handle herself by rendering me unconscious.
That would’ve been a blow to the ego except the woman was a professional hit woman. Seriously, she was an assassin.
“She’s hot.”
I scowled at Toxic. “How the fuck would you know?”
“I’m tellin’ Billie you said that,” Hush said, taking a swig from the beer bottle he was holding.
“Fuck off, we’re busting Warrant’s balls today,” Toxic replied, “not mine.”
“We’re always goin’ to bust your balls when given the chance,” Hush said.
Butcher nodded in agreement.
“Should’ve left you two assholes at home,” Toxic muttered, but he turned his cell around and showed a picture of Ainsley from the County Sheriff’s website.
Hush let out a whistle. “You don’t believe in playin’ in your own league do you?” he asked me.
I chuckled and eyed the photo. My woman did look good in her uniform.
“I’m getting bored. Let me kick in a few doors.”
Cypher sighed and glared at Butcher. “Well, too fucking bad, it’s not happening.”
“We’re all getting a bit antsy, Prez,” Scythe said. “Waiting around for intelligence isn’t most of our strong suits.”
“What the fuck do you want me to do about it? Glitch, Switch, Rat, and Riptide are all on it. Besides, there’s too many doors to just randomly kick them in.”
Riptide was the Tucson Chapter’s tech guy. It wasn’t his obsession the way it was for the others, but he was better than most of us with a computer so he did the work until they needed something more. Then they usually called Cypher to get Glitch’s help.
“Why’s it taking so long?” Pyre asked. “It never takes this fucking long.” He was using the needle of a syringe to clean underneath his nails.
He was our medic. He always had medical supplies with him.
Not sure where he kept it all because sometimes he pulled needles out of places that they didn’t seem to belong.
The main problem, so Glitch had explained, was that Sentinel was so remote that there were hardly any highway cameras, and while most gas stations and such might have security cameras, they might not have cell service or Wi-Fi.
Shit was isolated out here, or enroute to here.
So connecting the dots from one sighting to the next was hit or miss.
It was like looking for a needle in a haystack for our techies.
And the guys who’d snatched these kids weren’t stupid enough to let them be seen in town where there were cameras.
It was making it take too much damn time to track them down, but there wasn’t much we could do but be patient.
Cypher rolled his head, stretching his neck. It was one of his tells that he was losing his patience. The man had an epic amount of patience and control. He had to with all of us around. We were less…restrained. “How the hell am I supposed to know that?” he finally asked.
“My guess?” Everyone looked at me and Cypher nodded. “Either this was some last minute thing, or we’re dealing with some low level fuck ups.”
Demo’s eyebrows rose. “What makes you say that?”
“Everything’s been so fucking reactionary,” I told him. “Taking two kids instead of one. Stealing cars that were right next to the vehicles they dumped. They didn’t want to drag those kids any farther than they had to, or they’d get spotted. No online trail for our techs to find?”
“Maybe they’ve wiped everything,” Cynic suggested.
“I don’t think so,” I replied. “There’d still be something Glitch would find if it’d been wiped.
That’s his fucking specialty, tracking down shit people don’t want others to find.
Tells me there’s nothing to find. They’re not using tech.
I think they—whoever the fuck they are—just decided to grab this kid for some reason and did it. ”
“How would they know where he was?” Torque asked.
“Christina is the birth mother,” Glitch said from behind his laptop screen. He hadn’t retreated down to his basement despite all the talking. He just tuned us out for the most part.
“So?” Demo asked with a shrug of his massive shoulders.
“So, she could have called CPS,” Jury answered.
“Would they have given her any information since he was abandoned and then adopted out?” Toxic asked.
“Seems kind of fucked up to do that,” Butcher added.
“CPS is filled with idiots with soft hearts. She must have fed them some kind of sob story,” I said with a shrug. “Or maybe they paid someone to run a search for him so they weren’t traceable. Probably won’t know until we find them.”
“So we’re either dealing with mostly inept shitheads, or incredibly smart shit heads,” Scythe said in a grim voice. “Either way, they’re going to be dead shit heads by the time this is all over.”
We all raised our beers in a toast to that.