“I’m not gonna make it,” Eric muttered, glancing up and taking in the scene.
“Cop, you grab my helmet and get on the back of the bike,” Burton said. “Can you hang on to the bitch bar and shoot at the same time?”
“Sure,” Brady said, not sure at all if he could.
“You’d better not be lying. Much. Eric, if you’re still working on this when the big bang happens, you tell Jai to catch us running after we take off. Once we’re clear of the rubble, he can hand us the phone mid-run. You hear?”
“Got it,” Eric said, but he sounded like his concentration was elsewhere.
Brady slid out of the SUV and glanced back at him, eyeballs-deep in hacker shit that Brady had never mastered, and for a moment, he couldn’t do it.
“Charlie!” he called out, hating the neediness in his voice but so,sonot ready to let the last few days with this man disappear like settling dust.
Eric looked up, bloodied and wearied but not broken. “Don’t worry, baby,” he said, his voice thick with Boston. “Like I told ya, you’ll know where to find me.”
“I….” His voice cracked. “I’ll come back,” he said. “Just… God?” They hadn’t been supposed to happen. They’d been an interlude, emotional support sex, two strangers on the outside of the hurricane. But that’s not what it felt like now. It felt like it was real. How could he leave this man bleeding on the side of the road?
“Go, baby,” Eric said softly. “We’ve both got shit to do, but we ended up here from two different places. We’ll end up back here looking for the same thing.”
Brady nodded, eyes burning, thinking there was more to say than that, but he took the helmet Burton was impatiently offering him and wrestled it onto his head.
Inside, Burton said, via Bluetooth apparently, “Don’t worry, son. They’ll get him help. He’s tough, right?”
“Right,” Brady said, tired of being rescued. What he wanted to do—what hereallywanted to do—was to get in the driver’s seat of the car and take Eric to the hospital and to wait, pacing like any other lover until he knew in his bones that his man would be all right. He’d been shot—shot—and Brady was getting on a motorcycle and whizzing far, far away. “I—”
“Hop on.”
Brady did, grimly reaching back with his left hand to anchor himself to the bike while pulling his gun from the holster on his hip to ready himself. He had no idea what Burton had in mind, but if he’d learned anything this last week, it was not to be surprised.
Still, he was not prepared for Burton to head directly toward the flatbed Jai had placed in the middle of the road and to whirl the bike around so they were facing the oncoming wave of cop cars, still about two miles off but coming in fast. Brady had a heartbeat to contemplate the vastness of the desert and the long swaths of land and road between the action they saw andthe action they would soon be in the thick of while he glanced around to get his bearings.
To his surprise, he saw that Jai had gotten out of the truck, which was apparently as locked in as he could make it, and was standing next to them. As Brady gave the SUV to the side of the road another nervous glance, Jai spoke up, his voice only faintly muffled by the helmet on Brady’s head.
“The trick,” the big man said thoughtfully, “is to not let them see where the phone is hiding. By the time he is done, there will be too much chaos for them to care.”
“He who?” Eric or Ace?
Jai gave that disturbing smile, with all the big teeth. “Does it matter?”
From far away behind them, Brady could hear the now-familiar cacophony of cop cars and Subaru Forester, heading for them at speed.
In front of them, the whirling lights grew closer as the sirens screamed.
GEORGE ANDErnie rather liked working at the garage. Most of the time, one or the other of them would work the cashier’s cubicle, but Jai had taught them how to use the diagnostic equipment too. They could tell somebody if their tires were balanced, if they needed an oil change, if their belts were going, and then give them options. Some customers would choose to pay a nominal fee and try to get across the desert to wherever they were going—although Baker was a no-go because Ace and Sonny werestillthe best equipped garage east of LA. Some customers would take the option of staying in one of the small hotels in Victoriana proper while waiting for their part to come in—for some of them, staying in town wasn’t an option. And some of them—usually the richer ones—would opt to have their vehicles towed to their destination where some “less colorful”mechanics could take care of their transportation, and this always made the people at the garage snicker because they knew that “less colorful” also meant “less skilled,” and they looked forward to seeing those people on the return trip when whatever they’dthoughthad been repaired busted again.
George and Ernie couldn’t do any of the detailed stuff—but the basic triage that told them how long a thing would take and whether or not they had the parts,thatthey could do.
And in this case, while not as skilled as Ace or Jai—and definitely not on par with Sonny—Dimitri turned out to be able-bodied and competent, and they all managed a working rhythm during that morning, most of it revolving around patching tires. It seemed a roadwork site that floated between the roadblocks was leaving stupid little bits of metal everywhere, and there were a lot of pissed-off people with holes in tires that should have had thousands of miles left on the tread.
“I swear to God,” George said, after sending a distraught mother of three across the interstate to get her kids an ice cream and wait half an hour for Dimitri to patch the tire, “it’s like the cops in this area are adisease, spreading contagion with every damned move.”
Ernie didn’t crack a smile. He gazed at George through the scratched security Plexiglas and said, “We are incredibly lucky both roadblocks moved west of Victoriana, period. The shit going down near Baker isnotconducive to good health.”
George paused then and swallowed. “You’d know, right—”
Ernie’s gaze focused, and he gave a faint smile. “I’d know,” he reassured. “I’m just….” He shook his head. “God, George, I’msostrung out right now. I feel like I’mfloating. I’m getting glimpses of all of them, including….” He swallowed. “Just… they may need you. Eric stopped the bleeding in his leg, but he’s going to—”
“Oh Lord. Should I tell Amal?” Shit. George was already attached to their two new people. He couldn’t help it; he did like a community.
