Radclyffe - Code of Honor

Adam stood and looked pointedly at Cam. “You’ll just have to see that the people assigned to protect them do their jobs.”

“Thank you for your time,” Lucinda said, rising. “Anything you need, Cam, just let me know.”

Stark’s jaw looked tight enough to crack, but she said nothing as Adam turned and walked out.

“Thank you.” Cam appreciated Lucinda’s offer of support, but the one thing she needed, Lucinda couldn’t give her. A guarantee that Blair would be safe.

*

“So,” Sky said, glancing once around the cavernous garage. Three motorcycle bodies in various stages of disassembly occupied the center of the room, and one entire wall was taken up by a counter covered with tools. Shelves above and below sagged under jumbles of spare parts. A few small windows on one long wall let in a little light, casting everything in a gray pall. Despite the clutter, the place seemed unusually clean for a garage. “This is home?”

Loren hung her leather jacket on a peg beside the double-wide pull-down door and hit the button for the automatic closer. She kept the temperature in the garage in the high sixties—cool enough to weld damaged motorcycle chassis in comfort, but high enough to inhabit when not working. She pointed to a half wall toward the far end of the room. “I sleep down there.”

“Cozy,” Sky said.

“It suffices.” Loren poured water into a glass coffeepot, filled the reservoir of a drip coffeemaker, dumped grounds into a filter, and set the pot to brew. Leaning against the counter, Loren braced her elbows on the wooden ledge and surveyed Sky. She’d unzipped her jacket and stood with her hands on her hips, looking sexy and cocky and unsettlingly seductive in her tight tank and hip-hugging jeans. Loren ignored the twinge of attraction. “So, why are you here?”

“I already told you,” Sky answered with mock patience. “Things are heating up and I wanted a firsthand look.”

“If Ramsey finds out you’re not Lisa Smith, he’ll kill you. Or worse.”

“He won’t find out. Lisa gave us all the details of her assignment, including when and how she’s supposed to report to Jerome’s man. As long as she checks in on time and provides them with some intel, they’ll be happy.”

“Is the international president really interested in the club’s finances?”

Sky laughed. “The New Year’s run is coming up and he heard about the guns. He wants to make sure he gets his share.”

Loren swore. “So we have a leak.”

“Possibly not on your end—maybe whoever you’re buying from is talking around, looking to leverage your offer into something better.”

“Whoever I’m dealing with?” Loren asked. If the redhead was who she said she was, she’d know.

Sky sighed. “You are a hard sell. The Russians don’t care who they sell their guns to, only who is willing to pay the most.”

“Okay—you pass,” Loren said. And Sky was right—all the guns moving along the West Coast were coming by way of the Russian mob. Two and a half years ago, when she’d first set up shop in Silver Lake and put out the word she was in the business of procurement again, she’d called on contacts she’d made in the Middle East to vouch for her with the mob. Only this time, she was working for the Renegades and not the U.S. Army. “My arrangements with the Russians are solid—they won’t try to outbid me.”

“You know there’s no such thing as loyalty with these guys. And if there’s a struggle going on internally, someone may be trying to build a power base by allying with the Soledads.”

“Stupid, then,” Loren muttered.

“Yes, but no one ever said these guys were geniuses.”

“So we need to move quickly before our guns end up in the Soledads’ armory.” The Soledads were a Salvadoran offshoot and one of the most violent gangs to spring up in the last decade. They were annexing territory all over the country by killing off their rivals. So far, they hadn’t made a move on Renegades territory, but if they got their hands on two hundred assault rifles, they might.

“I’d say the sooner the better.” Sky straddled a demo Harley—one Loren had rebuilt and outfitted herself. Sky leaned forward and gripped the handlebars, her legs hugging the smooth rise of the black tank with red flames dancing along its sultry curves. “Nice bike. Your work?”

“Yeah,” Loren said, her throat unusually dry. She reached into the small fridge under the counter, pulled out a bottle of water, and took a long drink. The cold did little to extinguish the simmering heat that burned hotter the longer she looked at Skylar.

“Where is FALA getting that kind of money?” Sky asked casually.

“I don’t know yet.”

Sky peered at her from beneath a sweep of glossy red. “What are they going to do with them?”

“Don’t know that, either.”

“We can’t afford to have a bunch of fringe lunatics use guns we helped them get in some kind of homegrown terrorist attack.”

Loren’s lust cooled. Her voice hardened. “They won’t. By the time the exchange is set and the guns are moved to an intermediary holding point, we’ll know what we need to know, and we can arrange for a raid by the ATF. The guns will never get into the militia’s hands.”

“Yes,” Sky said, lifting one long leg gracefully over the bike and dismounting. “That’s the plan. And I’m here to be sure it works.”

Loren watched her silently. Sky hadn’t really said very much, and what she hadn’t said was telling—who’d sent her, why now, and what she was really looking for. Of course, that assumed anything she’d said was really true at all. Loren had no choice but to play along, and the game would have been simpler if Sky didn’t have the unusual and unwelcome effect of clouding her mind with a haze of desire. A distraction like that could get her killed.

Chapter Eight

Duggin’s was a corner bar in Adams Morgan that had escaped gentrification, projecting a casual air of disregard for appearances typical of local taprooms that had served DC neighborhoods for generations. The wood-paneled, low-ceilinged bar was lit by dusty, shadeless bulbs in sconces along the wall opposite the long wooden bar whose varnish had long since been scoured away by countless bartenders’ rags and gallons of spilled beer. Behind the bar, liquor bottles stood sentry in rows, from rotgut on the counter within easy reach to top-shelf brands almost as dusty as the light fixtures. The big mirror behind the bottles threw back distorted images of bottles and faces, discolored in smoky patches from years gone by. The bartender was a burly Irishman in a white open-collared shirt and shapeless black pants who’d inherited the place from his father, whose father’s father and those before him had stood behind this bar serving the local police and firemen and, eventually, scores of federal agents.

Duggin’s was a cop bar, and though the bartender didn’t know Cam, he knew her type. Cops were cops, whether local or feds. He tipped a finger to his forehead in acknowledgment as she walked by and then studiously ignored her. Eddie had picked a good place. Their presence would be forgotten before they’d even left. Eddie sat at the far end of the bar nursing a beer in a heavy glass mug. He hadn’t changed in the nearly two years since she’d last seen him. His receding hairline and long, thin face made him look a decade older than late thirties, but his frame was still wiry and trim. In a Redskins sweatshirt and jeans, he could easily pass for one of the local LEOs, stopping off for a quick one after shift. No one sat nearby. Happy hour didn’t start for an hour, and then the place would be wall-to-wall bodies. Now a few men at the bar watched sports on the television monitors angled in the corners of the room or contemplated the liquor in their glasses as if searching for answers that had long eluded them.