Bone Rider (34 page)

They sat in silence for a while, Andrej wolfing down the best damn chili he’d had in ages and J.C. sharing his space like he belonged there. The ancient rock of the canyon wall was warm and rough against Andrej’s back, the ground dirty under his ass. Around them the compound buzzed with quiet activity. Machinery moved back and forth, disappearing into side canyons and behind camouflage tarps, stirring up dust. Once, Andrej could’ve sworn he heard a muffled explosion from somewhere. The ground trembled slightly. Andrej put down the empty bowl and reached over to steal J.C.’s beer to wash down the last bite.

“Are you seriously digging bunkers now?” he inquired mildly.

“Something like that.” J.C. smiled, the crow’s feet around his eyes deepening. He hadn’t changed all that much, Andrej noted fondly. There was more gray in his beard and hair than the last time they’d met, a new scar peeking out from under his collar, but mostly he was still the same John Charles King, deceptively laid back on the surface and rock solid beneath. The only friend Andrej had outside of syndicate circles; well, except for Riley, maybe. He wasn’t sure whether he could still count Riley as a friend. They’d lied to him a lot and Riley Cooper wasn’t the type to forgive easily. Andrej had never had to lie to J.C., who was every bit as dangerous as the crowd Andrej usually ran with, though not nearly as cold-blooded. A different kind of crazy. J.C. was much more likely to kill you for personal reasons than for business or an abstract idea of honor. It was a fine distinction, but one Andrej appreciated.

He handed back the bottle with a warm smile of his own. “Thanks for taking us in,” he said, and stretched out his legs. Almost as good as lounging in a deck chair. Almost. He shifted his hip, lifted up, and reached down to brush a particularly obnoxious piece of rock from under his ass. Nature was not his friend.

J.C. eyed the pitiful remainder of his beer reproachfully, but there wasn’t a hint of disapproval in his tone when he addressed Andrej.

“You gonna tell me what’s going on now?” he rumbled, and it was ridiculous how good it was to hear that deep voice for real again, not only on the phone.

“I would if I could.” Andrej had been chewing at the problem for hours and it didn’t make any more sense now than it had before. “This was totally out of control, man. There was military all over the fucking place. First they tried to shoot Riley and then they fired three grenades into that diner like it was Baghdad or something. Boom.” He mimicked an explosion, shrugged a little and slumped back against the rock wall. “Misha went berserk and marched us straight in there to get him out. Well, get his body out. We assumed Riley had to be dead for sure.”

He remembered the way Misha had looked when he’d seen the diner go up and felt again that helpless twist in his heart that had come with realizing he was about to watch the most important person in his life die by military-assisted suicide.

“I thought I was gonna lose Misha,” he muttered, because he couldn’t say it to Kolya, wouldn’t ever let Misha know how much it bothered him, but he could tell J.C. “He never was rational about Riley. If Riley had died….”

He didn’t finish, preferred not to think too closely about what Misha might’ve done to himself and others. Misha had always been a bit unstable, his basically amiable nature at odds with the demands of his training and the things they’d both had to do—to become—in order to survive. He’d walked a tightrope even before Riley had entered the picture. Riley had upset this precarious balance and Andrej wasn’t sure Misha could ever get it back. Things were changing. Had been changing for a while, really, but they’d reached the point of no return when the diner had gone up in fire and smoke. Misha had glimpsed a future without Riley and he plainly hadn’t been able to handle it.

Andrej rubbed his hand over his face, tired enough to admit to himself that he was scared of what was coming. He could almost taste the blood waiting to be spilled. “I need another beer,” he muttered.

J.C. let out a gravelly chuckle, reached into the cooler, and handed over a cold bottle. “Any idea about why the government would be this interested in Cooper?”

Grateful for the change of topic, Andrej opened the beer and took a long drink. He wasn’t a fan of Mexican brews, but between J.C. and Riley he’d gotten used to them. Riley had introduced him to grits, too, and real Mexican food. Texas Hold ’Em. Cock rock. Joe Lansdale. Outdoor barbecues with not a hors d’oeuvre in sight. All in all, Riley was an easygoing guy with a wry sense of humor and a refreshing lack of homicidal tendencies. He might’ve ruined Misha for the job, but he’d also resurrected parts of the man Andrej had seen wither and nearly die over the past few years. Andrej liked Riley, thought of him as a friend… or as close to a friend as someone could be who lacked some critical information about you… but primarily Riley was a civilian with no known bodies in his metaphorical basement.

“I don’t have a clue.” Andrej rolled the beer bottle between his hands, watched the sunlight turn the piss-yellow liquid into something almost pretty. “He’s a good guy, but he’s a nobody. I checked his background myself. No connections to our business or the military, no suspicious money movements. He once spent a night in jail for drunk and disorderly.” He snorted, still amused by that one, then thought again of the mess in El Paso. That took the funny right out of it.

“I don’t know how he managed to survive,” he huffed. “Three grenades in an enclosed space that size? We should’ve been peeling his remains off the walls.”

And the ceiling. And the floor. Probably pick bits and pieces of him out of the debris. Burnt bits and pieces. There couldn’t have been much cover in there. It bugged Andrej. He didn’t believe in miracles and Riley surviving that blast with barely a scratch had been nothing short of one. Riley should’ve been dead. At the very least, he should’ve been severely injured. The shrapnel should’ve cut him to ribbons. The blast wave should’ve destroyed his eardrums and done serious damage to his internal organs. Maybe it had. There’d been no sign of it, though, not even a nosebleed, nothing but a bump on the head and some minor bruising.

“Huh,” J.C. said, but didn’t voice his thoughts on the matter beyond that. Wouldn’t, until he’d acquired more data. J.C. might be a suspicious ex-spook digging bunkers in the desert, but he wasn’t prone to spinning wild conspiracy theories. “Want to see what we’re doing here?”

Used to his friend’s penchant for mental zigzagging, Andrej merely nodded and climbed to his feet with a soft grunt. It had been a long day, and it wasn’t over yet. J.C. patted his shoulder in passing, kind enough not to tease.

“Come on. I’ll show you.”

Andrej glanced at the house once more before he followed. He wondered if Riley had woken up yet, if he was going to be all right. Hoped so for Riley’s sake, but mostly for Misha’s, because he was worried about what Misha would do if Riley wasn’t okay. Or if Riley rejected him again. He suspected that either way someone was going to die messily. There was nothing to do about it, no way Andrej could help except to try and get Misha through the aftermath, so he tore his gaze away and loped down the dirt path to catch up with J.C. instead.

“You know what the difference is between you and me?” J.C. asked conversationally when Andrej fell in step beside him.

“I dress better?” Andrej hazarded, only half kidding.

J.C. shot him a look from under dark brows that worked just fine as a rejoinder.

Andrej smiled sheepishly. “No?”

White teeth flashed in a quick, dimpled grin, the kind that made J.C. look ten years younger and heartbreakingly carefree. “You’re always running around getting shot at,” he explained mildly, “whereas I prefer to dig in and make my enemies beat their heads bloody at my door.”

“Uh-huh.”

Andrej nodded skeptically and absentmindedly kicked a stone across the path. He still thought being on the move was better than sitting in a corner. J.C. was a lazy fuck, was all. As if he’d read his thought, J.C. booted the stone back at him and they amused themselves with the age-old game of punting it back and forth without breaking stride.

They crossed the canyon floor unhurriedly, the stone skipping ahead erratically as they wandered past heaps of debris and the odd yellowed cactus patch. All those vehicles driving through had left a trail, dusty and desolate, too faint to be called a road, too prominent to be overlooked. The air was shimmering with heat. Everything was soaked in it, the ground beneath their feet burning even through the thick soles of their boots. Well, J.C.’s boots. He’d taken one look at Andrej’s Gucci loafers and immediately equipped him with more suitable footwear in addition to a ridiculous straw cowboy hat that was currently saving Andrej’s brains from frying. It should’ve annoyed him, this casual disregard for his clothing, but Andrej had to admit there was a peculiar freedom in losing all those tight creases and expensive accessories.

It didn’t take them long to reach their destination, but still Andrej was sweating like a pig by the time they came to a stop in front of a hole in the rock wall on the other side of the canyon. It turned out to be the entrance to what appeared to be a mineshaft, framed by sturdy timbers and secured by a crude metal gate. J.C. opened the old-fashioned lock and pushed against the heavy wings with a flourish. They swung inward with the hair-raising screech of warped hinges to reveal a whopping five yards of rough-hewn stone corridor and an uninspiring, cage-like construction at the end that appeared to be a freight elevator.

Andrej cleared his throat and tried to muster some sort of enthusiasm. “Wow. You… you dug a really big hole. You mining for gold now or is this going to be a bunker?”

“Both, kinda,” J.C. explained with a smirk. “The original idea was to create additional storage space underground. Doing that we found turquoise and copper.”

Turquoise. Copper. How thrilling.

J.C. chuckled. Figured, that he’d find Andrej’s lack of excitement funny. The man had a queer sense of humor.

“There’s good money in both, kid, believe it or not. It’s harder work than gunrunning, but you don’t get shot at as often, either, so I figure we’ll stick to it for now.”

“Are you saying you’ve gone legit?” Andrej asked, not buying it for a second. He nodded at the thick metal door. “What? People trying to make away with your copper ore?”

“Oh, this ain’t the mine,” J.C. said, grinning. “This is the
cool
part of our operation here.” He nodded at the elevator. “Turns out there’s caverns down there. Underground tunnels and caves, a whole damn maze. Juan swears he even heard a river once.”

Now that was kinda interesting. In a “secret cave system under a survivalist compound, how fucking cool is this?” kind of way.

“No shit?”

“No shit,” J.C. promised. “We’re using parts of it, but mostly it’s a huge, unexplored mess. We don’t know how far it stretches, but it’s possible some of the caves connect to the Carlsbad Caverns.” He hesitated, staring into the dark, and his smile dimmed. “If something happens, grab your friends and get down there.”

So that was what this little field trip was about. Andrej’s mind snapped back to business obediently, but not without disappointment. It had been fun to pretend, for a bit, that this was a social call.

“What if they follow?”

“I’ll give you a cheat sheet.” J.C. patted his arm, but his eyes were serious when he added, “Don’t deviate. You get lost down there, we’ll have a hard time finding you again.”

“Awesome,” Andrej muttered, eying the elevator with trepidation. Suddenly, exploring the secret underground caves sounded much less exhilarating. “Let’s hope they don’t track us down, then.”

J.C. snorted sardonically. “Yeah, that’s likely.”

A man was allowed to dream, wasn’t he?

“Mostly I’m hoping we’ll be long gone by the time they get here,” Andrej confessed. “I don’t want to bring this down on you. I just didn’t know where else to go.”

He didn’t know where to go from here, either. All of his other contacts had ties to the syndicate and there was no doubt Papa Tokarev was on to them and beyond mad by now. Chances were he’d given orders for Riley to be killed on sight, which would push Misha over the edge, so they had to avoid their usual crowd at any cost. Misha’s outside connections consisted of a bunch of freelance mechanics, a string of long-forgotten one-night stands, and Riley, who might or might not know a coyote or two, but probably nobody able to help them out of this level of shit. No telling whether Riley would even be useful in a gunfight: a few trips out to the shooting range had assured Andrej that the man could definitely hit what he aimed for, but Andrej doubted Riley had ever pointed his gun at a human being. As far as he’d been able to tell, the extent of violence in Riley’s life so far boiled down to the branding of hapless cows and the odd brawl. Andrej wasn’t cold enough yet to call this a flaw, but it certainly was inconvenient in their current situation.

Maybe Kolya knew somebody useful, but from what little he’d divulged of his personal history, the few friends of his who were still alive lived in Russia. Also, if they were anything like Kolya, involving them would be like putting out fire with gasoline.

“Where else could you have gone?” J.C. shrugged. “Somehow, that boy of yours pissed off the
government
. This shit’s serious. I don’t think even your don will be able to protect you from the hell that’s about to rain down.”

“My ‘don’ doesn’t
know
about this,” Andrej informed him with a frown, “and I’d rather keep it that way, thanks. Last thing we need is the old man taking potshots at Riley. Misha’s one nudge from going postal as it is.”

Maybe Russia wasn’t such a bad idea. Or Iceland. Seemed to be a nice, peaceful sort of country, except for the occasional volcanic eruption. Apparently, the horses were smaller than Riley was used to, but he’d simply have to deal. Also, lots of green, there. Rustic ambience. It’d be a nice change of pace. No sane person would ever search for them in Iceland.

That was when Andrej noticed a funny look on J.C.’s face. His heart plummeted. “What? What now?”