Ruben took two steps toward me, pressing the barrel of his piece to my temple. He snarled, “I think you know what happened to Jorge. How else did you know someone was spying on Leaves of Grass?”
I’d had many a piece glued to my head in my time, but this guy seemed like more of a loose cannon than most. He definitely didn’t have all the dots on his dice. It was one of those situations where he had a piece, and I had a piece—a literal Mexican standoff. However, his barrel was closer to my brains. “Through the grapevine, ese!” I could’ve probably buried him faster than he could me, but it wasn’t worth taking the chance. “Those are the guys threatening to go to the pigs, not me.” I tossed my head in Wolf’s direction.
That did the trick. Ruben turned his irate, huffing face onto the sludge pond and in an instant, had blown the arm off one of the stiffs across the water. I was sure he meant to plug the guy in the head, but with that idiotic gangsta side grip he used, it was much harder to aim.
“That’s what I think of your fucking Eminence Front,” he snarled, referring to Lytton’s famed pot. He shot again, getting another arm. I was almost entirely sure that dirt berm would be a sufficient shield for Wolf. I was rewarded when he waggled the arm of the remaining corpse, in a wobbly sort of “fuck you” gesture.
Ruben shot at that body. Again, he got an arm, so he kept shooting. A leg. Another leg. Just the berm. An arm. Oh, a head.
Trying to calm Ruben down, I said, “You definitely gave them outlaw justice. I’ll give your message to Dr. Driving Hawk. You’d like to open up a dialogue.”
“There’s my fucking dialogue,” growled Ruben, plugging the berm a few more times for good measure.
“I’ll tell him you refuse to pay for his burned shipment,” I said with the utmost respect. I could’ve taken him out now, he was so preoccupied with taking his anger out on a pile of dirt. I hoped Wolf had given up playing puppet master by now and was crawling back around the side where we’d parked our rides behind a shed.
Ruben lifted his chin at his two associates. “Ir a buscar los cadavers.” Go get those bodies. The two guys trotted off, and Ruben shoved his piece down his pants. You tell Lytton I’m sorry, but this means war. It’s every man for himself out in this desert, eh?”
I nodded. I actually couldn’t agree more. I stuck my piece back into my 501s, too, and shook his hand. “I’ll pass the word along.”
“We’re good,” said Ruben.
We went our separate ways. The fact still remained that Ochoas had buried three Bare Bones men, not just once like normal narcos, but now twice. And he’d destroyed a shipment of grade A pot that had been destined for Phoenix dispensaries.
From the shed I could see Wolf continue to crawl on hands and knees along the berm. I waved an arm at him to hurry up. He ran half-crouched the rest of the way.
“Oh, man! I am so going to impress Tracy with what I just did!”
I was actually impressed, too. I jammed on my lid and started my scoot. “We’d better rip it out of here. Ruben’s about to find out those guys were already dead.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
PIPPA
We were walking out to our targets to collect our arrows when I dared ask Wolf Glaser what had happened the other day.
I mean, I knew better than to outright ask anyone associated with The Bare Bones what was going on. That was a given. It was a man’s world for better or worse, and sometimes I didn’t even dare ask Madison or June what was up. Men rushed around whispering in each other’s ears or making signs with their eyes. They gathered in separate groups to talk about stuff I was certain was more interesting than what we women discussed.
But today I had the nerve. It had been four days since Fox had lifted me up to grab the arrow in the wall. I hadn’t seen him, even though I’d been hanging around The Bum Steer, Leaves of Grass, and now I was up behind their enormous airplane hangar, The Citadel. Fox simply wasn’t around, and it was not my place to ask about him. Had he accomplished his task for Lytton and gone back to—wherever the hell it was he came from? My hunger for him had ballooned into a painful jones that had me thinking about him every five minutes. My work was fascinating, learning the particulars of the pot trade. But even a lesson on feminized clones didn’t distract me for more than four minutes, and my mind was back on his muscular ass, the carved ripple of his abs, the meaning behind the Ezekiel verse on his back.
“There was something Fox said about an explosion?” I said meekly. I was too weak to pull my arrows from the hay bales—hell, I was a biochemist, not an athlete—so I had to use this rubber clamp thing to yank them. Even then, I was straining so badly I had to put my knee against the target.
Wolf frowned. “Explosion?”