Page 5 of Shade

“That’s going to need stitches.”

“Great,” she said. “I love stitches.”

I pressed a wad of gauze into it, and she sucked air through her teeth and didn’t pull away. Her hair had been pinned up once. Most of it had come down since, dark and wavy around her face.

“Tell me what happened.”

She told it in pieces while I worked, short and plain. She’d been flying those crates down to the Bootheel every couple of weeks since spring, and today one of them broke open.

“Russ knew,” she said. “He looked at me, and I could tell he’d known the whole time. And then he used it. He told them I’d seen it, so now they had to pay more. That’s when the man shot him.”

“What’d he look like? The one who shot him.”

“Older than the rest. Heavy. Gray in his mustache.” She frowned, remembering. “He shot Russ with his left hand. His right arm was all stiff, like he’d hurt his wrist once and it never healed right.”

I knew exactly who that was.

Vega. He was cartel muscle, and Preacher had wrecked that wrist for him a while back for putting his hands on his old lady, Holly. Vega worked for Tomas Rivas, who ran the cartel’s operation in Salvation. Tomas had been losing pieces of that operation ever since he picked our town to operate in.

“You know him?” Mya said.

“Yeah. Something like that.”

“Is that bad?”

“Yeah, these aren’t guys you want to screw with.”

“He told me I fly for them now.” She swallowed. “That was right before I stole the plane.”

I wrapped the arm tight over the gauze and tied it off. My hands were sure on her. They always are on a wound. I’ve packed worse than this in the back of a Humvee with rounds punching through the doors. I’ve done it lying flat on a mountainside in the dark with mortars walking in closer every minute, and a kid from Ohio screaming for his mother under my hands. A cut arm on a quiet airstrip was nothing.

But her skin was warm under my fingers, and she was watching my face instead of the cut. She had light hazel eyes, and they didn’t leave me once. When I pulled the bandage tight she bit down on her bottom lip to keep from making a sound, and I wanted to put my thumb right there and ease it free.

For her it was first aid. For me it was the first time in years I’d had my hands on a woman and wanted to keep them there.

Not long after, the bikes came up the mine road.

Preacher got off first. He’s been president of this club as long as I’ve worn the patch, and he took in the plane, the crate and the woman in one look.

“You texted me ‘plane down,’” he said to me. “Two words.”

“Plane was down.”

He looked at the rifles. “You left out a few things.”

Gage climbed up into the back of the plane. Gage is our sergeant-at-arms, and whatever comes to this club with a gun attached ends up being his problem. He came back out a minute later wiping his hands on his jeans.

“Thirty crates, give or take,” he said. “Rifles and ammo. All of it military grade.”

Deacon whistled through his teeth. Deacon keeps the club’s money, which means he knows what everything is worth.

“You got any idea what thirty crates of those go for?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Gage said. “Got a fair idea.”

“So does Tomas,” I replied.

Havoc looked at the nose buried in the dirt, then at Mya. “Nice parking.”