Nolan: Return to Signal Bend (30 page)

He laid his hands on the revolver before him. “I’ve been careful to remove as many traces of your presence here as I could. Remove the rest, pack your pack with the supplies you need, and go out the way you came in. You’re healed enough. You’ve been strong enough for days. I’ve been keeping you weak, hoping for some time. But it’s time for this to be over. It’s time for you to return to Signal Bend.”

The drug must have been slowing Nolan’s thinking down, because he was having difficulty making sense of the conversation. It seemed simple and yet incredible. “You’re going to let me kill you.”

Vega nodded and pushed the gun across the table. Out of reflex more than anything else, Nolan caught it.

He sat facing David Vega, the man who had opened Havoc’s belly and taken him away from his family, from Nolan and his mom, and from Loki, who had never known his father. The man before him had conspired over decades to
end drugs
, as if that were possible, and he’d left behind him a deep wake of bodies. All the chaos the Horde had known for the past decade and a half could be traced back to the feet of the man sitting calmly at this table with him.

He cocked and aimed the gun. Vega’s expression didn’t change. He didn’t even blink.

Nolan had been Horde for a decade. Although he’d gotten his patch after the Missouri charter had gone straight, he’d spent more than a year in the dark with the SoCal charter. He had killed. In fact, he’d had an existential crisis in SoCal, when he’d realized how little it bothered him to take another life. He’d wondered what kind of man he was. Analisa had helped him see that he could be both light and dark, that he could love deeply and kill when he had to, and that he could hold those truths in balance.

But he had never killed anyone who wasn’t actively an enemy, who wasn’t trying to kill him at the very same time, or who wouldn’t have killed him when the opportunity arose.

He had never faced a man like this. Someone he knew.

The gun shook in his hand, and he brought his other hand up to steady it.

Vega sat there, still as a corpse.

Was it the drugs making him hesitate? Were they still in his system, whatever they were? He didn’t think so; he felt clearer than he had in all the time he’d been in this cabin.

He simply couldn’t kill him. He knew him too well now. He understood him. He couldn’t find the vengeance he needed. He couldn’t see the rightness.

Nolan set the gun down. Then, unable to stop himself, he laid his head on the table and wept.

Vega stood and pulled his chair around to sit at Nolan’s side. He set his hand on Nolan’s back and just sat there until Nolan was able to pull himself together.

When he sat up and sliced his hands across his cheeks to clear the wet trails, Vega picked up the gun and opened the cylinder.

It was empty.

“Fuck you,” Nolan said, but without the energy of anger. He was just too fucking drained and lost to be angry at the ruse. His head felt like it had been upended and shaken hard.

Vega pulled another gun from behind him, opened that cylinder, showed Nolan that it was loaded. He set it on the table. “I only wanted it not to be a reflex. I wanted you to think first. I know the burden of a cold kill, and I don’t want you to carry it, Nolan. It will break your back. But it’s your choice. I am ready to die. My life ended when I lost my family.”

Nolan stared at the two guns on the table. Then he pushed them away.

Vega put his hand on Nolan’s shoulder. “Do we have an understanding, you and I?”

“Yes.”

~oOo~

Two days later, Nolan packed his pack. Vega was out running his perimeter check before they left. They had a nearly two-mile hike to the plane Vega used to get to Winnipeg.

What a strange, sad life the man was leading, isolated from everyone, his family dead, his own life for sale. Now that Nolan had lost his hatred, he’d found sympathy, and even some grudging respect, for the man who’d broken his family. He didn’t think he could live like this, in oppressive solitude, a victim of his own deeds.

No, he couldn’t. But he didn’t have to. Nolan was going home, and he would try put his life back the way it belonged—the way it had already been when he’d gone off on this selfish, stupid mission. He was lucky—it was turning out okay. He had survived, he hadn’t put his family at risk, and they hadn’t abandoned him.

There would be consequences, and he might not keep his patch, but Nolan had a home to return to. He had a family. He had love.

He looked around the cabin, this sad, dim set of walls, and understood, finally, that Havoc’s death had been avenged long ago.

As he zipped up his pack, Vega came in hard, slamming the door against the wall and making the weapons rattle on the rack. He grabbed a semi-automatic rifle and threw it at Nolan, who caught it without thinking. His chest complained, but not much.

“What’s up?”

“Company. I saw their trail, not them. Somebody’s out there. At least five or six, maybe more.”

“Not your guys?” Nolan checked the load on the M16.

“My guys wouldn’t come up unless I don’t show at our meet. I’m on my own up here otherwise. It’s got to be cartel.” He pulled a handgun from the cabinet and waved it at Nolan as an offer, then set it on top. “Everything’s loaded, but take some mags and keep the cabinet open for reloads. We’ll have to hold this position. I’ll take this window. You take the bedroom—based on the trail they’re leaving, that’s the only other direction they could come from.”

Nolan nodded and went to the cabinet. He took the Glock and checked the mag, then gathered up clips for both weapons. Vega was already in position when he walked through the cabin and opened the door to the bedroom.

He settled on his knees at the window and set his aim with the M16. He saw movement within minutes and turned his aim toward the rustling greenery.

When the first human body came through into the small clearing, Nolan set his finger on the trigger immediately. But the body had long hair, and he hesitated at the thought that he might shoot a woman.

Another step—no, not a woman. A man with long hair. He focused his intent again, but in those few beats, more people had eased from the clearing, keeping low, seeking cover. They made an arc, converging on the cabin. Nolan used the sight to scan the other people coming for them.

And saw Isaac Lunden. The Horde had come for him.

His chest nearly exploded with love and relief. Home. They’d come to take him home.

“Nolan.” Vega’s voice behind him made him twitch, and he almost fired. He would have shot Isaac if he had. He pulled his hand away and set the gun down, pushing it from him like it might bite him.

“It’s okay. It’s my—” he’d turned as he’d spoken, and his mouth snapped shut when he found Vega standing in the doorway with a shotgun pointed at his head.

He held his hands out in a calming gesture. “It’s Horde. Not a threat. We’re okay.”

But David Vega, the man who’d killed his father, the man he’d chosen not to kill in retribution, had failed to kill when he’d had the chance, shook his head and waved the shotgun at him. “Let’s go.”

“You son of a bitch. You piece of shit.”

Vega only waved the gun again, and Nolan, without a gun in his own hand now, had no choice but to stand and let Vega lead him out of the cabin.

When Nolan came out of the cabin with his hands raised, the Horde all froze but didn’t drop their weapons. There were eight of them: Len, Tommy, Isaac, Showdown, and Double A, plus Nacto and two others whom Nolan assumed were from the Montana charter. It was Nacto he’d seen coming first out of the woods. All eight bore M16s or AKs.

Had they all walked the twenty or more miles to this cabin? Had Isaac, Show, and Len—all of whom were well into or beyond middle age, and all of whom suffered from old injuries—walked all that way? For him?

He didn’t have time to parse the question, because Vega poked him in the back with his gun. He stepped forward, with Vega right behind him. No one had spoken yet.

Double A, the Missouri VP and the ranking member of the Horde present, took a step forward. Still no one spoke.

Then Vega swung to Nolan’s side and took a step back. He said, “Remember what I told you,” and pumped the shotgun.

Nolan dropped to the ground as a gun fired, but he hadn’t been shot. His only pain was the healing wound in his chest. Then more shots rang out, and Vega fell to the ground next to him, his torso and face torn open. His one remaining eye stared. As Nolan lay on still, waiting for the air to clear, blood soaked Vega’s abdomen and seeped into the dirt.

Just like that, it was over.

Vega had never fired. Nolan understood that he’d never intended to.

Remember what I told you
. He remembered it all. Vega had confessed his sins. He’d spoken in depth of his regret, his loss, his loneliness. He’d told Nolan how to cover up his death. He’d wanted to die, and yet he hadn’t wanted Nolan to carry the burden. And then the Horde had shown up and given him another way.

Showdown was at his side first. “You hit, brother?”

Nolan shook his head. “No. I’m whole.” Show held out his hand, and Nolan took it and let his brother pull him up. When Show yanked him into a monstrous bear hug, Nolan held on.

Then Show pushed him away and punched him in the face.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Geoff stood at the front window as Darwin and Cox walked by, both wearing colors and sporting handguns holstered at their hips. He sighed.

“I’d heard about the way things were, but it’s different living it.”

Iris came and stood next to him. “This is nothing like the way it was. I didn’t live here for most of the worst part, but I know it was much, much worse before.” They weren’t even on lockdown. It was just a bit of extra security.

Iris didn’t know what her father had done or said, but within a day or two of the incident at Moe’s and what she’d told him she needed, a third of the Horde had ridden out of town, heading north, after Nolan. Of the members Iris had always thought of as the ‘core’ of the club, only Badger had stayed back. All of the living members she truly considered family—her father, Uncle Isaac, and Uncle Len—had gone.

Her daddy was fixing it.

Whatever Nolan had gone to do, the Horde was worried it would blow back on the town. So all the old ladies, Iris, the members who’d stayed back, the hangarounds and other club friends, everyone was carrying, and the Horde on patrol were carrying openly. Patrols happened more often, and family had to check in regularly. If whatever they’d gone to do to bring Nolan home went badly, they were as ready as they could be to deal with it.

In the meantime, things were supposed to run as normally as possible.

There were shoppers strolling around, but it was quiet for a summer Saturday. Most of that was the town itself—everyone was watchful. Even those who weren’t directly affiliated with the club knew that there was something up, and people were lying low. That atmosphere seemed contagious, and people who came from away to shop didn’t stay long. The vibe was off.

Geoff turned to her and sighed yet again. He’d been huffing and puffing for days about the state of the town, and of her face. “Okay. Well, I hope it passes and we get back to normal soon. You want to help me rearrange the curiosities again?”

“Sure. Let’s go.”

For her part, Iris had been a bundle of nerves since the riders had left. Now it had been two days since they’d checked in with anyone, and she didn’t know whether she’d forced her father, and more of her family, to join Nolan in death.

She brushed her finger down the length of her nose, something she’d been doing over and over since the day before, when she’d been able to take the splint off. Her face was still bruised—even uglier now in its healing—and makeup didn’t seem to make much of a difference.

Iris didn’t know what had happened to those guys, but everybody kept telling her they were ‘handled’ and no longer a threat. Did she hope they were dead? She didn’t have an opinion on that either way. She just never wanted to see them again. As long as that were true, they could breathe, or not. Whatever.

Gia had been put to work at the town library and at the B&B, filling her days with chores and supervision. Iris had only seen her once since that night. They’d been at the market: Gia and Bo with Lilli, and Iris with Joey, following a shopping list Shannon had sent with them.

Gia had been blushingly silent, staring at her boots. Lilli had had a lot to say—so much so that Iris was going to the Lunden’s after work. To start self-defense training.

She hadn’t been given much of a choice. When Lilli wanted something, she got it.

~oOo~

“Did you bring your splint?”

Answering Lilli’s question, Iris nodded and pulled a fresh self-adhesive splint from the pocket of her denim shorts. They were in the Lunden’s barn—Iris, Lilli, and Gia. The horses were out loose in the pasture, and Lilli had all the doors open.

The afternoon was hot and humid, but the big ceiling fans moved the air above them, and the barn felt almost cool. A couple of barn cats prowled around, curious about the new activity, and their old dog Kodi stretched out in the front doorway, panting. While Iris put the splint on her nose, feeling its placement without need of a mirror, she considered the Lundens’ hound.

Several Horde families had old dogs, all of them littermates, from a litter Badger and Adrienne had found abandoned on the road ten years earlier. They were big beasts, with a pedigree they’d only been able to guess at. Most of them looked like some kind of cross between a Rottweiler and a pit bull, but two of them looked a lot different and still managed to look related. The biggest, the Lundens’ Kodi, was something like a hundred and fifty pounds and looked more like a hulking German Shepherd than anything else. Adrienne and Badger’s Hector, pushing a hundred pounds, looked like a huge Australian Shepherd. The littlest, Uncle Len and Tasha’s Penny, was nearly eighty pounds. Cory and Loki had Thor, also about a hundred pounds.

Iris’s family had had Max, but he’d died a couple of years earlier. He’d never really been her dog, since she hadn’t lived in Signal Bend, but Joey and Millie still got sad about missing him sometimes. Max had come into their lives when they were just tiny babies. They’d grown up with him those first years. Iris felt their grief—and she felt a little envious, too. Even before Ray and what he’d done to little Falkor, Iris had never had a pet.

Watching Kodi stretch his arthritic legs out onto the shaded dirt, maximizing his contact with its cool, Iris realized that all the families would know Joey and Millie’s grief soon enough. The littermates had gotten elderly.

“We ready?”

Iris turned and smiled at Lilli. “Yep.”

Gia was leaning against an empty stall, withdrawn and unhappy. Iris and she had yet to talk about their shared misadventure, and Iris intended to rectify that before she left this evening.

Lilli had brought out a punching dummy or whatever it was called, and she was filling its base with water. While she worked at that task, she explained her plan for their first training.

“We’re not going to do any contact stuff tonight, except on Bob here. We’ll wait until your nose is fully healed, and then we’ll bring in one of the Horde, and you can punch on him.” She smirked as she stood up, dropping the running hose into a steel bucket. “I’ll let you choose which one. Turn off the water for me, G.”

Gia did as she was told. She seemed smaller than before the Moe’s incident.

Iris poked at the dummy. It was rubbery but solid. “You named him Bob?”

“He came that way. B.O.B. It stands for Body Opponent Bag. He’s better than the heavy bag for this, because you can place your hits according to their location on a man’s body. On a regular bag, you have to estimate. I want you to build some good memory in your head and your muscles.” She closed the spout in the base. “We’re gonna start with the basics, though.”

“I know all that stuff,” Gia muttered.

Lilli spun on her boot heel and stood akimbo, facing her daughter down. “You,
cara mia
, don’t have shit to say about this. Iris’s nose was broken and her ribs bruised because you thought you knew better than everybody else, and you were wrong. Did you use any of your great knowledge deciding to sneak out to a bar dressed like a club girl? No. Did you use any of it when you were getting attention you didn’t want? No. Did you almost get raped by some son of a bitch who’d put GHB in your beer? Yes. So stand up straight and get over here. We’re starting from scratch.”

“It was your sweater,” she protested as she slumped closer. “How come when I wear it, I’m a club slut, but you’re not when you wear it?”

Iris felt extremely uncomfortable standing in the middle of this mother-daughter smackdown, but she’d draw more attention to herself if she said anything or tried to sidle out, so she just stood there, waiting.

Lilli’s expression had become calculating. “I wear it for my man. Because it turns him on. Who were you wearing it for?”

Gia blushed, but she faced her mother straight on. “I made a mistake. Like you’ve never made any mistakes.”

“I’ve made plenty. But no, G, that was not a mistake. A mistake is doing something you didn’t intend to do—it’s buying whole milk when you wanted skim. Everything about that night was your
intention
—you didn’t accidentally steal my sweater and smear makeup all over your face, you didn’t accidentally sneak out of the house, you didn’t accidentally go out with Hilary and those girls.”

“I didn’t want to go to Moe’s, though. That was Hilary’s idea. And I didn’t deserve to get roofied because of what I was
wearing
. God, Mom.”

“Of course you didn’t, and that’s why those guys were…handled. But you
have
to protect yourself, and you
have
to think about risks. You dove into a shark tank.” Lilli sighed and shook her head. “We’ve been through this, G. I’m done fighting about it. It wasn’t a mistake. It was a bad choice, and bad choices snowball. I’ve made plenty of those, too. Those are the consequences that carry important lessons. So straighten your spine now and learn something.”

Gia came and stood near Iris. Iris smiled at her, but Gia wouldn’t make eye contact. Sheesh. Was she angry at her? If she was, maybe there would be some contact during this training after all, because Iris would not stand for that nonsense.

“First thing.” Lilli grabbed Iris’s wrist. “This is easy. You’ve probably had a guy grab you like this—just catch your wrist to keep you from turning away. Try to break my hold.”

Iris did, pulling as hard as she could, but Lilli’s grip only got tighter.

“Now watch what Gia does.” Lilli went to her daughter and grabbed her wrist. Gia broke it immediately, with such force that she nearly punched herself in the chest. “Good. Let’s do it again, slow, so Iris can see.” When she had Gia’s wrist, she narrated her daughter’s movements. “She turns her arm first, lining up the strongest part of her wrist with the weakest part of my hold. Think thumb to thumb—line the base of your thumb up with the tip of your attacker’s. Then yank hard, bending at the elbow. You get strong torque that way.” They demonstrated again, and Lilli came back to Iris. “Okay, you try it.”

This time, she got herself free at once.

“Good! It’s almost foolproof, unless the guy is an absolute beast. And in situations like at Moe’s, these guys are just assholes. They’re not trained assassins. They just grab, thinking that you’re little and helpless and they can do what they want. People think that weapons are the answer to self-defense—guns or knives or mace…or batons, but usually, for normal people without
extensive
training, they just make things worse. Too much chance for error. If you turn your
body
into a weapon, though—nobody knows your body like you do. It’s always armed, always ready.” Lilli grabbed Iris’s wrist again. “Okay, do it again.”

Again, Iris was able to break the hold, even though it didn’t feel like Lilli was going easy on her.

“Excellent! Okay, let’s play with BOB and deal him some palm strikes—nose and solar plexus.”

~oOo~

They worked for an hour, and by the time Lilli called the session off, all three of them were soaked in sweat. But Iris felt
good
. She felt powerful. Her hands ached from pounding the heels of her palms into BOB’s nose and chest, but she kept curling her fists closed, making them ache more—because in that calm pain, she felt strength.

She thought she understood why the past had been tormenting her so much all of a sudden, when for so many years she’d kept it safely tucked away, only getting loose during occasional nightmares. She had felt hopeless and helpless, lying on the floor of Moe’s. She’d tried to do the right thing, and she’d had her little baton and used it, but it hadn’t saved her, or Gia. They’d been, until the Horde had arrived, lost to the whims of bad men. And that had been much, much too close to the place that memory called home.

She’d felt hopeless and helpless before that night, too—a different kind, and one she’d been denying, but real nonetheless. Since Nolan had gone away, and she’d been left without any understanding of why or who or what or when. No word from him, no information from the Horde—she’d tried to carry on, to wait and understand and hope for the best,
believe
in the best, but it had been a veneer she’d brushed on over her loss.