Page 15 of Smoke

I hit the brakes as the sedan closed behind me until reversing was impossible.

I locked the doors and tried the sheriff's department just as the first man reached my window. He struck the glass with something hard enough to crack it, and the second blow shattered it across my lap.

I twisted away and drove my elbow into the arm coming through the opening. The man cursed and jerked back, but another hand caught my hair before I could scramble across the seat. I swung the phone backward, connected with something solid and leaned on the horn when the grip loosened.

The passenger door opened and a second man tried to climb in. I kicked him high in the chest and bought myself a few seconds before he recovered and caught my ankle. I grabbed the steering wheel with both hands while he dragged, kicking hard enough to make him swear.

Something struck the side of my head, and pain exploded through my skull, and my grip loosened. Through the ringing in my ears, I heard one of the men mention my father, which pulled enough of the world back into focus for me to understand the point. They needed the sheriff to stop, and I was the piece they believed could make him do it.

I reached for my phone one last time. The cracked screen was still lit, and I hit the call button without seeing whose name was beneath my thumb before one of the men ripped it away.

They dragged me out of the car, and I fought as soon as my feet hit the road. I twisted, kicked and raked my nails across one man's face before a forearm locked around my chest. I threw my weight backward and made them drag me toward the waiting truck because every second, every mark and every sound gave somebody a better chance of finding me.

My phone lay beneath the open car door several feet away, the screen still lit, and whoever I had called was still connected.

CHAPTER 6

SMOKE

Beth's call connected without a word, and I knew immediately that something was wrong.

If she'd called to say she was being followed, I would've moved fast. If she'd screamed my name, I'd at least have known what kind of problem I was dealing with. Instead, the line opened onto noise, the distant blast of a car horn and a man shouting something I couldn't make out.

Then I heard Beth yell, followed by shouting.

I was on my feet before Preacher looked up from the far end of the clubhouse table. Whatever he saw in my face brought him out of his chair, and Gage followed a second later while I listened for anything useful through the movement and voices on the line.

A man swore. Beth shouted again, farther from the phone this time, and then one sentence came through clearly.

"Your father stops, this stops."

The line died before I could hear anything else. Panic had its uses, but this wasn't one of them. The Army taught me years ago that fear and rage could exist without being allowed to make decisions, and I carried that lesson long after I stopped wearing a uniform. I called Beth back, got no answer and forced my head to stay where it needed to be.

"Last location?" Preacher asked.

"Hospital road. She called after leaving Warren."

Gage already had his phone out. There were three ways to move her off that road without coming through Main, and every man in the room knew them. Salvation looked easy to outsiders because the roads were long and half the old industrial ground appeared abandoned. The Unholy Few knew where the dirt tracks connected, which properties still had usable access and where somebody could disappear without driving far.

Preacher sent Gage east and Havoc south. I took the mine road because Deacon had flagged an old storage property there, recently bought through the same attorney attached to two of the lots we were already watching.

If I wanted to hide somebody quickly without taking her far from town, that was where I'd go.

I was on the bike less than two minutes later.

The ride out of Salvation became distance, turns and time. I didn't let myself imagine what a man might do to Beth if he thought hurting her would make Warren cooperate. I thought about how long it took to stop a car, move somebody into another vehicle and get to the mine road. I thought about Beth fighting because I knew she'd be smart enough to know what to do.

Gage phoned me before I reached the turn. "Found her car. Driver's window's gone, phone on the ground. Some blood on the seat, not much. Truck tracks off the shoulder, dual rear."

My hands tightened around the grips before I forced them loose again. "I'm at the mine road."

"Preacher's coming behind you."

The old storage property sat behind a rise where rusted steel and sun-bleached concrete marked what was left of the mine. I left the bike well back, came in on foot and saw a truck beside the loading bay with fresh tracks running through the dust.

The rear door stood open, and when he caught up with me, I gave Preacher the location and told him to cover the outside rather than come charging through another entrance blind.

Inside, the building smelled of dust, old oil and metal baked under decades of New Mexico heat. Voices carried from deeper in, and I moved toward them until one man's words became clear.