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JJ stepped up. “I took it in high school. I remember some.Hola,” he said, raising his voice. “Uh …Nosotros … ayudamos … te?”
The women exchanged looks. Then one stepped forward, pushing one of those who was probably a child back into the cluster. Seemingly older than the others, she came forward and said a string of Spanish words to JJ.
He shook his head and held up his hands, then said something in slow, halting Spanish. In that way, they began a conversation.
Meanwhile, Gun was on his knees beside Dex, trying to pick the padlock.
“I can’t catch it all,” JJ said. “I wish Coop was here.” Cooper’s father was a Salvadoran immigrant, and Coop was fluent in Spanish.
Dex didn’t have time for wishes. “He’s not. What d’you got?”
“She doesn’t know much. She paid coyotes to bring her over and they put her and three others here in the back of a truck. They ended up here. There’s more, but I couldn’t make it out.”
“Jesus,” Gunner muttered. “These assholes are traffickingpeople?”
“Vendor, customer, or transport—yeah, looks like,” Gargoyle said. “Could be they bought them to do the rebranding. Sarge,” he said, coming up on Dex’s side. “Do you mean to take these women with us?”
“I damn sure don’t mean to leave them behind.”
“And do what with them? This is not our game. We don’t even know who the players are. And I don’t know how we’ll fit everybody in the van.”
Dex turned and faced his brother. “I do not give a rat’s fuck. We are not leaving these people behind. If we need room, you can fucking walk home.”
Just then, Gunner got the lock open. “You’re a cold bitch, but I made you come,” he said, apparently to the lock, and unwound the chain as he stood. He opened the cage door.
The women stood there in their frightened knot.
“Jay,” Dex said. “Tell them we’re taking them to safety.”
“Shit. I’ll try. “Nosotros te … lla—llavamos?… a … seguro?”
The women all turned to the one who’d spoken with JJ. Obviously, she was their leader. She spoke to them, and leaned down to speak to the girl she’d protected earlier. Finally the women began to move toward the open door.
“What’s the plan, Sarge?” Gunner asked.
“We get the women out of here. We take those crates, for the Hounds. Everything else, we leave. We get the fuck back to the clubhouse and figure shit out from there.”
“Do we still want them to know it was us?” JJ asked.
Dex didn’t know. His head was full of the past and the present, all roiling together in an indistinguishable slop, and it took every atom of will he possessed to stay in the moment and focused on the job.
“I say no,” Gargoyle answered before Dex had formulated one. “This is bigger than we thought, and we don’t know who’s on the other end of this. We all know the situation south of the border is convoluted and unstable. We do not want to end up on the wrong side of another cartel.”
“Gargo’s right,” Dex said. “The plan’s changed. We take the women, the crates, and we get the fuck out of this goddamn cave.”
~oOo~
Once at the clubhouse, Dex’s mission was complete except for the debrief. Thereafter, he sat at the bar and put down several bottles of beer while sweetbutts—two of whom spoke Spanish—and old ladies tended to the women they’d rescued, and Eight, Maverick, Apollo, and Jazz worked on getting the crates of heroin and crystal meth back to the Hounds and finding a place for the women to go.
Apollo’s wife, Jacinda, was the one who’d finally solved that last one. As a private investigator, her contacts reached even deeper and wider than the Bulls in some respects. She found the women a place to shelter safely. There were, or would be, a lot of different people, from the ‘Hade’s Army’ assholes to the fucking Feds, interested in grabbing these women—and girls; two were teens and one was only eleven. And who knew what kind of baddie lurked at the edges of this mess. The farther they got those women from the Bulls, the better. For everybody.
Dex sat at the bar, using alcohol to keep the dark at bay. Nobody challenged him about whether freeing the women had been the right call, but everybody, Dex included, was twitchy about the possibility that they’d just started a war with another fucking Mexican cartel. They were still licking their wounds from the Perros; two years wasn’t nearly enough time to recover from that damage. Hell, ten years wasn’t enough time to recover from damage that deep. Dex knew that well. Maybe no amount of time was enough.
Simon had wondered aloud if it wouldn’t be a good idea to pull everybody in and lock down, and they’d talked it out for a while, but they’d decided a lockdown had too much potential to cause notice, and since they hadn’t left a calling card, they needed to proceed as if they weren’t made.
Finally, with the Hounds’ merchandise returned and the women safely away, Eight said they’d done all the could do for the night, told everyone to keep alert for trouble, and sent everybody home.
Dex didn’t want to go home. He wanted to go to Kelsey. As new as things were between them, already she was his safe harbor.
But he wasn’t safe for her. The mess in his head was loud and busy, and he couldn’t risk being around her if he lost time.
The farther he was from her, the better.
