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When I hit the far side of the house, I could see ambulances and multiple police cars flying up the driveway, and I knew I had just seconds to make sure the men were dead before we were fucking overrun. I stopped abruptly when the bodies came into view.
Because there weren’t two.
There were three.
And the third was so fucking beat up, I had a hard time recognizing him.
“Hulk,” he groaned, reaching out a hand that was still clutching a pistol. “Help.”
I glanced at the men a few feet away. One of them was lying in a huge pool of blood in the packed dirt and the other was facedown, a bullet hole in the back of his head.
“Woody,” I said, sighing as I dropped to my knees beside him. “Put it down, bud.”
His fingers slowly loosened around the grip of the pistol.
“The fuck?” I asked, taking in his wounds.
It looked like he’d been sliced with a knife up and down his arms and his face was so swollen I had no idea how he was awake and talking. He also had matching gunshot wounds in each of his shoulders. I wasn’t even sure how he was still moving his arms.
“Caught me last night,” he mumbled, tears rolling down the sides of his face. “Didn’t help ’em. Swear. Didn’t help ’em.”
“I know, bud,” I soothed, glancing behind me as the vehicles started parking and doors started slamming. “You don’t know anything, alright? Men picked you up, beat you up, dragged you here. That’s all you know, right?”
“All I know,” he said in agreement.
I’d just set my piece on the ground when two officers came around the side of the house.
“Hands where we can see them!” one of the cops yelled as I lifted my arms up by my head.
“I’m unarmed. Shooters are down,” I yelled back.
I’d never in my life been so happy to see a fucking cop.
They swarmed into the yard like locusts, feeding off our misery. I got it. I understood that taking care of multiple gunshot victims was probably both incredibly hard and a rush like nothing else.
I was just glad they were good at what they did.
The cops were on us, asking questions and trying to work out some sort of timeline, but those of us who weren’t hurt just watched anxiously as the paramedics did their thing. Farrah must have given a pretty clear account of what had happened when she’d called, because there were more than enough ambulances in the driveway. Within ten minutes, most of them had sped off toward hospitals, leaving a few of us sitting on the back porch, surrounded by blood and body bags.
“What happened here?” a plain-clothes cop asked me. He was new. He hadn’t been there in the beginning as they’d patted us down.
“Having a barbeque,” I told him gruffly. “Men came around the house, started shootin’.”
“And you returned fire, correct?” he asked, bracing his hands on his hips.
“Tried to.” I laughed humorlessly and gripped the back of my neck. “Don’t think I hit nothin.’ Too much happenin’ at once.”
I glanced at Trix, who was completely still, sitting in a rocking chair to my left.
“You have any idea why someone would target your family?” His voice was grating, and his insinuation clear.
“None at all,” I told him flatly. “I need to get to the hospital.”
“We’re going to have more questions,” he warned.
“Yeah, I figured.”
It wasn’t my first rodeo. I’d been held, booked and questioned so many times I could do that shit in my sleep.
“One last thing,” the cop said before he turned to walk away. “Why would someone target Mark Eastwood?”
“No idea.”
The cop walked away and I turned toward Tommy and the girls.
“Cam?” Cecilia asked quietly, her face swollen and blotchy from crying. “Why was he talking about Mark?”
I stared at her for a minute, wondering what was going through her head, but like always, I didn’t have a fucking clue. When she was a baby, she was easy to read, but the older she got, the more mysterious my sister became.
“He was here,” I said slowly.
Dad had ordered her to stay put, and for once, she’d done as she was told. She hadn’t been around the side of the house, or even back into the yard. She’d stayed right there on the porch with Rose, Trix and now, Tommy. Waiting and watching.
“What?” she whispered, her eyes widening as they filled with tears. “No, he wasn’t. He was—”
“You got somethin’ to tell me?” I snapped, watching her closely.
“It wasn’t him, Cam,” she cried. “It wasn’t him. He’s on club property. They couldn’t get to him there. It wasn’t him.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I hissed. We’d been looking for that boy for weeks.
“He was staying at the back of the property,” she confessed softly. “He had a tent and everything.”
