Wings to the Kingdom (Eden Moore #2)

He didn’t know Orin very well, but he knew he was a local boy who was partly full of shit, but partly knew his shit too. Orin wasn’t entitled to anything, not like Pete was. But having all of nothing wasn’t doing Pete any good. Maybe he ought to aim more modestly, for something like half of a whole lot.

So Pete set his beer down and leaned his body against the bar. “It’s like this,” he said, looking the other man straight in the eye. “I could use a hand with something big.”

“This is a bad idea,” Pete said aloud.

“It’s the only idea,” Orin corrected him. “I thought you wanted this.”

“I do.”

“Then this is the only way.”

Pete knew he was right. He’d been thinking himself in circles trying to come up with something else, but the only other “something else” he’d been able to scare up involved facing down Green Eyes again, and he frankly lacked the intestinal fortitude.

“He’s only a kid.”

“We’re not going to hurt him,” Orin reminded him. “We’ve just got to make him leave.”

“He’ll be leaving at the end of next year, anyway. When he graduates he’ll go off to school someplace else.”

“You want to wait another year and a half?”

“No.” Pete sulked. Orin was right. After making a few discreet phone calls, Orin had learned that Ryan Boynton had been orphaned as a youngster and fostered through middle school, when good grades, exceptional test scores, and a knack for football had landed him at McCallie, an expensive, exclusive boys’ school. So he was alone, and so far as Pete and Orin could tell, the last of his kind.

They just needed to put the fear of God into the kid, and Orin had a plan for that. Pete wasn’t happy about it, but kept reminding himself that this was exactly why he’d brought Orin on board in the first place: Because Pete’s plans were usually rotten, and he needed someone else to help him think.

He wasn’t morally averse to the idea of scaring some kid into another county; he didn’t mind that part at all. If anything, it almost sounded like fun. But it definitely sounded risky, especially since they were using real guns and real ammunition.

“It’s safer that way,” Orin had said. Pete knew what he meant, but it still sounded wrong. “Safer for us, anyway,” Orin clarified. “The kid’s a football player, and what? Maybe sixteen? He’s gonna be a fast, slippery bruiser of a thing, and we don’t want to take a chance that he’ll get away. We probably won’t get a second chance.” So Pete carried his .357, and Orin had brought a sawed-off shotgun because he thought it looked meaner than a handgun.

And they weren’t going to kill him or anything. No way. Too risky, and unnecessary. All they had to do, if they understood the folklore correctly, was make him leave. Though, as Orin had pointed out, if merely making him leave didn’t work, there were always options. There were always alternatives.

Pete chose not to think about them yet.

He chose instead to focus on the fact that he was sitting in the cab of his uncle’s car while armed to the teeth and wearing a black ski mask that practically screamed “criminal” at thirty paces.

The kid would be heading back to his dorm from practice at any moment. He would be driving pretty fast so as not to miss curfew. He probably would not notice the tree lying down across his shortcut until he was right on top of it. At least that’s what Orin figured, which was why his dad’s still-warm chain-saw was lying in the trunk of Pete’s uncle’s car.

Headlights crawled quickly around the bend. They held their breaths. They were cutting this close, and they had only hope and prayer to prevent the vehicle from belonging to some other poor driver.

It had to be the kid. It had to be.

Orin had enjoyed playing mastermind so much that he’d planned every small detail. They’d almost been caught while they were taking down the tree, and they’d almost let it drop right on top of an innocent bypasser’s car, but luck had been with them so far.

But Christ, it was dark.

They’d turned off the dome light and sat in the blackness, listening to each other try not to breathe. This next vehicle, it had to be the one. It had to be the small red pickup truck.

And it was.

Ryan hit the brake pedal and swerved, nearly managing to stop, but losing control instead. He slid sideways into the trunk, brakes squealing all the way. The driver’s side door crumpled, and all around the cab glass shattered in a spray of blue crystals. One headlight went out, but one stayed on.

Rock 105 didn’t miss a beat, and with all the windows busted out, Pete and Rudy could hear the hard rock tune loudly enough to bother them both.

“We’ve got to turn that off,” Pete observed, sliding his hands into the gloves he’d brought.

“I don’t see why,” Orin said. “If nobody heard that crash, nobody’s going to give a damn about the radio music.”

In the cab, the driver’s head wobbled loosely on his neck, side to side. In his disorientation, he hadn’t noticed the tree holding his door closed, so he tried it and found himself pinned from the left. He fumbled with his seat belt and released it.

Pete opened his own door, and Orin did the same. They tugged their masks down over their ears and checked their weapons.

Orin reached the passenger door first, yanking it open and pointing his shotgun inside. “Get out of there, boy,” he ordered.

Ryan was crawling forward along the seat. His head might’ve been the thing that broke the window, for the left side of his face was bloody, and one of his eyes looked like it was glued shut. “I’m trying,” he said, not seeing the gun or not registering it well enough to understand. “Did you see what happened? Can you call the cops?”

“We’re not calling nobody. You’re getting out and—”

“Shit,” the kid said, seeing the rough, circular edges of the weapon pointing down at his nose.

“Get out,” Pete backed Orin up. “Hurry up.”

Ryan’s hand lost its grip on the vinyl seat, and he pitched forward. “I need help, man. What are you doing? What do you want?”

Orin reached in and grabbed his shoulder, pulling him forward—though only by a few inches.

He wasn’t a huge kid, but he was solid and scared. He put his hands out to brace himself—to make himself as big as possible so as not to be dragged out of the cab. One leg thrust up behind him, and he snared his foot around the steering wheel.

“Goddamn it, come out now!” Orin commanded, but the kid wasn’t having any of it.

Ryan peeled Orin’s hand off his shoulder and jammed his own fist into the other man’s face. It wasn’t a punch, exactly, but the closed-fingered shove hurt enough to make Orin mad.

Pete stood aside while they wrestled, the wounded boy getting enough adrenaline to put up a decent fight against Orin, who was trying to juggle the shotgun and his own agenda. Years ago, Pete had watched his mother try to shove a large, violently reluctant puppy into a small carrier to go to the vet. This looked just like that, but in reverse.

He might’ve laughed if he weren’t getting worried.

The kid in the truck didn’t seem too impressed by the gun, and he was fighting like it wasn’t even there in the cab. It could’ve been that he was still in shock from the wreck, but Pete thought he looked beefy, like a boy who’d spent a lot of time outside. If he was the kind of kid who was used to being around guns, the sight of one wouldn’t have intimidated him into complacency.

“Pete, you son of a bitch,” Orin swore.

Pete wanted to bash the other man’s head in for using his name, but he answered, “What?” anyway and took a step or two closer.

“Help me out here, man. Or are you just going to stand there?”

Ryan had not noticed the second man until Pete spoke, and the sudden knowledge that he was outnumbered made him more desperate. He flailed harder, and righted himself so that his legs and arms both were facing out, kicking and swinging.

“Help!” he yelled. “Somebody help me!”

Orin yelled back, “Shut up!” as if it made any difference.

The radio was blaring still, turned up way too loud and way too hard on a station that played nothing but music Pete hated to hear.

The kid was thrashing like a hooked bass, and Orin was on the verge of losing the gun in the fray or of having it go off in his face—Pete wasn’t sure which was more likely. Either way, another car could be along any minute, someone may have heard the wreck and called the cops already, and the kid knew Pete’s first name.

This was turning out to be a very bad idea—right up there with running cars to Canada.

“Orin”—he used the name for retribution’s sake—“this is bad. Forget it, we’ll think of something else.”

“What’re you doing…using my name for, you fucker? You think he can’t hear you or something?” He got another grip on Ryan’s shoulder and was forced to drop the gun in order to keep it. The fat-barreled thing clattered to the ground beneath them, but didn’t fire. “Cover me, you useless bastard, cover me!”

Orin had a pair of good handholds then, one on each of Ryan’s shoulders. All it would take was one good backwards heave and the kid would be successfully birthed from the vehicle.

The DJ came on as a song ended, and he chatted merrily about concert tickets while the struggle raged. Pete wished to God the kid’s hip or knee would knock the radio in and shut it off.

“Get him out, man. Get him out and hurry up.”

“I’m working on it!” Orin bellowed, and Ryan shouted over them both for help from anyone within hearing distance.

“This is gone bad, Orin. It’s gone bad. If you can’t get him out, let him go, for Christ’s sake!”

The suggestion enraged Orin and invigorated the bleeding kid, who wrenched himself back into the cab and kicked against everything that appeared in the passenger’s side door space.