Chasing Claire (Hells Saints Motorcycle Club) (23 page)

Like many soldiers, Petey had somehow managed to bring back his service revolver from his days in Nam. He had loved that gun. He felt that it had saved his life more than a few times. Dolly’s Catholic heart knew that was blasphemy. In her mind, Mother Mary had
saved his ass, not a government issue. That damn gun had caused more fights in her house than anything else. But when Reno was born, that had all changed. There was absolutely no way Dolly was going to consent to having a gun in the house. Petey agreed and Dolly never saw the weapon again.

Then, one day after Petey’s death, Dolly and Pinky were cleaning out his garage and found it. There it was, stored carefully away along with Petey’s meager, but personally prized, possessions from his time in the military. At first, seeing the weapon had made Dolly furious, then the irony of it all had just made her sad. The gun had been locked away, but death had come for her husband anyway. Maybe the gun had saved his life in the war after all. She didn’t know. Dolly only knew that it was still here and he was gone and nothing made sense to her anymore.

Dolly could not bear to get rid of the stupid thing.

But she had also determined that Reno would not have it, so after careful thought and planning she had decided what to do with the gun.

Holy Mother of God.

She had decided what to do with the gun.

Dolly pulled on her gardening gloves, grabbed the spade, and began to dig.

CHAPTER 35

R
eno returned with the picnic basket to find his mother stabbing furiously at the soil. She talked nonsense about this thing or that and prompted answers from her son while she dug. Reno had no idea what she was doing. The way Reno figured it and if his instincts were right, they were probably running out of time. He had checked his cell a couple of times and found that he had no service. He couldn’t reach the brothers. He was on his own.

Reno tallied up the weapons he had if it came down it. He had a couple of bottles, some rocks in a basket, and a two-dollar spade.

Great.

Reno knew that he could handle himself. He was a big guy. Tall, muscled, with lots of power behind his fists. He was smart, fast, and strong. It took a lot to take him down.

But Reno wasn’t alone. He had his mom with him. And that changed everything.

Everything.

Next to him, Dolly was still on her knees digging with the intensity of a new puppy looking for his first T-bone.

What the hell was she doing?

Then he saw it.

His mother had begun to unearth what looked like a green torpedo-shaped object.

Dolly looked at Reno pointedly and said, “Reno, pick up that next geranium pot, would you? Now just take it out by the roots. Slowly. We are going to plant the pink one here and the red one over there. That variegated one should be right in the middle.”

Dolly chattered away with the clatter of garden tools. Reno glanced at his mother, but she was intent on extracting the plastic cylinder from the ground. As more of the object became exposed, Reno knew what he was looking at. For some reason his mother had buried a piece of green PVC pipe.

What was she doing?

He whispered to her. “Really, Ma? A time capsule? You seriously want to take that trip down memory lane now?”

“Hush up, Reno, and let me think,” Dolly whispered back.

Reno looked on in amazement as his mother’s neon-pink garden gloves whisked over the object. She worked with deft hands, as she commenced to quickly rid the pipe of the dirt and night crawlers that clung to it. Then, in one quick efficient move, the gloves were off.

Reno looked on in fascinated silence while his mother tore off a piece of paper towel, placed it like a bed on the ground, and used it as a makeshift drop cloth. Carefully and methodically, she commenced to unscrew the wing nut on the end of the pipe that was fitted with an expansion plug. Reno watched on as his mother carefully removed the rubber bellows and exposed a heavily greased gasket.

“Well, will ya look at that? It worked!” Dolly whispered urgently to her son. “It’s as dry as a bone. All these years and it’s still as dry as the day I buried it.”

Dolly blushed with pride.

And Reno still had no idea what was going on.

She carefully placed the greasy plug on the paper towel. Then she ripped off another piece of toweling and began to wipe clean the
interior of the pipe. After she had cleaned off the grease at the end of the plastic tube, she tilted it up in order to release the contents onto her hand. Reno looked on as a shiny, padded, sealed envelope fell heavily into his mother’s steady palm. Dolly quickly deposited it to the ground and ripped it open. Finally, she pushed the open bag over to her son.

Reno could not believe what he saw.

Could not believe it.

His mother had somehow managed to hermetically seal a firearm under a foot of dirt at his father’s gravestone.

Reno let out a low chuckle.

His mother never failed to surprise him. Who else could come up with the exact thing that he needed at the exact time he needed it? Reno suddenly felt very sorry for any poor bastard that had to grow up without a mother.

But then he felt a rush of disappointment.

He whispered to her, “Ma, what about the . . . ?”

“Magazine?” she whispered back as a second smaller bag fell out and on to his hand.

Reno made a promise to himself at that very moment. He would never, ever make fun of his mother’s fastidious attention to detail again.

“Ma, should I even ask?” Reno couldn’t help himself.

“It’s your father’s,” Dolly answered.

“This is Dad’s gun? You buried it with him?” Reno was incredulous. And a little outraged. When his father had died, he had torn his father’s shop inside out looking for that service revolver. His mother had insisted that she had no idea where it was.

He looked at the gun again and Reno immediately recognized the army issue colt 1911 .45. This was his old man’s gun for sure.

“Ma, you lied to me about the gun?” he whispered. “You buried it?”

“And I’m not one bit sorry. Never wanted you to have it,” she retorted.

“Humph,” Reno snorted. “Well, I’m sure as glad as hell that we have it now.”

Then he kissed his mother on top of her head.

“What else have you been lying to me about?” he asked, despite the seriousness of the circumstances.

“Hush, Reno. We don’t have time for your sass. Will it shoot?”

“Yeah, Ma. Damn right, it’ll shoot. It’ll shoot just fine.”

Reno examined the magazine and found that it was completely loaded. The gun held seven rounds of ammo. Seven chances to get it right. He instinctively articulated the weapon. Then he saw them. The notches for the four kill shots that his father had carved into the stock. If Reno’s instincts were right, he would be adding more notches in the next few minutes.

A rush of startled birds flew from a nearby tree as a group of shadows moved against the sun-soaked lawn.

“Now, Ma.” Reno held the gun loosely in his hand. “Hold the basket in front of you and move with me toward the car.”

Dolly’s hand shook as she lifted the heavy basket with two hands and carried it in front of her chest. Then she said loudly, “Damn, I’m getting old, honey. Looks like that’s going to have to be it for today. You want to help me carry this stuff back to the car?”

Reno stood next to his mother. He also stood in front of her and behind her. When she moved, he moved. As they headed toward the relative safety of the car, Reno tried to shield her body with as much of his as he could.

They got within about five feet of the door before Dolly turned to glance toward the brown van. Reno followed her gaze to see three men start their approach.

And so it begins.

Behind the men stood a tall Hispanic woman. Reno knew instantly who it was.

Psycho Snatch had finally made her play. Madness and rage radiated from every pore in the woman’s homely pitted face.

And she was smiling. Bitch must have done her homework.

Dolly went to Petey’s gravesite every week like clockwork. Reno made the pilgrimage once a fucking year, and today was it. Yeah, it made sense. To Sievas’s way of thinking, Prosper had taken out her son, so she was here to take out the closest thing that he had to one.

Reno heard his mother’s sharp intake of breath.

Drawn purely by mother’s instinct, Dolly readied a bottle to be used as a weapon and leaped to Reno with lightning speed. That protective move captured the assailant’s attention just long enough for Reno to raise his weapon. Reno pushed his mother hard toward the Escalade and yelled for her to get in.

The report of gunshots echoed through the quiet graveyard. For what seemed like an eternity, Reno aimed, fired, and dodged, aimed, fired, and dodged until he had cleared his way to the car. As he fumbled to push the keys into the ignition, he gave a quick glance over to his mother, who now leaned heavily against the door.

“Ma . . . ?”

“I’m okay. I’m all right. Go, son. Go! Go! Go!” Dolly yelled.

The engine rumbled and turned over. Reno glanced quickly in the rearview before he shifted into gear and saw the two desperados lying dead on the ground. Their eyes were open unblinkingly. Their dark blood stained the asphalt.

Where was that last asswipe?

“Reno, straight ahead,” Dolly yelled to him.

When he looked through the windshield, Reno saw that the third guy stood in front of the vehicle with a .22 leveled right at him.

His mother screamed.

Without a moment’s hesitation, Reno stomped his foot fully down on the gas pedal and floored it. Reno saw a look of surprised terror on that ugly face before the body flew high and bounced over the hood of the Escalade. He hit the windshield with such force that it cracked his skull and the glass at the same instant. Reno grunted with satisfaction as the body rolled off the car and joined the other dead men on the ground.

Road kill.

Before he could breathe the slightest sigh of relief, a sound on the passenger side caught his attention. Dolly’s screams had turned to deep guttural wheezes.

Reno turned toward his mother and what he saw made his blood run cold.

Luisa Sievas was hanging on to the door. She had pushed her skeletal body through the open window and her hand was placed hard up against his mother’s throat. With the kind of strength reserved only for the damned, the bitch was strangling his mother. Dolly thrashed while she scratched and clawed at her assailant. Before Reno could act, Dolly reached down and groped for the broken bottle that sat on her lap.

Luisa’s dilated pupils bore a crazy drug-induced look. The foaming spittle of a rabid dog trickled from the side of her thin mouth. Her fingernails were dirty and broken where they held on to Dolly’s throat.

“I’m going to strangle the life out of your whore of a mother. Mommy here is going to die knowing that her precious baby boy is next. That cocksucker president of yours destroyed my family. Now I am going to take his.” The sound of Luisa Sievas’s voice came straight from hell.

Still struggling against the death grip that Luisa had on her, Dolly’s fingers finally found the makeshift weapon. With all the force of an enraged lioness, she pushed the heavy, jagged-edged
glass deep into Sievas’s neck. Luisa released her grip on Dolly just long enough for the air to pass into her lungs and for his mother to let out a deep snarl.

Reno swerved the car sharply to the left and then to the right in an effort to dislodge the homicidal maniac. Incredibly, the bitch still held on. Even with her throat bleeding out, she was still screaming threats at Reno.

Dolly finished the job. She shoved the razor-sharp end of the bottle as hard as she could into Luisa’s neck.

Bull’s-eye.

Reno turned to see Luisa’s blood splatter out from her jugular vein in long, pumping streams. Her hand immediately left Dolly’s throat and frantically clutched at her own bleeding neck.

Unbelievably, the crazy bitch was still hanging on to the moving vehicle.

Reno reached across his mother then, placed his hand over the face of the dying woman and pushed hard. Blood pulsed out from her neck and across the Escalade before Luisa Sievas fell away from the door and back onto the hard ground. Reno pulled up beside the thrashing body. Then he leaned out his window and pumped his last bullet right between her eyes before he sped out of the cemetery.

CHAPTER 36

R
eno put the pedal to the metal and expertly navigated through the narrow streets of the city before he finally reached the relative safety of the highway. All the while, Dolly bravely fought down the nausea that threatened to overcome her. Her breath came out in shallow gasps while she struggled to keep the terror at bay. She stuck her head out the open window and breathed in the fresh cool air.

“Ma?” Reno’s voice sounded far away. Dolly willed herself back from the edge of that extreme fear.

“I’m good, son. I’m okay. Let’s get home.” Dolly reached over and patted Reno reassuringly. Then she put her head to the backrest and closed her eyes. She took in a few deep breaths and felt the adrenaline slowly begin to move out of her system. For Reno’s sake, she needed to push that panic aside. After all, they had just left four dead at the cemetery and were driving in a bloodstained motor vehicle with the windshield cracked. The very last thing Reno needed was a frantic woman beside him. Getting stopped by the highway patrol was not an option.

They needed to get back to the compound. They needed to get home safe and sound.

There would be time later to fall apart.

Dolly willed her heart to stop beating out of her chest. She clasped her hands together to stop them from shaking. Her mind raced and her throat hurt.

She had just killed a woman. A woman who, together with three men, had tried to murder her and her son.

But why?

Although Dolly had a lot of questions, she knew that they would have to wait.

Thank God there would be time enough for that.

Light and shadow flashed against her closed eyelids, and she felt the unmistakable blinding nausea and pain of a severe migraine coming on.