Highlander's Need: Winter Solestice (Against All Odds Series 4) Read online

  Our bodies are on auto pilot now but still full of desire. As she continues to stroke my still throbbing member, she repositions herself on the couch, spreading her legs and guiding me inside of her. Our love making isn’t as fevered as our first two acts as if we’ve now decided to take our time and experience each other with slow clarity. Her legs are wrapped tightly around my lower back, our mouths joined, the taste of ourselves intermingling. The heat of our bodies against one another could start a wildfire if were near dry brush. I once again feel her body tense and quicken my pace as her legs clamp harder around my back and both of us simultaneously erupt in a tangle of flesh and new found love.

  ***

  I don’t know if this is problem most men have, but whenever I spend the night with a new woman, I have a bit of problem with getting to sleep. It’s not that I’m not used to having another body in bed with me, but it’s almost like I’m a little kid at Christmas waiting for the sun to rise so I can rush into my parents room without them yelling at me to go back to bed. I know that sounds like kind of a weird comparison, but that’s exactly how I felt lying there next to Inez. I didn’t want to take my eyes off of her out of fear that if I went to sleep, she wouldn’t be there when I woke up in the morning. I know it was completely unfounded, especially since the ranch is a solid 10 miles from anywhere resembling civilization.

  So instead of sleeping, I stared down at her peaceful, beautiful face under the gauzy rays of the moon that peeked through the curtains and the shadows that played across her body. But something didn’t sit right with those shadows. The property around the house is clear of any kind of bushes or trees and there shouldn’t have been any kind of shadows at all. I rose from the bed and went to the window, pulled the curtain aside and saw three figures maybe 10 feet from the house and all of them aiming semi-autos right at my bedroom.

  I dove for the bed just as they began to fire, cover Inez’s body with mine and then dragging her onto the ground. A hail of bullets shattered the window and tore the room to shreds, filling it with the stink of burning wood and cordite. I could here Inez hyperventilating underneath me, but staying completely quiet. I took her example and calmed myself. I knew whoever was shooting at us would have to reload soon enough, and that’s when we would have to make a break for it. Finally, the last of the gunshots quieted and heard the familiar snap of magazines being pulled from rifles and that’s when I grabbed Inez and dragged her from the room and headed towards my father’s old trophy room.

  Like a solid hunk of Arizona’s rural population, my old man was a bit on the paranoid side, and when he added his trophy room onto the house, he basically had the contractor who built it turn it into a near fortress. The walls were reinforced solid steel and the door leading into it was made of the same material. Once you were locked inside, it would basically take a couple of hand grenades or a bazooka to get inside. If all else failed, we’d be safe Or, at least, Inez would be. Me, on the other hand, I was plenty pissed. Tonight had been one of the best of my life and now that someone one had come along and tried to ruin it for me, I was bound and determined to take their fucking heads.

  With the door lock behind us, I flipped on the light inside of the windowless room and opened up the gun safe. I’m not a large caliber or automatic weapon kind of guy—I never understood persons need to fire a bunch of bullets at once in hopes of taking out their target, when all you really needed to do was just bide your time and only fire one or two rounds and put down your target for sure—but I have plenty of revolvers, shotguns, hand-to-hand combat weapons, and, of course, my old sniper rifle. The rifle was still nothing but bad memories whenever I picked it up, so I loaded up two .38 snub noses, a pump action Remington, and a spring loaded 9 inch flip knife incase I needed to get up close and personal. Fortunately, I also had a pair pf khakis to store my gear in stashed away in the gun safe. At least I wouldn’t be swinging in the wind while hunting these clowns down.

  I went to where Inez was crouched against the far wall and handed her one of the revolvers. She took it like she was handling a poisonous snake.

  “Do you know how to use one of these?” I asked.

  She shook her head and clutched it to her naked body. I kissed the top of her forehead and took to my feet.

  “The door locks automatically, so when I leave, don’t open it for anyone except for me, do you got that?”

  “Henry, no—!”

  “No, I’ve gotta. These guys are trying to kill us for some reason, and my guess is they ain’t gonna stop until they’ve got us.”

  I turned, went to the door, and switched off the light.

  “Remember, only open this if you know it’s me.”

  I then went low, quietly cracked open the door, and duck walked out into the hallway.

  Whoever had shot at us was definitely in the house now. From the sounds of it, they were going from room-to-room turning my stuff into kindling as they moved along. It took a lot of balls to pull a home invasion at my place, especially if you know mine and my family’s reputation, which made me think none of these clowns had the slightest clue of who I was or what I was capable of. I heard noise coming from the kitchen to the right of me and movement in my little brother’s old bedroom to the left. Since the kitchen was closer, I moved towards there.

  I had the .38 holstered and the shotgun slung across my shoulder and gripped my knife, planning to use it as my primary weapon. I had no idea how many of these guys were inside the house, so I was planning on taking them out as quiet as possible. Just as I was about to slide into the kitchen, I saw a huge figure emerge from it, his rifle slung easy and unconcerned off his shoulders as he stuffed something into his mouth. Whoever these guys were, they weren’t pros, pros didn’t grab a snack while they were hunting their prey down. Just as he was almost right on top of me, I sprang up, covered his mouth with one hand and drove my blade into my neck with the other. I watched as his eyes went wide with fear, he knew I was the last sight he was ever going to see.

  I quietly lowered him to the ground as his feet kicked and spasmed. No, these guys definitely weren’t pros. The guy I just dropped looked more like a redneck biker gone to fat, but he didn’t look like no killer. I moved down the hallway to my brother’s room and ran almost smack dab into another fat biker type. Even though he easily spotted me, he was slow on the draw and I was able to put two in his head with my .38 before he had his rifle up. The shots made someone come pounding out of my now decimated bedroom, and I was ready for him with my shotgun. As he turned the corner of the hallway, I fired low and took out his legs in a spray of buckshot and bullets. He screamed like wounded habit and his rifle went flying out into the dark. I was on top of him in seconds, the hot barrel of the Remington buried under his chin.

  “Who the hell are you?” I snarled.

  “FUCK! MY LEGS!” I gave him a hard slap across the face to hopefully snap him out of his pain.

  “You’ve got two seconds to answer me or I’m taking off the top of your head with this shotgun. Who are you?”

  “Man, we don’t want you. We just want the girl! We just came for the girl!”

  What the hell would they want with Inez? The words that came out of his mouth was enough to make me see red and still took his head off. There was no way I was going let these peckerwoods live so that they could maybe come back for her. Absolutely no way.

  I rolled the newest corpse over onto his stomach and found his wallet. I flipped it open his wallet—also another sure sign these guys weren’t professionals. Pros didn’t bring their wallets along to a job—and read the address off of his license. It was a Tucson address, so that meant whoever had sent them was probably from down around there, too.

  Maybe it was time to go and visit my big brother, Sam. He was in deep with a lot of the shader types down that way. At the very least, he could tell me who sent these guys to kill Inez.

  Chapter 5

  Not long after the firefight, Juan and a few boys from the bunkhouse made it up the h
ouse. I told them what was going on and to not call the sheriff for an hour or so. I wanted to get Inez as far away from this as possible and I didn’t want her to have anything to do with the law other than my brother. For as far as I knew, she was neck deep into something that would put her in jail for the rest of her life and I wasn’t going to help put her there.

  When I had Inez open the door to the trophy room, she leaped into my arms, tears streaming down her face. We stood there like that with her trembling in my arms, and I could have stayed just like that for the rest of night, but I needed to get her out of dodge and I needed answers. I had her get dressed and we headed to Tucson in one of the ranch 4-by-4’s. As we made the hour long trip down to Tucson, she told me the whole story of why the men had come after her. She’d been through hell and back and then back again. But because of the her story, I knew that my brother would be able to help us.

  Sam had joined up with the border patrol when he turned 18 despite the fact that he had more money than he could spend in 10 lifetimes. But like me and the Army, and both my old man and my brother with the police, Sam needed the action. No, that’s not quite accurate, Sam needed the power. There isn’t a government agency in the entire state of Arizona that held more sway and power than the border patrol, and that power virtually doubled after 9/11 and the creation of the patriot act. Sam basically held the power of life and death with zero impunity in the palm of his hand. And if the rumors were true, he wielded like a mad king and built an empire for himself on both sides of the border. He was a truly dangerous man, and at this point, I was pretty damn happy that he would be siding with me against whoever had come after Inez.

  We arrived at Sam’s little ranch style house on the outskirts of Mount Lemon just after dawn. Sam greeted us wearing nothing but a tattered old bathrobe and slurping from a monstrous mug of coffee. Sam had never married, or even had a girlfriend as far as I knew, and his spartan house reflected its lack of a feminine touch; it was nothing bare gray walls and outdated dark oak furniture. He sat us down in his kitchen and stared at Inez and I like we were some kind of science experiment.

  “So, I guess you drove all the way down here to introduce me to your new girlfriend,” He said as he took another big sip of coffee.

  I pulled the ID I’d lifted off the third dead man and flipped casually across the table to Sam

  “Any chance you know who that is?” I asked.

  Sam picked up the ID.

  “Yup, Billy Zane. I know the kid all too well.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Just another uneducated redneck with a hard-on for hurting Mexicans. Who is he to you?”

  “I just killed him and a couple of his buddies back at the ranch a couple of hours ago for trying to kill me and my new girlfriend.”

  “Well, that ain't no good.”

  “How come come?”

  “Well, Billy may be nothing but poor white trash, but he’s connected poor white trash.”

  “Connected to who?”

  “Reverend Fine.”

  Shit. Just about everyone in the state of Arizona knew who the Reverend Joseph Fine was. He was one of those loud mouth yahoos I mentioned earlier who give the state of Arizona a bad name. In fact, he was pretty much the lead yahoo. The ultra-conservative politicians loved trotting out the good reverend out anytime around elections and they needed to get the natives worked up and scared and into the voting booths. He was extremely well known, but as far as I knew, he wasn’t dangerous. But then again, I avoided politics like the plague because the last time I gave a crap about them got me 6 years out in Iraq blowing people's heads off.

  “You wanna take me to him?” I asked Sam.

  “Not particularly. But I suppose you ain’t gonna give me much of a choice in the matter?”

  “No, I ain’t.”

  “Then I suppose I will.”

  ***

  We left Inez back at Sam’s house and made the half hour drive to the Reverend’s “church” in total silence. Me and Sam have never been what you would describe as close. Sure, we were brothers, but we’d never paled around growing up like me and my little brother did. We were blood and that’s all that mattered. But in the same breath, if push came to shove, I was fairly certain Sam would sacrifice me in a dead second to either save his own ass or curry favor with someone who could give him a little more power. So when it came to dealing with the Reverend, I didn’t know where I stood exactly.

  As we pulled in front of the Reverend’s church—which was just an anonymous storefront in a burnt out mini-mall—Sam turned to me with his gray eyes.

  “I can’t have you killing this man, little brother,” He said.

  “And why’s that? Are you into him?”

  He snickered and cleared his throat.

  “First off, I don’t feel like arresting you today, and if you kill him in front of me, you ain’t going to give me a choice in the matter. Secondly, I ain’t into him, but a whole bunch of people you don’t want to mess with are, and if you kill him, I ain’t going to be able to protect you one damn bit. So hands off, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Oh, and let me do the talking. He don’t know you from fucking Adam, but he’s scared shitless of me.”

  We exited my brothers truck and stepped through the glass fronted door to the jingling of bells. There was nothing in the store front other than the Reverend himself sitting at a battered desk that looked like it had been fished out of the trash.

  “Samuel!” The Reverend greeted us. “What a pleasant surprise! It’s been too long since you’ve last visited!”

  The Reverend held out his long-fingered hand, but Sam just stared at it like it was a dead moth stuck in a screen door.

  “Knock off the shit, Joe, and sit down, this ain’t a social visit.”

  “It’s not, then whatever reason do you have for visiting me today? And who is this fine young man you brought along with you?” The Reverend took a seat and kicked up his snakeskin boots on top of his battered desk. The boots he was wearing easily cost 10 grand, so obviously he was doing pretty well for himself.

  “This is my little brother and just killed the shit out of Billy Zane,” Sam tossed the ID onto the desk and it bounced off the Reverends boot. “And a couple of other fellas who just shot up his house trying to kill his girlfriend.”

  “Now that’s a shame. Billy was always a little too hot tempered when it comes to dealing with the illegal problem. Too hot-tempered, too over overzealous.”

  “Indeed, he was,” Sam agreed. “But my brother’s girlfriend also told me that Billy and a few of his other buddies killed a truckload of Mexicans just after crossing the border up near Phoenix.”

  “That is a shame. As you know, Sam, I’ve never condoned violence.”

  “Of course. But, you know I don’t feel quite the same. So here’s the deal, if you or any of your people come at my brother or his girl ever again, I’m going come down here and put you into a pair of handcuffs. And then I going personally drive you down to Juarez to visit a couple of fellas I know down there, and these fellas, Joe, they don’t give two shits about who you know up at the statehouse, all they know is that you’re bad for business. Got it.”

  The Reverend’s face had turned visibly gray as we turned and walked out of the small office. As the door closed behind us, Sam said me.

  “Don’t say I’ve never done nothing for you, Hank, because that just cost me more than you’ll ever know.”

  ***

  It’s been two months since the attack on the ranch, and things are more or less back to normal. The day Inez and I drove back home, Sam called the Apache Junction sheriff’s department and smoothed things over with them and the attack was labeled a home invasion gone bad. The house is more or less back to normal, too, but both Inez and I have taken to sleeping in the trophy room just incase. She still has nightmares about what she experienced here and out in the desert (I do, too, but she doesn’t need to here about that.), but every night, they bec
ome a little less frequent.

  Every morning, we go out riding and every night I help her study for the GED. Neither of us talks very much, but then again, we really don’t need to.

  Because all we need is to know that we’ll always be there for one another, and that’s all that matters.

  THE END

  Desired by the Alien King

  Blinking her bleary, groggy eyes, Gwendolyn tried to focus her mind on the last thing she could remember. The shooting pain in her head—where did that come from?—did not make it any easier.