Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 70566 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 353(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 70566 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 353(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
The receipt printed, but I left it flapping in the wind as I remounted my bike and said, “Take a couple of hours to sleep. We reconvene in the morning. Tack, let the others know.”
Tack nodded once.
Tack, short for tackle, was his actual name.
His daddy had loved to fish. His mom had been in labor with Tack when she’d called her husband to tell him the news. Tack’s dad, in his haste to get home, slipped and fell, and conked his head on a rock and drowned in about two inches of water.
Tack’s mom had been broken, but she’d not been broken enough not to come up with Tack’s name.
He was sharp as a tack, too.
And sometimes, I wondered if he’d been named after the wrong thing.
I could tell that he was wondering why I wasn’t going to make the call.
“I’m not stopping,” I informed him.
He nodded once. “I think it’s good for the rest of us to have a couple of hours of rest. Or we’ll be useless in the daylight.”
Just then, Major came in on his own bike and pulled up to the pump opposite us.
When he was filling up, he walked over to us and said, “I think we need a couple of hours of sleep. I’m about to fall off my damn bike.”
“That’s what I was just telling Tack to do, call and let y’all know that we need some rest.”
He studied me, knowing that I wasn’t stopping, and nodded. “I’ll call the others.”
He did that, and I started the bike up and took off, not heading home, but to a place just down the mountain from where I’d been earlier in the day.
As I did, I noticed the number of vehicles that were coming and going from the property.
Not necessarily unusual seeing as there were a lot of rentals in this area, but not at this time of night.
Tourists didn’t tend to drive on the mountain roads at night.
They were scary to them.
Pulling to the side, I tucked the bike into some bushes and started to walk, using the woods as cover as I made my way deeper into the area that I knew was Kenswood’s place.
I checked my phone to see if I had any signal and found none.
Though I wasn’t surprised, I was annoyed.
As I got closer to where I could now hear quite a few people milling about, some of them were yelling and cheering. Along with the cheering and yelling, I could also hear other things.
Things that I somehow knew were going to turn my stomach when I got closer.
Because I knew what the sounds were.
Pained animal sounds.
Using the shadows as cover as best as I could since the sparse trees I’d been using had thinned out even more, I got as close to the fighting ring as possible so I could see what was going on.
And my stomach sank.
Dogs fighting.
Dammit.
I would not allow this.
Not in my town.
I had one gun with me, a Glock nineteen that held fifteen rounds.
I had two extra magazines in my pocket.
And there were over fifty people here.
I couldn’t shoot them all if I stepped out and…
The bushes next to the house exploded, and an angry white-haired woman burst out of the trees with a baseball bat in her hands.
She screamed and hit the guy holding a dog back by a leash across his forearm.
The bone in the man’s arm snapped and he let go of the dog.
The dog took off across the yard, straight up the mountain at my back.
I cursed and hurried forward, my gun already in my hand.
“This is despicable!” Holly screeched. “This is utterly and wholly horrific, and every single one of you should go straight to hell!”
Silence.
Then laughter.
The man whom she’d hit reared back with his good hand and aimed it at her face.
I stepped in and caught his good hand with my left hand, twisted, shoved backward, and heard the pop of his shoulder coming out of the socket in the next moment.
He fell to the ground, screaming in agony.
Holly looked over at me with wide eyes.
I brought my gun up and aimed it at them, waving it around to each of them as I said, “Every last one of you. Down. Don’t make me shoot you, because I will.”
Baron Kenswood started to sneak backward, but Thumper came out of the bushes and clocked him right up the side of the head with a meaty fist.
Kenswood hit the ground in a solid heap.
The gun in Thumper’s hand materialized out of nowhere, and he had his gun aimed at the others just like I did.
“Baby, go get that rope behind you, and we’ll start tying everyone’s hands.”
It took us fifteen minutes, but we got everyone tied up, hands tied to feet and on their bellies in the dirt and blood around the fighting ring.