Priest: A Motorcycle Club Romance (The Viking’s Rampage MC: Tucson Chapter Book 2)
Priest: A Motorcycle Club Romance: Chapter 22

Lockout, Riptide, Dash, Hush, and Seek were all back inside the meeting room. Dash looked over in excitement as I walked in.

“Yo! We finally got a lock on the tracker’s location!”

Riptide gave Dash a bitter look. “That was my fucking line, Dash.”

“Sorry, Rip,” Dash said, looking not the least bit ashamed.

“Where did Chet go?” I asked. I’d put that tracker in his bag a week ago, but he’d been bouncing around the city for days on end and we’d been waiting for him to settle in one place before looking into it.

“The Silverbells,” Seek told me, a wide grin on her face. “He stopped out in the middle of the desert two days ago. Rip thinks he’s there to stay for a while.”

“In the middle of the desert?” I asked.

“Seek!” Riptide said at the same time as I asked my question. “You’re both stealing my thunder here.”

Seek gave him a toothy smile. “Yeah, well you guys won’t let me go out and help investigate, so that’s what you get.”

Riptide grumbled and scowled at her.

“Can we fucking focus?” I asked. “What would Chet be doing out in the desert? Camping?”

“That’s what we’re going to replace out,” Hush answered. “But given how close it is to where Caitlyn’s mother was murdered, I doubt he’s up to anything good.”

“I’m in.” I remembered Ricochet’s request and met Lockout’s gaze. “We should bring Ricochet in on this one.”

His brows pinched together. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Priest.”

“He asked me if I’d speak to you and Rip. He wants in, Lock.”

He was quiet for a few moments. “You think he’s ready? It took him a while to get over what happened in Austin.”

“Maybe. Maybe not, but if he says he wants in we should probably listen. He knows he needs to do something, and he wants to be helpful.”

“He needs the distraction,” Hush interjected. “Let him come along. We’re just doin’ some recon.”

“Just recon,” Lockout insisted. “I don’t want you assholes busting in on whatever is going on out there. We got lucky with Seek and Cait, we don’t know anything yet. Go. Check it out. Get your asses home.”

“Will do,” I said with a grin. This was a welcome distraction with everything going on with me right now, too. I knew exactly how Ricochet felt. In more ways than one. What had happened to the kid over on his deployment could eat at you if you let it. Not to mention his reaction and how it kept affecting him. I’d been waiting for him to come to me. To talk things out with someone. Instead, it seemed as though he was dedicated to internalizing all his agony. Yeah…I knew how he felt because we were too fucking similar.

“Meanwhile,” Lockout said, interrupting my thoughts, “I’ll go check out the spots here in the city where Chet was staying. See if I can figure out what he was up to. Why he kept moving from place to place the way he did. With him out of the city I’ll draw less suspicion poking around.”

I noticed Riptide elbow Dash and bit back a grin. Riptide knew better than to tell his president anything, especially in front of everyone, so he often used Dash to circumvent that. Dash’s old lady preferred the man to take less dangerous jobs within the club—much to his annoyance—and Lockout and Riptide always tried to appease them both.

“Mind if I tag along, Prez?” Dash asked. “The old lady will shit a brick if she hears that I was out fucking around in the desert. Especially after the whole Dex thing.” His son had gotten lost out in the desert at the beginning of summer. It was how we’d first met Seek. Her and her dogs were the ones to replace him. Dash’s tone was sheepish, but all of us—including Lockout—knew what he was up to.

Lockout gave Riptide a hard look, but he nodded. “Happy to have you along, Brother,” he told Dash. He pointed at Riptide. “Take however many of the guys you need.”

It was the weekend and most of the guys weren’t working today, so we’d end up taking a good amount of reinforcements. After what’d happened out at The Silverbells the last time, we weren’t about to be taken by surprise. Who knew what we’d walk in on.

“I need to let Jenny know-”

“I’ll tell her,” Seek said, interrupting me. “I’m going to need a bottle of wine to soothe the blow to my pride not allowing me to go with you will cause,” she grumped. She leaned over and brushed her lips over Hush’s.

“Only one?” Hush asked.

Seek flipped him off with a laugh. “If Jenny can’t babysit, then I’ll take care of the girls while you guys are gone.”

I’d already talked to Jenny yesterday about her moving in with us, but she insisted on taking it slowly, for the girls’ sake. That didn’t mean I wasn’t having the adult version of a sleepover as much as possible.

“If you’re watching the girls you’ll need more than one bottle of wine.” It was nice seeing her being able to laugh and joke about the fact that we were taking over her investigation into The Silverbells. We all understood her anger at first, but she was too important to Hush to put at risk. He’d almost lost her once and he wouldn’t be able to handle that, not after losing his first wife.

Just the thought of Jenny dying made me want to storm up to the apartment and duct tape her and the girls to something sturdy inside the apartment. If they didn’t leave it without me there, they wouldn’t get into any trouble.

I knew that was a bit over the top, and wouldn’t be received well, so I followed my brothers over to the armory area and unlocked the door. There were too many kids—not to mention Butcher—around not to lock the guns up. It wasn’t that Butcher was dangerous with guns per se, it was the opposite. I would come home to replace the girls putting precision holes in the wall or shooting clay birds off of the roof. He’d end up training them to be crack shots before they even knew how to drive.

Handing out rifles, I grabbed one for myself and strapped my pistol holster to my belt before loading my Glock into it.

We didn’t know what we were going to be heading into. It was best to bring a little bit of everything.

“Prez, mind if I tag along with you for this one?”

We all glanced over as Hellfire walked up. Riptide had rounded up the rest of the guys we’d need for the two missions we had going.

Lockout’s brows shot up. “Always happy to have you along. Something up?”

Hellfire was the first one to offer himself up for the most dangerous jobs. Him requesting to go with Lockout—on what we all suspect would be the tamer of the two missions—was unusual.

In the beginning Lockout had been the same. He went on every one of our runs. He was the first one to enter buildings and went running into danger before any of us. As much as we’d all appreciated that our president wasn’t willing to ask something of us that he wouldn’t do, we’d finally had a talk with him. Riptide, Hush, and I had sat down with him and told him that the club needed him. It was our jobs to face that danger for him. If one of us went down, the club would recover, but if we lost him? It was fucking unimaginable.

He’d been fucking pissed, but eventually had accepted what we were telling him. We weren’t trying to tell him how to run his club. We’d just told him the hard truth. It was why he had us as his main officers. He knew we’d tell it to him straight. He still got involved in way more than we’d prefer, but he’d eased off a lot as well. It was the best compromise we were going to get from him.

“Everything’s fine,” Hellfire told him. “Just needed to be closer to the city. My mom isn’t feeling great and I may need to take her to the hospital.”

Lockout’s eyes narrowed on him as he tried to figure out whether Hellfire was full of bullshit or not. “If she’s sick, you don’t need to go.”

“Eh, you know Mom. She won’t let me take her anywhere unless she’s on her deathbed.” His eyes found mine and the huge man grimaced. “Sorry, Priest. I didn’t-”

“Don’t be,” I interrupted. Shoving the rising mix of feelings back down, I handed Riptide a rifle.

“I’m in for the city mission,” Smokehouse called from behind everyone.

“I don’t need fucking babysitters,” Lockout snarled at Riptide, though he did so under his breath.

“Hey, don’t look at me,” Riptide replied with a shrug. “I didn’t ask them to go along.”

“The fuck you didn’t,” Lockout muttered. His eyes flashed angrily. “We’re going to have to have a talk about the chain of fucking command when we finish this, Rip.” With that he walked off, snapping at our three brothers who were going with him to hurry the fuck up.

I let out a low whistle. “You managed to piss him off. Good job.”

Riptide shrugged. He’d cut his hair a few weeks ago, so instead of hanging down to his shoulders it was just past his ears. He still looked like the quintessential surfer guy, which was exactly what he was. He’d grown up in the Pacific Northwest and lived for the ocean. The fact that he’d ended up in the damn desert was only because of the relationship he’d built with Lockout during a deployment.

He’d left behind his one true love—the sea—to come here and help build the MC. He was a few years younger than me and Lockout, but no one gave a shit. He’d proved his worth and every one of us—even the older guys—would follow him anywhere. It’s why Lockout had made him his VP.

Riptide looked around at the group coming with us. There were six of us counting him. Everyone else had been busy. Six was fine. It was all we needed for a recon mission.

Something bumped my leg and I looked down into a furry face. “Your mom is going to be pissed that you’re down here without her,” I told Jecht. The Malinois didn’t look the least bit worried. He whined low in his throat. “I swear,” I said, kneeling to scratch the dog behind the ears, but looking up at Hush, “these dogs can fucking speak English.”

“You and me both,” Hush replied with a chuckle. “Jecht, back upstairs,” he ordered, pointing up the staircase.

The dog whined again, but left, tail drooping as he trotted up the stairs with exaggerated slowness. “Great,” Hush muttered. “Now I’m in trouble with Seek and her dogs. At least Auron stayed upstairs.”

“Guaranteed he’s glued to Caitlyn’s side,” I said with a grin. Seek’s dogs loved my girls and the feeling was very clearly mutual. The day was coming when I was going to have to give in and get them their own dog. Things had been too chaotic before for a puppy, but soon—once things settled—I’d get them one. Especially since we had Seek around to train it. She was amazing with the animals.

“Let’s go,” Riptide called out. “We need to get in and out of there before dark. I don’t want to alert whoever is out there with Chet that we’re coming.”

The ride out to the area where we’d found Caitlyn more than a month ago was eerie. It was like the desert knew something we didn’t. Summer was officially coming to an end, though we’d still have hot weather up until November—just not blistering heat—so the Cicadas were quiet. Their mating season had come and gone and it was weird not to hear the bugs buzzing from the trees.

There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, yet I still had an ominous feeling. The others felt it, too, and we were all silent as we rode out together in one of the trucks.

“Stop here,” Riptide told me. He had a handheld antenna outside the window and was holding a radio in his other hand. I knew the contraption was called a telemetry GPS tracker, or some such shit, since that’s what he’d called it when he told Lockout he had a way to track Chet. I wasn’t sure how the damn thing worked, but we were about to replace out.

The hairs prickled on the back of my neck. I turned and looked over my shoulder at Hush, Ricochet, Butcher, and Toxic, who were all smashed together in the backseat. Hush had the same scowl on his face that I was sure was on my own. This had been the exact spot where Sherry Holden’s vehicle had been parked that day.

Riptide frowned down at his handheld radio receiver—it was connected to the foot-long antenna by a cable—as it emitted a beeping noise. He hadn’t even noticed the significance of having us stop here. Riptide had been a communications Sergeant within a Green Beret special forces team, so he had all the coolest gadgets. I wasn’t sure how he kept getting the equipment now that he was out, but it was clear he still had some contacts within his old team. He was a techie to the extreme.

He finally looked up and his eyes met mine when the realization hit. “Well hell. What do ya know?” He shrugged. “This puts us directly in line with Chet.” He held up the receiver and grinned at me.

I stared at it blankly as it continued chirping, then lifted a brow. It wasn’t like I had any idea what the fucking beeping meant.

Riptide shook his head with a sigh. “Come on, let’s go.”

We got out and got our gear together, pulling out camelbacks filled with water. We weren’t sure how long this was going to take, or how far we’d be hiking and the last thing you wanted was to get stuck out in the Sonoran Desert with no water. That would lead to a miserable death. We left the truck parked under a mesquite tree. The whole point was to be discreet. The truck would be loud and kick up a lot of dust. By walking the last few miles, we could stay out of sight.

“You’re bringing that thing with us?” Butcher asked as Riptide started walking, holding the antenna out in front of him.

Riptide rolled his eyes. “If we want to replace Chet, it comes with us.” He moved the antenna around and I started to notice that every time the beeping grew fainter, he’d sweep the thing around until the signal was strong again, and change our direction.

Pretty fucking cool.

I hadn’t realized, until this moment, that the thing I’d dropped into Chet’s bag had been a radio transmitter. That’s what we were following now. Makes sense. Out here there was no cell signal, and your off the shelf commercial tracking devices needed cell service to work. We walked along with Riptide, listening to the beeps echo around the quiet desert surrounding us.