Page 25 of Rush Turner
“What are you going to do with his vehicle?”
“Gonzales can have his car too.”
“I’ll follow you and give you a ride back,” Nate said.
“No, stop, you can’t do this. I love her; she belongs to me. I won’t let anyone have her. If I can’t have her, then I’ll kill both of us.”
“She’s a fifteen-year-old girl who you have scared to death.” I looked in Nate’s truck, grabbed some tape, taped his mouth shut, and then zip-tied his feet.
“Damn, he is crazy. What if he finds a way back?” Nate asked.
“I’ll tell Gonzales to make sure he never finds his way back.”
19
Rush
Amonth passed like a heartbeat.
The BelAir was purring. The goats still hated fences. And Jessa and those kids were safe, at least as much as any family could be with me in the picture.
But safety was a lie some days — especially when you wore a Trident on your chest.
So when Fraiser called about a girl gone missing overseas — a diplomat’s daughter, snatched by a local gang looking for ransom — I packed my bag before he even finished the sentence. Max and Jack were already waiting at the airfield—some things you don’t say no to.
Somewhere in Eastern Europe
The extraction was supposed to be clean. Get in, get the girl, get out before the local cops or the wrong kind of government muscle got curious.
She was fifteen — bruised, terrified, but alive when Max and I found her huddled behind a locked door in a half-finished high-rise.
“Hey, sweetheart. I got you,” I said, my voice low as I cut through the cable binding her wrists. “You’re going home tonight.”
Max kept an eye on the hallway, rifle up. “Move it, Turner. She ain’t the only guest in this dump.”
He wasn’t wrong. We hit the stairwell, the girl clinging to my side like she thought I’d vanish if she blinked. We hit the street, made the rendezvous with Jack’s getaway van — all smooth until I spotted a shape under a streetlamp across the alley.
Thin. Dirty. Wild eyes.
I knew that face, even before he stumbled out, ranting in half-slurred English.
Kyle.
His hair was greasy, skin yellowed, clothes hanging off him like a bad joke. He saw me — really saw me — and his mouth twisted into that same snarl he used on Jessa.
He reached for something at his belt — maybe a gun, maybe a bluff. I never found out because local cops pulled up behind him, shouted in their language, and he spun on them instead.
One wrong move.
Three shots cracked the alley open. Kyle dropped like trash at the curb.
I stood there a second too long, the girl’s sobs muffled in my jacket, Max pushing me toward the van.
Jack yelled from behind the wheel, “Rush! Move your damn feet!”
I looked down at Kyle one last time. I didn’t feel sorry. I didn’t feel anything, really.
“Bastard deserved it,” I muttered, slamming the van door shut behind us. We had heard that Joanie wasn’t the first girlthat Kyle had stalked, he raped a twelve year old, and his daddy’s lawyer got him off.
