Page 28 of Crash’s Secret

Saber swings a leg over his bike.

We ride north with headlights dark. At the staging point, Saber and I kill our engines and walk the bikes the last quarter mile to a ditch before continuing on foot.

The compound is bright against the dark, floodlights on the main building, music from somewhere, men’s laughter.

Saber and I belly up a low ridge of rock-hard dirt east of the fence. Below us, the row of trailers—five of them propped on cinder blocks.

A man sits on the steps of the middle one, rifle across his knees, halfway through a beer.

I check the tracker app on my phone. The green dot is inside that trailer.

She is twenty yards from me, behind one drunk guard and a sheet-metal door.

“One on the steps,” Saber breathes. “One on the corner of the fence, north. See him?”

“Got him.”

My phone buzzes once against my chest.

Duke: In position.

It’s time to go get my girl.

We come down the slope in the dark. Saber takes the fence corner, gets behind the guard, and puts a knife in him. The body goes down without a sound.

The man on the steps tips his beer back, oblivious.

I cross the last thirty feet while his head is tilted back, and I kill him with my knife before he ever sees me. He folds sideways off the steps into the dirt. I take his rifle and set it down out of reach.

Saber materializes at the other side of the door. He holds up a fist. Wait.

Through the thin metal skin of the trailer, we hear a man’s voice. “Keep crying, sweetheart. Nobody out here but coyotes.”

Then she says, “When my brother gets here, I’m going to tell him to kill you first.”

My knees nearly give out with the relief of hearing her, and Saber smiles.

I know the same thought is in both our heads: That’s our girl.

Saber drops his fist and kicks the trailer door off its hinges.

Two men are inside. The first one turns toward the door, and Saber shoots him dead.

The second grabs Cassidy. She’s zip-tied to a kitchenette chair, blood dried down her temple. He grabs a fistful of her hair, and his pistol is half-raised toward her head.

I shoot him through the shoulder of his gun arm. He drops the pistol, and my second shot kills him.

“Crash,” Cassidy calls out to me.

I leave the man where he is.

Saber is already cutting the zip ties. She comes up out of the chair, and there’s one second where she doesn’t know which of us to go to, her brother or me.

Saber steps back. She comes to me.

She hits my chest, and my arms close around her, and her fists twist into the back of my cut.

“You came,” she says into my chest.