“Oh, this ain’t the mine,” J.C. said, grinning. “This is the cool part of our operation here.” He nodded at the elevator. “Turns out there’s caverns down there. Underground tunnels and caves, a whole damn maze. Juan swears he even heard a river once.”
Now that was kinda interesting. In a “secret cave system under a survivalist compound, how fucking cool is this?” kind of way.
“No shit?”
“No shit,” J.C. promised. “We’re using parts of it, but mostly it’s a huge, unexplored mess. We don’t know how far it stretches, but it’s possible some of the caves connect to the Carlsbad Caverns.” He hesitated, staring into the dark, and his smile dimmed. “If something happens, grab your friends and get down there.”
So that was what this little field trip was about. Andrej’s mind snapped back to business obediently, but not without disappointment. It had been fun to pretend, for a bit, that this was a social call.
“What if they follow?”
“I’ll give you a cheat sheet.” J.C. patted his arm, but his eyes were serious when he added, “Don’t deviate. You get lost down there, we’ll have a hard time finding you again.”
“Awesome,” Andrej muttered, eying the elevator with trepidation.
Suddenly, exploring the secret underground caves sounded much less exhilarating. “Let’s hope they don’t track us down, then.”
J.C. snorted sardonically. “Yeah, that’s likely.”
A man was allowed to dream, wasn’t he?
“Mostly I’m hoping we’ll be long gone by the time they get here,”
Andrej confessed. “I don’t want to bring this down on you. I just didn’t know where else to go.”
He didn’t know where to go from here, either. All of his other contacts had ties to the syndicate and there was no doubt Papa Tokarev was on to them and beyond mad by now. Chances were he’d given orders for Riley to be killed on sight, which would push Misha over the edge, so they had to avoid their usual crowd at any cost. Misha’s outside connections consisted of a bunch of freelance mechanics, a string of long-forgotten one-night stands, and Riley, who might or might not know a coyote or two, but probably nobody able to help them out of this level of shit. No telling whether Riley would even be useful in a gunfight: a few trips out to the shooting range had assured Andrej that the man could definitely hit what he aimed for, but Andrej doubted Riley had ever pointed his gun at a human being. As far as he’d been able to tell, the extent of violence in Riley’s life so far boiled down to the branding of hapless cows and the odd brawl.
Andrej wasn’t cold enough yet to call this a flaw, but it certainly was inconvenient in their current situation.
Maybe Kolya knew somebody useful, but from what little he’d divulged of his personal history, the few friends of his who were still alive lived in Russia. Also, if they were anything like Kolya, involving them would be like putting out fire with gasoline.