Against the Edge (The Raines of Wind Can - By Kat Martin Page 0,47
a shoulder holster over a dark T-shirt. One was big and muscular with skin so dark it looked black, the other tall and rangy, his arms roped with muscle and lined with blue ink prison tattoos.
Ben let go of Claire and eased a little away from her in case he needed to move fast. His pistol rode at his back. He wondered if they would want him to give it up. Then again, this was Texas. Everyone carried here.
Their attention swung from him to Claire, looking her over with eyes full of lust and bulges in their jeans.
“Eh, gringo. I have not seen you here before,” the bigger man said.
Ben managed to smile. “Friend of Duke Hutchins. He here yet? He’s supposed to meet me.”
“Sí, he just came in.”
“How about Troy Bridger? He here, too?”
“Maybe. I don’t know him.” Hard black eyes slid back to Claire. His thin lips curled up in a wolfish smile. “You got a good-looking woman, señor. She for sale?”
Claire’s face went pale. Ben kept his easy smile in place. “Not tonight.”
The other man just laughed. “Good luck, hombre.”
“Gracias, amigo.” He wasn’t fluent, but he knew enough Spanish to get by. So did the rest of the guys on his SEAL team. One of the reasons they’d been sent to Juarez. It came in handy in Houston.
“Come on, baby,” he said, pulling her close. “Let’s go win some money.”
She laughed as if she couldn’t wait, a throaty, sexy purr that made his groin throb.
“Buy me something pretty if you win?”
He raked her with his eyes. Even with the makeup and hair, she didn’t quite fit in. A little too elegant, maybe. Or a little too naive. “You bet, sweetheart.”
They headed for the beer concession, which was on the other side of a door leading out on the right. Ben bought a Bud in a red plastic cup and handed it to Claire so they would look like everyone else in the crowd. He made a slow, ambling loop around the barn, noticing it had four big open doors, one on each side, providing possible avenues of escape.
Then he led Claire back inside, moving toward the open area in the center of the barn, keeping her close, scanning the throng of people, looking for Hutchins or Bridger while Claire searched for Sam.
It was hard to believe people brought kids to a place like this, but they were there, standing next to their parents, some up in the rafters looking down on the matches. Bloodthirsty little bastards.
He could feel the tension in the hand Claire wrapped around his arm in a tourniquet grip. As they moved closer to the ring and the cries grew louder, he was pretty tense himself.
* * *
Claire forced her legs to move. She’d been determined to help Ben look for Sam, had told herself she could handle seeing what went on inside. Michael had once done an exposé on cockfighting, a bloody sport that was now illegal in all fifty states but still went on in far too many places.
Obviously one of those places was here.
She clung to Ben’s arm and pasted on a smile, trying to pretend she was enjoying herself. The crowd was a mixture of Hispanic, white and black, the dregs of society, from what she could tell. Michael had told her it was a favorite sport in a number of countries around the world, which might have accounted for some of the Asian men she saw.
He had also said that all levels of society frequented the matches, gambling thousands of dollars, some of the purses as high as a million.
Not this one. As they drew closer to the ring surrounded by bales of straw, she saw fistfuls of money being handed back and forth as the betting went down for each match, but this crowd wasn’t made up of millionaires.
In the center of the ring, a bronze rooster wearing three-inch metal spurs on its legs faced a snow-white opponent also wearing knife-sharp spurs. Their handlers were goading them, bringing them to a fighting frenzy.
The roar in the barn would have matched a World Series baseball game.
“See anything?” Ben asked, stopping next to a wooden post a little ways from the fighting.
Claire tore her gaze away from the ring just as the handlers let the birds go but not before she saw one of the steel spurs on the bronze rooster sink into the white chicken’s back. Blood erupted over its snowy feathers.