Gathering Dark by Candice Fox (best life changing books txt) 📕

“Mr. Rieu,” I said, pushing Sneak toward the counter. I needed to get Rieu away from Sneak to give her time to search. “Perhaps we could leave my partner to look at your logbook and you could show me some of your aircraft?”

“Sure,” the man said, smiling brightly. “I’ll give you a proper tour. Come this way.”

Long grass was growing under the wheels of unused planes in the shade. Sun-bleached rubber and faded seat belts. There was a nest of swallows in the roof of a long hangar, the birds swirling out, going for fast, extended sweeps of the field before returning with tiny bugs in their beaks. A fire was burning in the mountains somewhere, smoke trailing thin and black against the white, blazing sky.

I should have known something was wrong by the speed with which we walked by the rows of small aircraft sitting like ready white birds, ticking with the heat of the sun. Rieu wasn’t giving me a tour. He was leading me. I didn’t question our path. I was thinking about Dayly, what she might have wanted out here, who the possible cop with the flat-top haircut was.

I was in the hangar before I really had a sense of the danger around me. Perhaps it was the sun beating down on my head, or the shock of the past twenty-four hours, but I looked at the three men in front of us almost pleasantly, as though Rieu was going to introduce me to them and we were all going to have a friendly chat about aviation fuel types. It was the sight of the bags on the table that brought me to. Large, clear plastic ziplock bags stacked in an enormous pile, some already packed into cardboard boxes marked with a brand of ramen noodle that I recognized from my time in prison. The bags were full to bursting with little white pills. Rieu pushed me forward and the men froze, two pausing in packing the boxes, one slowly lowering his phone from his ear in shock at the sight of me.

“There’s another one in the office,” Rieu said.

“Whoa.” I put my hands up carefully, trying to force my screaming brain to focus. “Okay. Let’s everybody just stay calm.”

“They’re cops.” Rieu dragged a chair from beside the table full of pills. “I don’t know if they’re wired up or not.”

I glanced around the huge aluminum hangar. There were more aircraft here, tables of parachuting equipment and coiled ropes, random parts of planes under restoration—the aileron of a Cessna lying on a tarp covered with fresh white paint. I could see stencils of letters lying in a stack on the ground by one of the planes. These men had probably been switching the tail numbers every few months as they moved drugs across the border.

The sight of the setup was so terrifying I almost gagged. I was grateful when Rieu shoved me into the chair before the men, my legs unsteady, tingling as the blood rushed to my head.

“We’re not cops,” I managed. No one heard me.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck.” A big guy with long, dark sideburns rounded the table and grabbed Rieu by the shoulders. “How did this happen? How did … Aw, fuck!”

“They’re not here looking for us.” Rieu was panting, wringing his hands. “They’re after some chick and a guy who might have come out here a couple of months ago. Don’t panic. We can contain this.”

“We’re not cops,” I repeated. The men who had been packing the boxes were still frozen, bags in their hands, watching Rieu and Sideburns try to work out the situation with the big-eyed stillness of frightened cats. “Listen to me.”

“Go get the other one,” Sideburns stammered. He drew a black pistol from the back of his jeans. “Is the parking lot empty? Are they the only ones here?”

“We’re not cops!” I snapped. The men looked at me. I was gripping the chair for dear life. Words started spilling out of me. “We’re just regular people. We’re here looking for our friend. She’s missing. I swear to God, we don’t care what the hell you’re doing here. All the stuff about fentanyl was a—”

“They know it’s fentanyl.” Rieu’s mouth was downturned with horror. “They know about the Long Beach guys.”

“Jesus.” I gripped my hair. “That was all bullshit! It was a lucky guess! My friend was lying her ass off, trying to get you to give us a look at your books. Just … We … You have to listen to me! Please!”

“Who would lie about being a cop?” Sideburns asked me. “Why wouldn’t you just tell the guy your friend is missing? Ask to see the tapes?”

“Because she lies about everything. She’s just that sort of person. We’re not cops, I swear to you. Let us walk away from here and you’ll never see either of us again.”

Sideburns looked at Rieu, at the men behind the table, at me. He actioned the pistol. As it swung up toward my head, I felt the seconds begin to lag with shocking clarity, my brain frantically trying to catch up to the situation I had found myself in. My pulse was beating so hard in my head I was seeing disjointed glimpses of the movements around me. The gun coming up. All the men turning toward the sound of an engine roaring outside the hangar. The east side of the hangar collapsing inward, bursting open as the Gangstermobile smashed through it and into the table where the pill bags were piled, sending the men there flying for cover. I sat rigid in my chair as Sneak hung out of the driver’s-side window and leveled a gun the size of her forearm at Sideburns, her aim hardly fixing before she blasted the weapon at him. The noise hammered off the sides of the building. Sneak fired twice more, and I felt the percussion wave of the bullets sailing past my left and then right shoulder as she fired wildly