Chapter 14 Augustine
Augustine
Damron, my president and the only guy I’d ever take an order from without bitching, was already standing at the head of the table, the big map of Los Alamos County duct-taped to the wall behind him.
He looked like hell had done him a favor and let him crawl out, at least for the night.
The scar along his jaw was lit up white, a zipper running from his left ear to the hinge of his chin, and tonight he was letting it do the talking.
On the table, two other maps: one of the county line, the other a Google Maps printout of downtown Los Alamos annotated with red and black pushpins.
There was a third, blank except for a few crude notes in Sharpie—someone’s idea of a joke.
It read, in giant block letters: "ARMAGEDDON? "
I slid in at his right hand, where the Sergeant-at-Arms was supposed to be, and watched the rest of the crew try to pretend they hadn’t just seen me bring a Leatherback princess into our house the night before.
Nobody said shit about it. Nobody had to.
They all knew, and that knowledge worked through the room like a slow-acting poison.
Damron didn't look at me. He addressed the room, his voice all gravel and authority. "You all know why we're here."
The prospects—three of them, none older than twenty-one—hauled in folding chairs from the back and lined the far wall, as if they were there to witness a firing squad.
They passed around a single bottle of Mr. Boston, the cap long gone, and took pulls like it was the antidote to everything happening outside these walls.
"We got a situation," Damron continued, stabbing a finger at the map.
"Saint Etienne wants a war. Cutler is calling in every favor from here to the Oklahoma state line.
" He moved the finger across town, tapping a cluster of three red pins.
"Leatherbacks are mobilizing here, here, and here.
That means they're planning a full sweep. They want their girl back."
The mention of "their girl" made a few heads turn my direction, but I kept my face blank and let my fingers drum on the bullet holes.
Damron's eyes swept the room. "Rex's body was found at the Chevron on 84. Execution-style, though they won't say it in the news. He was their enforcer, and now he's a goddamn warning."
I leaned in, voice dry enough to light a match. "We know the Leatherbacks. They never go for subtle when they can go for excessive. This isn’t about Melissa. This is about sending a message."
Damron gave me a hard look, not quite a challenge, not quite an agreement. "The message is received, Sergeant. But what’s your play?"
I reached across the table and stabbed a finger onto the map, straight at the main strip where the Leatherbacks' own bar sat like a boil on the county's ass.
"Cut off the head, the snake dies. We hit Saint Etienne before he’s ready.
No one expects us to go on the offensive, least of all the 'Backs. "
Someone snickered, and I recognized the voice—Seneca Wallace, with his dead-eye stare and the ghost of a smile that said he'd already written the eulogy for half the room. "You planning to walk up and ring the doorbell, Augie?"
I shot him a look that didn’t require a response.
Damron’s voice came in low, but it cut through the laughter. "We’re outnumbered. Three to one, if Durango shows up. This is a numbers game, and we don’t have the numbers."
The room went still. Even the prospects stopped pretending they were invisible.
I shrugged, pulling a smoke from my jacket and lighting it. "Numbers only matter if they know what we’re doing. Hit fast, hit hard, vanish. Blitzkrieg, not trench warfare."
Damron rolled the cigar in his teeth, eyes never leaving me. "You volunteering for the suicide run?"
"If it keeps the war off our doorstep, yeah," I said. "Saint Etienne is not going to negotiate. He’s not going to parlay. He’s going to burn us down and piss on the ashes. The only thing he respects is force."
Seneca nodded, as if conceding a chess move.
"The Sadist" wasn’t just a nickname; it was a job description. He’d been doing wet work for the Scythes since he got back from Iraq, and he had a way of looking at a problem that made it clear he enjoyed the process as much as the result.
"What about the prospects?" he asked, glancing at the kids lined up by the wall. "They won’t stand up to a firefight."
"They’re not supposed to," I said. "They’re the bait."
Now the room went all the way silent. One of the prospects, the girl, set down the bottle and wiped her mouth, looking pale but stubborn. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. We’d all been the bait at some point.
Damron leaned over the map, hands planted on either side.
He looked old tonight, older than the forty years he claimed.
"We fortify the compound. Prospects and families go into lockdown. The rest of us set up pickets at the north and south approaches. If they come, we bleed them. But we don’t go hunting, not until we know who’s really behind this. "
I stared at the map, watching the lines of attack, the fallback positions, the choke points. It was a good plan—if you wanted to survive. It was a shit plan if you wanted to win.
"I say we hit them first," I said, keeping my voice level. "We take Saint Etienne off the board, make it personal. We show them what happens when you poke a real MC."
Damron’s eyes narrowed. "You want to go back to the way things were in the nineties? Bodies in the river every week, ATF crawling up our ass? Because that’s what happens if we escalate."
I shrugged, flicked ash into an empty beer can. "Maybe it’s already escalated. Maybe they’re just waiting for us to blink first."
Seneca spoke up, tone flat as a dead battery. "The way I see it, we can either die slow or die interesting."
A couple of the older guys nodded, their faces lit by the shitty fluorescent light and the flicker of memory. They remembered what it was like, back before the treaties, when a man could settle a beef without worrying about federal prison or cartel blowback.
Damron finally broke the standoff. "We vote. That's the rule. All in favor of fortify and hold?"
Five hands up. All the old guard, the ones with kids and side businesses to protect.
"All in favor of hit first, hit hard?"
Four hands. Mine, Seneca’s, and two of the wildcards who’d never met a bad idea they didn’t like.
Damron counted, then nodded. "It’s decided. We hold. Augustine, you’ll run point on perimeter. Seneca, you take the picket teams. Prospects, you’re on lockdown. Nobody leaves unless I say so."
The meeting broke up in a flurry of boots and arguments. The prospects hustled out, the girl throwing me one last look—anger, maybe, or respect, or just plain survival. Seneca clapped me on the shoulder as he passed. "You get your war, eventually," he said, voice low. "Just not tonight."
Damron waited until the room was empty, then sat down heavy in the chair next to mine. He poured two fingers of cheap bourbon and slid it across the table.
"You ever think you were born for peacetime?" he asked, not quite joking.
I picked up the glass and downed it. "Never crossed my mind."
He stared at the map, fingers tracing the edge of Leatherback territory. "You keep pushing like this, one day you’ll have to run the club. You ready for that?"
I didn't answer. I didn’t need to. He knew.
Damron stood, the weight of decision settling on his shoulders like a winter coat. "Get some sleep. We might need you alive tomorrow."
I left the chapel and walked back into the dark, the taste of bourbon still on my tongue.
The night felt colder, and the silence was waiting for the first shot.
I didn’t even make it to the door before I heard them go at it again, voices rolling up the hall like a bar brawl in a hurricane. The club never did like closed-casket decisions. Nothing got buried in the Scythes without everyone first pissing on the coffin.
So I doubled back, boots thudding the length of the hall, and ducked inside to see the chapel already full again.
This time it wasn’t quiet; it was a knife fight of arguments and smoke, with half the brothers up on their feet, red faces, fingers poking holes in the map or jabbing at each other’s chests.
The Mr. Boston bottle was making rounds at speed.
You could almost see the testosterone condensate dripping from the ceiling.
Damron was in the middle, holding court like a bastard bishop, but even his glacier-cool had limits.
Seneca was perched on the edge of the table, tracing something on the map with a knife, not paying attention to anything but his own thoughts.
Carl Dalton had parked himself near the window, his arm in a fresh white sling, still smelling like hospital bandages and stubbornness.
Every time the room got too loud, he’d whack the table with his good hand and shout until he got his point across.
"We hit ‘em at the old cannery," Carl was saying, nostrils flared. "They’re not expecting shit there, it’s too public. We roll hard, hit and run, just like Augustine said." He gestured at me, like I was the prize pig in a county fair.
Seneca didn’t even look up, just flicked the tip of his knife at the map and said, "Bad math, Carl. We pop them in public, ATF is up our ass before we get home. Damron's right—we let them come to us. Plenty of space to maneuver, plenty of cover."
Carl sneered, but before he could open his mouth, Seneca tapped the map three times, each one landing on a mark labeled "stash." "We’ve got weapon caches here, here, and here. Diablos still owe us after the Mexicans last summer. If we hold, we’ve got backup and a shitload of firepower."