Chapter Two
When we arrived at the warehouse, there were a few lights on outside, making it easy to see where the bikes and cars were pulled up.
Two of our guys were outside smoking and they waved to us and pulled back the oversized doors.
I pulled right up to the door and got off the bike, taking off my helmet and dropping it on the seat as I headed inside, Ballistic right beside me.
A few of the guys nodded in our direction as the doors slid shut again with a thump. It’s by no means soundproofed here but I hadn’t been able to hear any noises as we pulled up, mostly because of the roar of the bikes, but I sure as shit could hear it now.
Inside the warehouse was mostly a wide open space and triple height ceilings but since I was last here, there had clearly been some work done. There were rooms where there hadn’t been any before, made from thick breeze blocks. They had heavy steel doors and most of them were closed.
I glanced over as Hammer appeared from a room, dragging someone by the ankle, who’s hip bone look disjointed. Ballistic whistled to get Hammer’s attention. The guy he was dragging was clearly dead, a gunshot wound in his throat, blood all over him.
“He caught Chips off guard,” Hammer grunted, dropping the guys ankle with a thud. I noticed Chips sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall, with blood pouring from the side of his head, he was holding a rag up to it to stem the flow. “I had no choice.”
Ballistic hissed out a curse but nodded his head then carried on through the warehouse.
I stuck behind him. Ballistic might be our Enforcer, one of the shittier jobs in the club when it came to stuff like this, but he wasn’t a psychopath.
Neither was I, having worked with Ballistic for the last five years, I was already looking at the problems this was going to cause.
Bringing in this many Kingsmen was a clusterfuck.
Ballistic wasn’t the type to just slaughter people.
He had ways and means of doing things and killing them right off was not his way.
Torturing them, figuring out who is lying and who is telling the truth is something he is good at, but it takes time. Time we don’t have.
We’re gonna have a lot to answer for if we wipe out these guys. A whole MC? That is unheard of and not something the Devil’s would usually condone.
This place is not where I need to be right now, this is about holding these guys, not torturing information out of them. They didn’t know anything anyway. I noticed Ballistic eyeballing me as we walked through to the back of the building, bypassing all the rooms with Kingsmen inside.
My eyes burned into him as we continued on and he smirked slightly, knowing I’d figured it out. He wanted me and War separated, because he knows we’re suspicious about what the real reason behind all this is, he did overhear us talking.
Still, I followed Ballistic into what had once been the office. It wasn’t furnished, but there was a meeting table and four chairs, one of which had a broken leg leaning haphazardly against the wall.
“You forget I know you.”
“Cut the bullshit,” I snapped.
“You’ve worked with me for years. I may not have raised you but I’ve watched you since you were a kid, and you lived under my roof. No one knows you the way I do.”
“What are you talking about?” I shouted, pissed at him bringing me here for no reason.
He leaned back against the wall. “Forget about all the shit you and War think you know. You’re barely a heartbeat away from losing it. I’ve seen it before Hudson, especially after your dad,” he said, making my blood run cold.
Just before I turned eighteen, my father was involved in a drunk driving accident. He’d hit two pedestrians, one of them died, a young mother with two kids. I’d been so angry, so filled with rage I’d wanted to kill him myself. I hadn’t spoken to him since that day in the hospital.
My relationship with my dad was difficult, to say the least. He hadn’t been the same since we lost mom. His drinking got out of hand, his ability to hold down a job, and worst of all, the way he felt about me.
The beatings started when I was around eleven, it wasn’t much at first, a slap here and there. At first, he was horrified with himself when he sobered up. Until every last part of my father was swallowed up by the booze and the misery, and I became little more than someone to take his pain out on.
War did what he could, when I ran to their house to escape my father.
And Waverley… she was the only other person who saw beyond the surface, who got me to open up.
I was a different person around her. She tamed me, kept me calm, made me feel worth more than the punching bag my dad turned me into. The son of a convicted murderer.
Then everything with her got fucked up and I completely lost my shit. Drinking, fighting, women, I really lost my way when she left, ripping my heart out and taking it with her.
Ballistic brought me back from that. I could have got myself into a lot of trouble if it weren’t for him.
He trained me, shaped me, showed me how to focus when things were getting bad.
Most importantly of all, Ballistic talked to me.
For a guy who barely said more than two sentences at a time to anyone else, he became like a therapist to me.
Right now, I didn’t appreciate being handled. He’d always done it surreptitiously, without me catching on to where he was leading me. I’d gotten better at reading him over the years but my head was so far gone over where Waverley was, I’d missed it this time.
“I haven’t seen it in you for years, but I see it now. You’re about to burst out of your skin. It would have been misguided had you stayed with War trying to find answers.”
That pulled me up short. As much as it pissed me off, Ballistic was right. I was on the verge of losing it. Connor potentially dead, Waverley having God knew what done to her, it was tearing me apart inside, only my training with Ballistic was keeping it off my face.
If they put me in a room with one of the Kingsmen right now, I’d kill him with my bare hands. Which begged the question, why did he bring me here? The assholes were just waiting for me like sitting ducks and he’d said he didn’t want them dead.
“You figure there is more King isn’t telling you.”
I frowned at him as he pushed away from the wall and took a few steps towards me.
“There is,” he said.
“What?”
“He has no intention of telling War, or you, what that is.”
“Why? If it helps find Waverley, or answers the questions over why the fuck they have taken her?”
“King is more than capable of dealing with this, without dredging up old shit.”
“That is bullshit!” I shouted.
“That is your President,” Ballistic’s tone didn’t change, even though I was getting louder. “And nothing about the past will help find her now.”
“How do you know that?” I run my hands through my hair. “What if something he knows is the reason why she’s gone and can help get her back.”
“When has King ever done anything he didn’t think through, knowing all the angles and having a plan?”
“This is different,” I shook my head, turning away from him.
“Some things he keeps close to his chest. There are things none of us know locked away in that head of his. I’ve told you before, he does what he thinks is best for the club, he always will, and this situation is not normal. War is his son first. He’s doing it to protect him.”
“You’re right, this situation is not normal. Which makes it even more important to tell him the truth. To tell me the truth so I can find her!” I scream in his face. He isn’t fazed and that pisses me off even more.
“These guys don’t know a thing,” he told me, like I hadn’t just stepped up to him.
“So what the fuck is the point of this? You want me to take my shit out on one of them?”
“No,” he looked at me like I was stupid. “We need to find the officers. And I happen to know where one of them is.”
“Are you kidding me?” my mouth dropped open.
“Let’s go.” He left the room. All I could do was follow.
Passaic County was just under an hour’s drive from Sussex and as much as it killed me to be wasting even more time, leaving Waverley with those bastards, it was a lead and we had to follow it.
Ballistic told Hammer and the others to keep questioning the Kingsmen but they were not to kill anyone else. He hadn’t bothered calling King to let him know what he was planning, which made me wonder if King knew Ballistic could find one of the Kingsmen officers.
Ballistic had never been shy about opening up on the roads, so when I sped ahead, he kept up with me without complaint. It was a straight shoot down NJ-23 to Haskell, the small Borough we were headed to. I only deferred to Ballistic when we hit the town and he had to lead the way.
He drove us into a small cul-de-sac of one story houses that were on the outskirts of town, surrounded by fields and dead-ended at a landscaping company building, with a huge parking lot in front of it. Everything was surrounded by trees and bushes, making the place seem secluded and private.
The house we pulled up to was brick built, with a low roof, a long driveway and large plot of grass.
There was a garage with a brand-new Ford Tourneo parked in front.
The neighbors were close but separated, again by heavy bushes.
It seemed the kind of place you wanted to go to hide, not the kind of place an officer of an MC would live.
We stopped by the mailbox and got off our bikes. Ballistic turned to me as I approached him. “I’m not sure how this is gonna go down but keep a lid on things, we don’t want anything getting out of hand.”
“Are you serious? These people have been threatening our club for months, they almost killed Connor. Twice.”
“Just trust me,” he said, striding up the driveway.