Chapter 19 #2
The doors rolled open for the entire row of units. I did a quick count. Eight units. Thirteen men.
Fuck. Me.
We all stared over at Jury and he made a face that clearly said, ‘well shit, my bad.’
“We really need to have a talk about keeping your mouth shut and not jinxing shit,” Warrant muttered.
“Bunch of superstitious bullshit,” I replied in a low tone as the men began to cluster together.
With three to one odds they weren’t going to need to use their damn guns.
And we were far enough back in the lot that it wasn’t likely whoever the attendant was up front was going to hear us.
The kid had been watching TV in the office when we strolled past. Not that we wanted his help.
What would he be able to do other than call the cops, which would make things worse in the long run.
“Sure, like you don’t have your own superstitions,” Warrant shot back.
He had me there. I had an entire routine down that I did before every big patch job.
Especially if it was in the field. If I didn’t do it, people died.
It was kind of like fuckers not washing their socks until the end of a football season for good luck, but less nasty.
Well, less nasty to me. There were plenty who would consider my ‘rituals’—if you wanted to call them that—worse than some socks that smelled like Fritos and funk.
Pulling out our knives, we watched as these bastards grabbed bats, crow bars, and two by fours out of the units.
I sighed. We weren’t going to let them win, and if that meant shooting every one of them, we would, but that was a last resort.
We didn’t want Owen or his deputies crawling all over this place any more than the Iron Circle did. It would fuck with our plans for them.
Getting tired of waiting, I muttered, “Let’s get this over with.”
“Do me a favor,” Warrant said, glancing over at me.
“What?”
“Pretend one of them hit Rae,” he said.
I turned my head and stared at him in anger and disbelief. “Why the fuck would you say something like that?”
“He wants you seeing red and ready to murder,” Rotor replied.
“I don’t need the extra motivation,” I told them.
“You and Jury take the seven on the left and we’ll take the six on the right,” Warrant ordered.
“Why do we get the extra?” Jury looked over at me. “It’s like the additional Chinese fortune cookie no one wants.”
“Because I just pissed Pyre off enough that he’s going to cut through the first couple like they’re butter,” Warrant told him. “It’s only fucking fair that you take the leftovers. Besides, it’s your fault that there’s so many of them.”
“Fine,” Jury muttered. He smacked me in the back. “He’s right. Picture death girl somewhere in one of those containers.”
“I’m going to beat your ass later,” I growled at him, but I moved forward like a man possessed. It didn’t matter that I knew Rae wasn’t here. They had it in my head now that these fuckers were a threat to her.
I raised my arm as the first guy I came to brought his two by four down in an arc.
I didn’t have time to avoid it, so I met the blow as high up as I could, taking some of the power out of it.
It still reverberated down my spine as the wood cracked against my ulna.
I was going to feel that for days to come.
But my right arm flashed out and the guy had several holes from where I plunged my knife in his body before he knew what the fuck was happening.
It was important to make the first one drop fast. The others would hesitate before bum rushing me. That hesitation would allow me to fight them one on one, versus being overwhelmed.
The nice thing about being a medic and getting into a fight?
You knew exactly where to stab a fucker to take him down with the least amount of effort on your part.
Especially when you didn’t care about casualties.
The body dropped at my feet. I moved onto my next target.
My eyes and focus were locked on them, though I paid enough attention that no one could come up behind me.
Tunnel vision was a bitch during a fight and that was how you fucking lost. We weren’t losing.
Sounds of fists hitting flesh, grunts, and short screams that were cut off early filled the air as we fought.
We needed to hurry. Someone was going to end up hearing this, or coming around the damn corner and catching an eyeful.
Or one of them would decide that quiet no longer mattered if they were losing and would pull a gun.
I wasn’t sure how the townspeople would react to seeing us fighting—or killing.
Most of them really liked having us here.
We protected them and our home, but seeing what we were capable of first-hand was a little different.
For them protection meant beating up rowdy out-of-towners, not mass slaughter of drug dealers.
I grunted as I took a bat to the side, simultaneously I swung my arm in an arc and embedded my blade into the soft flesh of a guy’s neck.
A quick twist ended his life as his friend rushed toward me.
I halted the downward momentum of the body and held him up, using him to block the crow bar the guy swung my way.
Two heavy thumps to the dead body sounded before I tossed it at the man with the bar.
His dead friend took him down to the ground because he had to weigh all of a buck twenty-five. “Wait, wait, wait!”
I didn’t wait.
I flicked my knife downward with as much force as I could and watched as it hit his jugular. I looked up and around, frowning when I realized there were no more shit heads for me to take my anger out on. “Where are the rest of them?”
“Scurried off like rats as soon as they realized that even though they outnumbered us they weren’t going to win,” Rotor said, tone heavy with disgust.
“Damn,” I sighed. “They’re going to warn the rest.”
“Pretty sure once none of them came back and they found all their drugs missing,” Warrant said, poking his head into one of the units, “they’d have figured it out.”
“I guess that is a dead giveaway.” I walked in after him and searched the area. There were enough drugs in here to have made it worth it to check, but even better was all the equipment. We were going to end up taking a chunk out of Dolan’s revenue with this haul.
“Jury, call Cypher and get the club over here to help us pack all this up,” Warrant called out.
We went through each unit as we waited, doing a rough calculation of how much money Dolan was going to lose between equipment and drugs. If killing his brother and the last crew wasn’t enough to bring him out of hiding, this should be.
I unwound a hose I found at the end of the units. Once we loaded the bodies into one of the vehicles our brothers would bring, I’d get rid of the evidence. Frowning at how much blood was soaking into the porous concrete, I grabbed my cell. “Hey Prez.”
“Hear you guys ran into some trouble,” Cypher said.
I snorted. “Barely broke a sweat. Can you send one of the guys down to the armory for me before heading over?”
“Yeah, sure. What do you need?”
“The entire store of Hydrogen Peroxide I have down there.”
“Hydrogen… Someone get hurt?”
“No. It’s for getting the blood stains off this concrete. Don’t need the storage unit owner calling Owen out here to investigate when he sees it all.”
“Good point. I’ll get it done.”
“Thanks.” I ended the call and stretched out my neck.
The fury from the fight was starting to cool inside me and now I was starting to feel the pain from the places I’d been hit.
It wouldn’t take long for that to fade. At least now we were able to move forward against the Iron Circle.
That was going to make my brothers happy.