CHAPTER 18
SETTLING SCORES
Moose resurfaced the same way he'd disappeared — without warning, without explanation, a single message relayed through Hamid that simply read *found who did it.
Time to move.* Whatever had kept him silent through the weeks of chaos went unaddressed, and Varnell found he didn't have the energy left to demand answers he suspected wouldn't satisfy him even if given.
"We found the crew that hit us," Moose said, meeting them in a stripped-down apartment that felt more like a war room than any of their previous meeting spots, the diner diplomacy of earlier chapters long since abandoned for something colder.
"Still in the tristate. Got sloppy, stayed local thinking the heat would die down faster than it has. "
"Who," Chucky J asked, voice flat, all business.
"Crew out of Elizabeth. Small, but they had help — somebody feeding them information they shouldn't have had access to.
" Moose's eyes flicked to Varnell and Chucky J both, something unreadable in the look that neither of them fully liked.
"We'll worry about the how later. Right now, we need to handle the who. "
They spent the following days tracking the crew's movements with a patience that felt almost clinical, Hamid's intelligence network doing the quiet work of narrowing down exactly where the people responsible for Rico's death had holed up — a stronghold on the edge of Elizabeth, a building that had clearly been fortified with exactly this kind of retaliation in mind.
"They know we coming," Hamid said, studying the layout they'd assembled. "Building's sealed tighter than it should be for a regular stash spot. They expecting us."
"Then we make sure they right to expect us," Moose said, something grim and final in his tone.
? ? ?
The night they moved on the building, Moose gathered them briefly before everything began, an unusual softness entering his voice that caught Varnell entirely off guard.
"Whatever happens tonight," Moose said, looking between Varnell and Chucky J both, "I want y'all to know — I'm proud of what you built. Both of you. Wasn't sure, at first, if either of you had what it took to go the distance. Y'all proved me wrong."
Varnell blinked, thrown by the sentiment, memory of Moose's cold arithmetic back in that Miami diner sitting uneasily alongside this sudden, unexpected warmth.
He didn't trust it fully, didn't know quite what to make of a man who could speak so mercilessly about his mortality one moment and so tenderly about his loyalty the next.
"Alright," Varnell said, unsure what else there was to say, shrugging off the strangeness of the moment rather than examining it further, too focused on what was coming to spend much thought on what it might mean.
? ? ?
The plan called for Varnell and Chucky J to hold position outside, covering the building's exterior while Hamid's people sealed off every exit but one, funneling whatever happened inside toward a single point Moose intended to control completely.
Varnell posted at his assigned corner, gun steady in hands that had grown far too familiar with the weight of one over these past months, adrenaline sharpening every sense into something almost painfully alert.
Moose moved with a calm that unsettled Varnell more than any visible rage would have — methodical, unhurried, lighting the first molotov cocktail with the same unbothered focus he brought to any ordinary transaction, and hurling it through a lower window with practiced precision.
The building caught fast, flame spreading through it with a speed that made clear this wasn't Moose's first time orchestrating something like this.
Screaming followed almost immediately, chaos erupting inside as the crew responsible for Rico's death scrambled toward whatever exit still seemed viable, funneled by Hamid's sealed doorways toward the single point Moose had left open — directly into Varnell and Chucky J's line of sight.
What followed happened fast and ugly, adrenaline collapsing time into something Varnell would struggle to fully piece back together afterward — bodies emerging from smoke and flame into gunfire that didn't relent until the doorway stood empty, the building's cries fading into the roar of fire and the distant, rapidly approaching wail of sirens.
Moose stood watching it all unfold with an eerie stillness, unmoved by the violence he'd set into motion, unmoved even by the sirens closing in, staring at the burning building like a man settling a debt he'd been owed for a long time rather than a man who'd just orchestrated mass death.
"Moose," Chucky J hissed, urgency finally breaking through, "we gotta move, now—"
Moose blinked, something clearing behind his eyes as if surfacing from somewhere far away, and nodded once, turning without another word to disappear into the dark, the same way he'd disappeared weeks before.
? ? ?
Varnell and Chucky J laid low for days after, holed up far from both Newark and the smoking wreckage of that building, the weight of what they'd participated in sitting heavier on Varnell than almost anything that had come before it.
He'd fought before, hurt people before, understood in some abstract sense the violence this life demanded — but nothing had prepared him for the particular horror of watching people burn and run and fall in the same breath, funneled toward death by his own hand among others.
"You good?" Chucky J asked quietly, the two of them sharing a cramped, borrowed room, neither having slept more than fragments since that night.
"I don't know what good means no more," Varnell admitted, staring at the ceiling, Rico's death and the building's screams tangled together in his memory into something he suspected would never fully untangle again. "Feel like I crossed something tonight I ain't never crossing back over."
Chucky J didn't offer easy comfort, didn't pretend the moment called for anything but honesty. "Yeah," he said quietly. "I know that feeling."
They lay in silence after that, two boys who'd started this journey believing they were building something worth the cost, now uncertain, in the aftermath of fire and gunfire and Moose's unsettling calm, exactly what that cost had already taken from them, and what more it still stood to take before whatever they'd started finally reached its end.