Chapter Ten
He was already half-dressed—he'd been sleeping light since the motel, one ear tuned to the compound's rhythms—when Hatchet's security system pinged his phone.
Four camera angles, all showing the same thing: a convoy rolling up the access road in the gray predawn light.
Three trucks, spaced fifty yards apart, headlights off.
And behind them, hanging back on the highway shoulder like a spider watching its web—the white-and-tan motor home with the satellite dish.
Fenton. Running command from the road again. Only this time, with no Jessup to lead the charge, the logistics man had to drive his own assault.
Striker pulled on his boots, grabbed the shotgun leaning against his nightstand, and crossed the hallway in four strides. He hammered on Shadow's door without breaking stride.
"Company. Dawn assault. Full crew on the access road, motor home on the highway."
Shadow's door opened before Striker finished the sentence. The VP was shirtless, a pistol already in his hand, his crooked nose and dark eyes sharp with the instant alertness of a man who'd spent half his life waking up to trouble.
"How many?"
"Three trucks. Call it twelve men, maybe more." Striker grinned.
Shadow looked at the grin and shook his head. "You're a sick man, brother."
"I'm a happy man. There's a difference."
The compound woke up in sixty seconds. Striker had drilled this—the alarm protocol, the positions, the response.
Hatchet hit the compound-wide alert from his room, a single long blast on the air horn that cut through every wall and window.
Brothers poured out of their quarters pulling on cuts and grabbing weapons from the clubhouse rack like a machine engaging its gears.
Striker made the yard in time to see Teagan sprinting for the corral.
She was barefoot, wearing his shirt—the one she'd stolen along with his pillow three nights ago—and she didn't hesitate.
She vaulted the corral fence, grabbed Ginger's lead rope, and hauled the mare out of the stall.
The horse was wide-eyed, ears pinned at the air horn's echo, but Teagan had her by the halter and was talking low and fast, her free hand on the mare's neck.
"Behind the garage!" Striker shouted across the yard.
She was already moving. She led Ginger around the garage's far side, putting the building's cinder-block wall between the horse and the gate. Striker watched her tie the mare to a support beam, check the knot, check it again—then turn and run for the clubhouse.
She came back out fifteen seconds later with a rifle from the rack and a handful of shells she was feeding into the magazine as she jogged.
Something hot and fierce surged through Striker's chest. Not the time. He shoved it down and turned to the gate.
"Rascal! Six brothers on me. Frontal through the gate. Hatchet, you've got the east flank—" He pointed to the garage roof. "Shadow, west side, keep them off the fence. Ridge, cover the back in case they try to loop around."
"And the motor home?" Shadow called.
Striker racked his shotgun. "That one's mine."
The first truck hit the compound gate at speed.
Chain-link buckled and screamed. The gate tore off its track and folded under the truck's brush guard like aluminum foil, dragging across the gravel in a shower of sparks. The truck slewed sideways, men already bailing out of the cab and bed before it stopped sliding.
The second truck came through the gap right behind it. The third braked outside, disgorging men who fanned out toward the fence line.
Striker counted. Twelve. Maybe thirteen. Armed with pistols, shotguns, a couple of hunting rifles. Not soldiers—hired muscle, ex-cons, men who'd been recruited from halfway houses and old prison contacts. Men who could intimidate vendors and hurt horses.
Men who had never in their lives faced what was about to happen to them.
"Go!" Striker roared, and went through the ruined gate like he'd been launched.
Rascal was on his left. Six brothers fanned behind them.
They hit the lead truck's crew before the dust settled—Striker closing the distance in a dead sprint, shotgun booming twice into the knot of men scrambling for cover behind the truck bed.
One went down screaming. Another dove flat.
Rascal vaulted the truck's tailgate and dropped into the bed feet-first, driving his boot into a man's face and firing point-blank into a second who swung a rifle toward him.
The yard became a brawl.
Striker let the shotgun swing on its sling and pulled the .
45 from his waistband. A man rushed him from behind the second truck—big, fast, swinging a tire iron.
Striker sidestepped, caught the iron on his forearm hard enough to numb his hand, and put two rounds into the man's chest at contact distance.
The man folded. Striker stepped over him.
Muzzle flashes from the garage roof—Hatchet's team pouring fire into the crew trying to flank through the east fence. Two men dropped. A third stumbled backward through the gate and ran for the highway.
From the west side, Shadow's team engaged three men who'd made it over the fence with bolt cutters. Striker heard the distinctive crack of Shadow's revolver—one, two, three measured shots—and then silence from that direction.
The yard was chaos. Dust and gun smoke and the clash of bodies.
A brother named Colt was wrestling a man twice his size into the gravel.
Dawson had pinned another against the clubhouse wall.
Rascal moved through the fight like a scythe, pale eyes flat and empty, every motion ending with someone on the ground.
Striker scanned for Teagan.
There. Braced against the garage wall near the corner, rifle shouldered, covering the gap between the garage and the fence.
A man rounded the corner at a run—headed for the back of the building, headed for the horse—and Teagan fired.
The round caught him in the thigh and dropped him spinning into the gravel.
He tried to crawl. She chambered another round and aimed at his head.
"Move again," she said. "Please."
He didn't move.
Striker's grin was savage. He turned from the yard and ran.
The motor home was parked on the highway shoulder three hundred yards from the compound gate, engine idling, satellite dish humming.
Fenton's rolling command post—the nerve center that coordinated every move Pollard's crew made.
Through the windshield, Striker could see the glow of screens and the shadow of a man hunched over a radio.
He covered the distance at a flat sprint, gravel turning to asphalt under his boots, the sounds of the brawl fading behind him. The motor home's side door was locked. Striker didn't slow down. He grabbed the handle, braced his boot against the chassis, and ripped.
The latch tore out of the aluminum frame with a shriek of bending metal. The door swung wide, and Striker was inside.
Fenton spun from the driver's seat—a wiry man in his late forties, reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, a radio in one hand and a road atlas covered in handwritten notes spread across the console.
He didn't look like a man who ran a criminal empire's logistics.
He looked like an accountant who'd made a series of very bad decisions.
He reached for a pistol on the passenger seat.
Striker closed the distance in two steps, slapped the pistol across the cab, and grabbed Fenton by the back of his neck. The man yelped—a high, thin sound, the sound of a man who'd always had muscle between himself and the violence.
No muscle left. No Jessup. No crew. Just Fenton and the dashboard and Striker's hand on the back of his skull.
"You sent men to wire a horse's legs." Striker's voice was calm. Almost conversational. "You sent men to pour bleach in a water trough. You ran a racket that crippled animals and ruined people, and you never touched a single victim yourself."
Fenton's glasses fell off his face. "I can—I can give you Pollard. Everything. The money, the camps, the—"
"I know where Pollard is." Striker tightened his grip. "I don't need you for that."
"Please—"
"You never touched a victim." Striker pulled him forward. "Let me fix that."
He drove Fenton's face into the dashboard.
The crack of bone against plastic was sharp and final. Fenton's body spasmed once, went rigid, then went limp. Striker held him there for a beat—pressed against the cracked dashboard, the radio still squawking in his hand, the road atlas crumpling under his weight—then released.
Fenton slid sideways and didn't move again.
Striker straightened. He picked up the road atlas, the radio, a laptop bag wedged under the passenger seat. Intel. Fenton's whole operation in one bag—schedules, routes, contacts, the roadmap of a racket that had terrorized five counties.
He stepped out of the motor home and walked back toward the compound.
The yard was quieting. Gun smoke drifted in the morning air. Brothers were zip-tying the men who were still breathing and dragging the ones who weren't toward the truck beds. Four dead. The rest broken, bleeding, finished.
Teagan was behind the garage. She had the rifle slung on her shoulder and both hands on Ginger, running her palms down the mare's legs with the focused intensity that Striker had learned meant she was checking for damage she couldn't afford to find.
The horse stood calm beneath her hands, ears pricked toward the commotion in the yard but body relaxed.
Striker stopped at the corner of the garage and watched her.
She looked up. Saw the blood on his knuckles. Saw the laptop bag over his shoulder. Saw his face and read everything on it.
"Fenton?" she asked.
"Done."
Her eyes held his. She didn't flinch. Didn't look away. Just nodded—one sharp dip of her chin—and went back to checking her horse.
Striker leaned against the garage wall and let the adrenaline drain. The motor home was seized. Fenton was dead. Pollard's logistics, his command structure, his ability to coordinate—all of it gone in a single dawn assault that the man hadn't even had the spine to attend.
Shadow appeared around the corner, blood on his shirt and that sharp grin cutting across his face. He looked at Striker, at the laptop bag, at Teagan crouched by her horse with a rifle on her back.
"Hell of a morning, brother."
Striker looked at Teagan's hands on her mare's legs—steady, sure, checking every tendon and bone the way she always did, the way she always would—and felt something settle in his chest that had nothing to do with the fight.
"Yeah," he said. "It was."