Chapter 28
Bolo
Iran in, shotgun fitted against my shoulder.
Two assholes popped up off the couch in front of us.
It took me half a second to assess the room.
Smelled like weed, which didn’t mean anything on its own.
The two guys, tatted up the neck and face.
Gang tats. Two hand guns on the table next to… a stack of cash. Bingo.
They were already diving for the weapons. Civilians or not, they weren’t planning to stand by and let us barge in. These weren’t upstanding men whose night we just ruined.
“Fucking Saint’s Outlaws,” one of the men barked.
Well, they definitely knew who we were—though I had no idea how, maybe we were the only group ballsy enough to pull a stunt like this—which made them Collective. And targets.
I fired, pumped, and fired again. The rounds hit with a satisfying thump to each of their chests, sending them hurtling backwards over the table and tumbling across the floor.
Fuck I loved these rounds. I swept to my right to check the next room.
The kitchen. Empty. I heard two sets of two shots.
Relay had taken care of them. I moved to the bedroom.
“Empty,” I called out. I could hear gunfire from the other end of the building. The surprise was gone, now the real fun began. I slung the shotgun behind me and drew my pistol, letting Relay lead us out of here. The shitheads would start pouring out of the apartments into the hallway.
We’d take them out in the open, then continue sweeping the rooms. Strike and Flir were already heading up the stairs.
They’d cover the top floor. In a perfect world we’d have a third team to mow through the other hallways and guard the stairs, but we simply didn’t have the manpower.
Not a problem. Just meant more action for us.
The dinging of the elevator was our only warning before the doors slid open. Relay swung his rifle at the opening, eliciting ear piercing shrieks from the women inside. They cowered away from him, holding onto each other as they watched us with wide eyes.
I grabbed the barrel of the rifle and shoved it down. “Sorry, ladies,” I told them.
“Get the hell out of here,” Relay growled when they just stood, frozen. He jerked his head to accentuate the order.
They scrambled out of the elevator, their heels clacking on the tile floor. “What the hell is going on?” one asked.
“I don’t know, but they’re kind of hot…”
“Eliza! They’re holding guns. That’s not hot. Besides, you can’t even see their faces,” the first girl snapped.
“I can see their bodies,” Eliza countered, smiling at Relay.
The looks on her other friends’ faces said they sort of agreed with her assessment.
I grinned, but it slipped off my face as a door banged open. We’d been quiet out here for too long and people were starting to come investigate. Bullets hit sheet rock, peppering it over us as we ducked back into the open apartment door.
The girls screamed again and dashed out of the building. Thank fuck. My ears couldn’t take much more.
“We’re not going to have much time before someone starts calling the cops,” Relay gritted out as more gunfire spewed in our direction.
“I know.” I waited for a break in the shooting, then ran across the hallway and slammed into the door adjacent to the first apartment we’d come to. It gave way like it was made of cardboard. Loser ass contractors had used the cheapest fucking materials to build this place.
My pistol was already in my hand and I shot the man who came out of the back hallway pointing his own gun in my direction.
We were having to make split second decisions on whether to shoot or not.
It was a good thing we were fucking professionals.
Reminded me of the drills they used to put us through back in the day, when we were still in the military.
They set up a screen with scenarios like this and a plastic gun with a sensor in it.
Anytime you pulled the trigger it counted it as a kill.
You had to decide whether the people coming at you were shitbags, innocent people needing protection, or whether the situation was too hazardous for you to engage the threat.
I loved doing those drills. We’d had one guy who was terrible at it.
He’d ended up shooting a mall full of civilians.
He’d eventually been washed out of boot camp—not an easy thing to do in the military.
They’d honestly take just about anyone and just kept cycling you back through until you passed.
This fucker was so bad at decision making—not to mention his qualification scores on the gun range were abysmal—that when he’d gone through with us it’d been his fifth time.
He was done after that. Couldn’t say I blamed them.
You couldn’t unleash someone like that on any population.
I cleared the rest of the apartment then went back to the door. Relay had already taken out the three fuckers shooting from the end of the hall.
The silence was occasionally broken by gunfire from above us. “You ready?” I asked.
He nodded, so I holstered my nine mil and set the shotgun at my shoulder. If they were going to hide in these apartments like roaches instead of coming out to face us, we were going to take the fight to them. It just meant I had to go in with non-lethal force once more.
I wasn’t sure how much time passed as I kicked open doors and we cleared out apartments. Any citizens we found we sent out the back door into the parking lot.
“Last door,” I muttered. “Ready?”
“Go.”
Fuck. They were everywhere. I shoved my shotgun behind me, letting it dangle from the sling and pulled my pistol as I moved out of the way.
There were at least ten guys in this place.
It was a bigger apartment than the others, like they’d made the other apartments smaller to build this room into a larger space.
There wasn’t any furniture in here. Just tables with machines that were whirring and clacking.
And duffel bags. They lined the fucking walls, stacked on one another.
There were so many my damn eyes nearly crossed.
One of Relay’s rounds ricocheted and hit one of the bags, sending money spewing out of it.
I grunted as a bullet grazed my arm before embedding in the wall behind me. They’d been ready for us, listening to us coming closer and closer.
The window to Relay’s left exploded inward and OD came crashing into the room, followed by Merc and Drifter. It didn’t take long after that to mop up the fuckers shooting at us.
I looked over at them. “Talk about a fucking dramatic entrance.”
“Why use the door when you can go through a window?” OD asked with a grin.
“You took my damn kills,” Relay muttered.
“You needed the help,” Merc grunted.
“The fuck I did. You owe me now.”
“If you guys are here, that means we’ve been here too damn long,” I told them. “We need to get out of here.”
“Crowd outside is getting antsy,” Drifter said in agreement as he bent to look outside the broken window. “Couple are on their phones.”
“Shit,” OD muttered. “Drifter-”
“Upstairs is cleared,” Strike said as he walked into the apartment.
Flir’s eyes lit up when he saw the room. “Well, damn. That’s what they’re doing here.”
“What?” Relay asked with a scowl.
“Later,” OD said, shaking his head. “Drifter, Flir, go grab the SUVs, park them out in front of us, close as you can.”
They climbed out the busted windows and ran for the parking lot. The windows had some kind of privacy film put over them, before they’d been shattered, to make sure none of the neighbors could see what The Collective was up to when they used the apartment.
“Grab the bags,” OD said.
“And the machines,” Strike added. “We’re taking it all.”
We formed a human chain to pass the bags to the windows then started handing them out to Flir and Drifter to shove into the SUVs.
“Fucking jackpot!”
I glanced over my shoulder toward the shout from one of the back rooms. Relay wasn’t in here with us. That had definitely been his voice.
“Go see what he found,” OD told me. “We’ll finish this up.”
I trotted back to one of the back rooms and a grin stretched over my face when I saw what my brother had found.
There were guns fucking everywhere. I picked up a three-oh-eight that was leaning against the wall.
Serial number was scratched off. I considered calling dibs, but there was a whole stack of them.
These fuckers had been well equipped to protect their money, they just weren’t as well trained as we were and hadn’t stood a chance. Their loss was our gain.
“Here.” Relay tossed me a couple bags. We quickly loaded everything into them and carried them out to the others.
“Our lucky day,” I told OD with a grin.
“Why doesn’t it surprise me that you two are more geeked over some guns than all that cash?” Merc asked with a wry smile.
“Whatever. You’re going to cream your pants seeing some of this shit,” Relay told OD. “You’re not selling them in your fucking shop though. These are ours. Fair and square.”
“Serial numbers are scratched off anyway,” I told them.
“Let’s get out of here,” OD said.
We all paused as we started to hear sirens.
The fact that we’d already been here as long as we had and the cops hadn’t shown yet was a minor miracle.
It meant that the people who’d been forced out of their apartments hadn’t called the cops right away.
Either they had their own skeletons in the closet and didn’t want law enforcement here, or they’d been too scared and didn’t know what to do.
It was amazing how long a crowd of people would stay inactive when there was an emergency.
If someone took action and started directing the others, they’d all pitch in to help.
But if no one took that leadership role?
They’d just stand there. It was called the Bystander Effect and we’d seen more than our fair share of it play out in real time.
We’d gotten lucky that there wasn’t a single hero in the bunch out there. Or a fucking Karen. They were the worst and caused the most trouble.
“Yup,” Strike said with a nod. “That’s our cue to get the fuck out of here.”
“What about all the bodies?” Relay asked.
“We have to leave them. There’s so many fuckers here it’s going to take the cops time to shift through and figure out who they are,” OD replied.
“And all they’re going to find is that these assholes were a bunch of criminals,” I added.
We were smart enough to not only have our masks on, but gloves as well.
We weren’t leaving shit behind for the cops to find.
We’d taken the SUVs’ and motorcycles’ plates off when we’d gotten here.
We’d put them back on a few miles up the road so we didn’t get pulled over for some stupid ass traffic violation.
“Let’s go,” OD called, vaulting back through the window with the same enthusiasm as he came through it.
“We’re going to have to ride double,” Merc muttered. “Those SUVs are packed to the top.”
There’d been at least two hundred duffel bags, but we couldn’t fit that many.
We managed to get around seventy-five jammed in the SUVs and that was utilizing every space available except the driver’s seat.
We’d cut down the load out time by grabbing a couple at a time, but it’d still taken us at least twenty minutes to get everything stuffed into the cages.
“What do we do with the rest?” I asked, nodding toward the remaining bags. There were probably more than one hundred duffels left. I didn’t want to leave a fucking dollar bill behind for The Collective.
“We can’t burn it,” OD added. “Too many civilians are living here. I’m not destroying their homes and possessions for this.”
“Grab all those jugs,” Flir said, pointing into the corner of the main room.
Frowning, we did as he said and brought them over to where the stacked duffels were. I looked down at the labels. “What is this shit?”
“Bleaching agents, solvents, and ink,” Flir said. He pointed at the other guys. “Knock the bags down so they’re not stacked so high. Then start dumping all this over them. Make sure you cover each bag with something. It’ll destroy the remaining bills we have to leave behind.”
It didn’t take us too long to destroy an amount of money that made my damn head spin.
Didn’t matter that it was likely counterfeit.
It looked real enough. Merc shook his head in disappointment as he opened up the last bag, poured ink inside, zipped it back up, then shook it around to distribute the liquid.
We’d finally gotten a break. It wasn’t the end of this, but this was a hard blow for the two factions of The Collective that were after us. We had a big stash of their money and guns and had destroyed the rest. Not to mention we took the machines they probably used to print more.
I grinned as we booked it back to our bikes and took off while people watched us with their mouths hanging open and their phones raised.
We were probably already streaming all over social media, but there wasn’t anything to distinguish us by.
Most of our bikes were black and looked like any other Harleys out there.
Relay would have to use his back-up bike for a bit, ‘til shit died down because his had a custom paint job, but that was fine.
The adrenaline pumped through my system as my bike started up with a roar. It wasn’t going to be long before we had The Collective dismantled and destroyed.