8. Crash
CRASH
My brothers are already at Church when I arrive.
Duke is at the long table with his laptop open and his phone face-up beside it. Joker leans over his shoulder, a whiskey in his hand that he hasn’t touched.
“Talk,” I say.
“Shipment rolled out at nine, on schedule.” Duke turns the laptop toward me. “Driver checked in at the county line. After that, nothing.”
“Was Bear driving?” I ask.
Duke nods. “Buyer sat at the drop for an hour, then started blowing up my phone. I’ve called the driver eleven times.”
“The van?”
“Found it.” Joker sets the whiskey down without drinking it. “Jinx ran the route with a prospect. Van is in the ditch off Oak Road, doors open, cargo gone. Bear was face down in the dirt twenty feet off. Breathing. Barely. They’re bringing him in to Doc now.”
Thank fuck he’s alive.
“Cameras,” I say.
Joker is already pulling his own laptop across the table. He scrubs through gray-green footage at triple speed from the cameras we have set up around checkpoints.
Then he stops.
At eleven forty-one, high beams swing across a wall of corrugated metal. Then bikes. Five of them, single file, riding dark until the last hundred yards.
Duke leans in. “That’s the old copper mine. We put a cam on that turnoff just three months ago.”
The mine has been dead longer than I’ve been alive. A big metal processing shed, some rusted-out equipment, and one dead-end road in and out. A mile inside our eastern border.
“That’s our shipment.” I watch two men haul a crate off a flatbed trailer, and the crown stenciled on the side catches the beams for half a second. Ours. Stacked in a building on Kings’ territory.
All three of the guys in the room are looking at me.
We warned the Prez of the Crimson Warriors that if any of his guys crosses into our territory, we’ll declare war. Nitro’s men did a lot worse than that.
“Get Jinx. The four of us will check out the mine,” I say.
Then I list off the other brothers who will join us.
“I want guns sitting on that access road in case anybody else shows up. Trapper follows us out with the box truck. If our shipment is in that building, it’s coming home.
The women and kids come to the clubhouse.
Anybody not coming with us is on guard duty. ”
We kill the engines a mile out and walk in.
The desert at two in the morning is cold and dead quiet. The four of us spread out, boots silent on the hard dirt, the old shed a black shape ahead of us. Armed reinforcements are sitting dark on the road behind us.
There are five bikes parked behind the shed, the flatbed trailer next to them, and through a gap in the metal wall, a battery-operated lantern lights our crates.
Voices are laughing from inside.
I pull the guys in close and keep it to a whisper. “Duke, Joker—the back. Jinx, you’re with me. Fast and quiet.”
We move.
The side door isn’t even shut. That’s how comfortable they are on our territory. It’s the last comfortable thing that happens to them.
I put my boot through the door, and the whole building turns into noise.
It happens fast. These things always do. Two of them are dead before they’re off the crates they’re sitting on. Bullets tear through the wall a foot from my head, and shards of metal sting my cheek.
Jinx handles the shooter. Dead. The fourth runs for the door and doesn’t make it.
And the fifth comes out of a back room nobody had gotten to yet, and his pistol is level with my eyes from four feet away. No reason on earth for him to miss.
People say your life flashes before your eyes. Mine doesn’t. I get one picture.
I told Cassidy I wanted morning afters with her. The small stuff. The in-between. And that’s it.
I never got the morning after.
The shot is so close to my ear, the world rings white.
The Warrior, pointing the gun at me, drops, and Jinx is standing there with his arm out straight and smoke crawling off the muzzle.
“Clear,” Duke calls.
“Clear,” Joker says.
Five down. None of them ours. My legs hold me up out of habit more than anything.
Jinx lowers his arm. “You good, VP?”
“You’re never buying your own beer again,” I tell him. “I’ve got it covered.”
Back at the clubhouse, I stop at the infirmary door. Bear is lying on the cot, face swollen into something unrecognizable.
Doc looks up from his chair beside him. “He’ll wake up ugly,” Doc says. “But he’ll wake up.”
Good enough.
The guys are already around the table in Church when I walk in. Duke has a ledger open in front of him.
“Every crate accounted for,” he says. “Shipment’s locked in the back room until we reschedule with the buyer.”
“And the Warriors?”
“Down the shaft.” Joker drops into his chair. “That hole goes deeper than anybody ever measured. Bikes are stripped for parts by the weekend. There’s nothing at that mine but a dead mine.”
“Nitro will know, anyway,” Duke says.
“Five of his riders don’t come home? He’ll know exactly what it means.” I take the seat at the head of the table. “And we’re not going to wait for him to come for us. We’re done with this shit.”
Jinx leans against the wall, arms folded. “Trapper was a real asset tonight. He’s as loyal as they come.”
I’m thinking the same thing. “Noted.”
Church runs for forty minutes. Then I call Saber.
Duke has been keeping him updated, but he needs to know we’re escalating our retaliation.
He listens to all of it without interrupting once. When I finish, the line stays quiet long enough that I check the screen.
“You made the right call. All of it,” he says. “We’re already on the road. We’ll push through the night. Be home sometime tomorrow.”
Tomorrow. They’re hundreds of miles out. Even riding hard, that’s late afternoon at best.
“Cass is fine,” I say. He didn’t ask, but I figure he’d want to know.
“I know,” he responds. “I trust you to protect her.”
He hangs up, and I sit there alone in Church for a minute with that one—the trust he put in me.
Then I climb the stairs.
Her door’s locked.
Good girl.
I knock twice, and her feet cross the floor, and the lock turns.
She cracks open the door. She’s still in the same T-shirt and shorts, hair flat on one side.
Her eyes roam over me, top to bottom—the dust on my jeans, the split knuckles, the scratch dried on my cheek. She grew up in this life. She does the math without a sound.
She steps aside and locks the door behind me.
“Is everything good?” she asks.
“Not really.” I’m not going to lie to her. “It’s bad, and your brother’s on his way home.”
She nods but doesn’t push for more information.
“But,” I say, sitting down on the edge of her bed and pulling at my bootlaces, “I’m still getting my morning after.”
She watches me work the second boot off, and the corner of her mouth gives her away.
“It’s four a.m. We didn’t spend the night together.”
“It’s after midnight. Still counts.”
“What if we get caught?” She grabs my hand, turning it over and examining it. “And you’re covered in dirt.”
“You’re stalling.” I squeeze her hand. “Saber probably won’t be home until late afternoon. And I’ll personally wash your sheets.”
She bites down on her lower lip, smiles, and then lies down to pull the blanket open. I lie down in my jeans with my gun on her nightstand, and she fits herself along my side, head on my shoulder, her hand flat over the middle of me like she’s checking I’m all in one piece.
I am. Thanks to Jinx.
I had a gun in my face tonight, and the only thing in my head was this. This exact thing.
The war is here.
And after that’s handled, there’s going to be a second war when I tell Saber I want to make Cassidy my Old Lady.
Tomorrow’s problems.
I pull her in tighter and stay.