Chapter Ten
The call came at seven-fourteen AM, and Crossroad knew from the first word that Clint Roby was smarter than Wade Sims had ever been.
Two targets. Two roads. One clock.
Crossroad was already moving, boots hitting the compound floor as he crossed from his room to the garage, his mind splitting the problem the way he'd split freight routes for twelve years—distance, time, terrain, which load reaches which destination first.
"How many on the supply run?"
"Levee's got three brothers. They're pinned behind an overturned truck at the Sunflower River bridge. At least six Kings bikes blocking both ends."
"And Greenville?"
"Four Kings hit the hardware store. Owner's barricaded. Two of our prospects are holding the front but they're outgunned."
Two fronts. Roby was testing whether the Destroyers could fight a road war on split ground—applying the same distribution logic he used to move meth through three counties. Multiple routes, simultaneous delivery, overwhelm the system's capacity to respond.
It was smart. It was disciplined. And it told Crossroad exactly who was running this.
Not Darnell Price. Price was muscle and menace, a prison boss who led from the front because he didn't trust anyone else to hit hard enough. This was logistics. This was a man who moved product through networks thinking he could move violence the same way.
Roby didn't understand the difference between a supply chain and a war.
Supply chains followed the most efficient route. War followed the route your enemy didn't expect.
"Rally every brother at the compound," Crossroad said, already in the garage, already pulling his road map from the saddlebag. "Everyone. Now."
"We split to cover both—"
"We don't split." Crossroad spread the map on the workbench, his finger tracing the line he'd driven a thousand times. "That's what Roby wants. He wants us to divide our force, cover both targets, arrive thin at each one. We're not playing his game."
"Then Levee's crew—"
"Gets saved first. Because Roby's not at the hardware store.
" Crossroad tapped the map. "He's on the supply run.
The Greenville hit is the distraction—four riders making noise, drawing attention west. The real force is at Sunflower River, because that's where Roby can do the most damage with the least exposure.
A bridge ambush on a county road with no witnesses. That's a logistics man's move."
Silence on the line. Then Outlaw said, "How do you know?"
"Because Sims would have led the bigger assault himself.
Roby leads from the operations center—he'll be where the tactical advantage is, not where the fighting's loudest." Crossroad grabbed his helmet.
"There's a cut-through off Old Highway 49W that comes out behind the Sunflower River bridge.
Gravel road, runs through the Hodge cotton property.
Nobody uses it because it floods in spring, but it's been dry for six weeks. "
"Nobody knows that road."
"I know that road. I hauled a load of cottonseed down it when I was seventeen because the bridge was out on the county route.
" He headed for his bike. "We hit the supply-run ambush from behind with full force, break it in sixty seconds, then swing the whole formation west to Greenville before Roby's distraction team knows we're coming. "
"That's forty miles between targets."
"Not if you take my route. Twenty-six miles, no intersections, no stops, and I can run it in nineteen minutes."
The brothers assembled in the lot with the speed of men who'd been riding under the same Road Captain for years and trusted his routes the way they trusted their engines. Hollow racked his shotgun without expression. Burial checked his weapon with the calm of a man intimate with endings.
Crossroad mounted his bike and felt the engine settle beneath him—that familiar vibration, the machine ready to move, the road waiting.
Grace appeared at the compound door.
She was covered in flour. Three-thirty AM start, biscuits for the brothers, the kitchen that was hers now.
She stood in the doorway with dough on her hands and steel in her eyes, and she didn't say be careful or come back to me because she'd never been a woman who wasted words on things that should be obvious.
"I'll have food ready when you get back," she said. "Don't be late."
Crossroad held her gaze for one second. Let himself see her—flour in her hair, bare feet on concrete, the woman who'd taught him what standing still felt like.
"Yes, ma'am."
He led the formation out of the compound at speed, twelve bikes in tight formation eating up the highway south toward Indianola. The morning heat was already building, the air shimmering over the blacktop, cotton fields stretching flat and endless on both sides.
He took the Highway 49W exit and then the turn that wasn't a turn—a gap in the tree line that looked like nothing unless you'd driven it before, a gravel road that cut through cotton land and emerged behind the Sunflower River bridge like a back door nobody remembered existed.
The brothers followed without hesitation. Through the trees, through the dust, through a mile of gravel that rattled their teeth and threw dirt into the morning sky.
They hit the bridge from behind.
Six Kings bikes were arranged in a blocking pattern across both ends of the bridge, their riders crouched behind the overturned truck they'd used to stop Levee's supply run. Clean ambush—good sight lines, controlled approaches, the kind of setup a logistics man would design.
Except the logistics man hadn't accounted for a gravel road through the Hodge property that put twelve Destroyer bikes at his back.
Crossroad fired first.
The shot took the nearest King off his bike, and then the bridge erupted.
Brothers poured through the gap between the tree line and the bridge abutment, hitting the ambush force from the one direction they hadn't covered.
Levee's crew, pinned for twenty minutes behind the overturned truck, heard the Destroyer engines and opened up from the front.
The Kings were caught between anvil and hammer.
Crossroad drove through the chaos with the focus that had kept him alive on a thousand bad roads—reading the fight the way he read traffic, finding the gaps, anticipating the moves.
A King swung a shotgun toward Hollow and Crossroad put two rounds into his chest before the barrel came level.
Another tried to run his bike through the Destroyer line and Burial clotheslined him off the seat with an arm that moved like a cemetery gate swinging shut.
And there—behind the overturned truck, directing his men with sharp gestures and a calm that looked wrong in the middle of a firefight—Clint Roby.
The logistics man was trying to reorganize.
Crossroad could see it in the way he moved, pulling riders back, pointing toward the south end of the bridge where a gap was forming in the Destroyer line.
Roby was reading the fight like a supply problem—identifying the bottleneck, rerouting resources, looking for an alternate delivery path.
Crossroad cut off the path.
He drove his bike between two fallen Kings machines, skidded to a stop at the south end of the bridge, and dismounted into Roby's escape route. The wiry man saw him and reached for his weapon with the quick efficiency of someone who solved problems fast.
Not fast enough.
Crossroad shot him once in the chest. Roby staggered, didn't fall—the man was tough, whatever else he was—and raised his gun with a hand that was already slowing.
"You planned every route," Crossroad said. "Except the one I was standing on."
The second shot put Roby on his back. The third made sure he stayed there.
The bridge went quiet.
Crossroad stood over the body of the man who'd kept the Copperhead Kings' meth pipeline flowing through three counties, and let himself breathe for exactly two seconds.
Then he was back on the bike.
"Greenville!" he shouted, and the brothers who could still ride mounted up behind him. "Nineteen minutes. Stay on my wheel."
They tore off the bridge and onto the route he'd mapped in his head—county roads to back roads to a two-lane connector that most people didn't know existed because it didn't show up on GPS and it hadn't been paved since the nineties.
Crossroad ran it at eighty, the formation stretched out behind him, eating miles the way the Delta ate everything—fast and total and without mercy.
Nineteen minutes. He'd said nineteen and he meant it.
They hit Greenville at seven-fifty-one, coming from the east on a residential street that spilled onto Fifth two blocks from the hardware store.
The four Kings who'd been shooting up the storefront heard the engines and knew instantly what was coming—not reinforcements, not a split force, but the full weight of the Delta Destroyers arriving from a direction that should have been impossible.
Two ran. Hollow caught one before he cleared the block. The other made it three streets before Outlaw's bike cut him off at an intersection Crossroad had specified in the formation plan, because the Road Captain didn't just plan his own routes—he planned everyone else's too.
The other two surrendered. Brothers dragged them off their bikes and into the hardware store's back alley, where the conversation that followed was brief and one-sided.
Crossroad pulled up in front of the hardware store and killed his engine. The owner was in the doorway, shaking, a hunting rifle in his hands that he probably hadn't fired in years.
"It's done," Crossroad told him. "They won't be back."
The man nodded, unable to speak.
Crossroad surveyed the aftermath. Busted storefront windows.
Bullet holes in the brick facade. Two of his brothers with minor wounds—a graze on one, glass cuts on another.
The prospects who'd held the front were bloodied but standing, wearing the dazed expressions of young men who'd just learned what the patch actually cost.
Levee rolled up beside him, his heavy frame still coiled with fight energy. A gash on his forearm was bleeding freely and he hadn't noticed.
"Your arm," Crossroad said.
Levee looked down. "Huh." He wrapped it with a rag from his saddlebag and didn't mention it again. "Roby's network?"
"Dead with him. Every route he mapped, every drop he coordinated, every supply run he scheduled—it's all in his head and his head's on a bridge in Sunflower County."
"Price is running out of thinkers."
"Price was never the thinker." Crossroad looked east, toward Tupelo, toward the man who'd sent his operations brain to do a job that required a war fighter. "Sims was his fist. Roby was his brain. All he's got left is Fitch, and Fitch is a match—burns hot and burns out."
Hollow materialized beside them, shotgun resting on his shoulder, the bandage on his forearm from the truck stop fight already soaked through again. His hollowed gaze swept the street.
"Clean work, Road Captain. Two fronts, one clock, not a brother lost."
Crossroad nodded. The words landed the way they always landed—with the weight of a standard he'd set for himself a decade ago and refused to let slip.
Not a brother lost. That was the job. That was the only job that mattered.
He pulled out his phone and called Grace.
She answered on the first ring. She'd been waiting—he could hear it in the speed of her voice, the way she said "Talk" like she'd borrowed it from Cottonmouth.
"We're good. Roby's done. Brothers are whole. Heading back now."
He heard her exhale. A long, controlled breath—the sound of a woman who'd been holding herself together with flour and focus for three hours.
"The biscuits are getting cold," she said.
"We'll be there in forty minutes."
"Then I'll make new ones."
Crossroad ended the call and sat on his bike in the middle of a shot-up Greenville street with the morning sun baking the asphalt and his brothers bleeding around him and the Copperhead Kings' distribution network lying dead on a Sunflower County bridge.
Two down. Two to go.
He kicked the engine to life and pointed the formation home.