Chapter Sixteen
She'd never been inside the chapel before.
The room was smaller than she'd expected—a converted office with heavy double doors and walls thick enough to hold secrets. A long table filled most of the space, scarred wood that had seen decades of decisions made in rooms like this by men who didn't write things down.
Patty sat in a chair someone had pulled up to the table's end, and every officer in the Destroyers looked at her like they weren't sure whether to be annoyed or impressed that she was there.
She looked back at them the way she looked at a full diner at seven AM. Same energy. Different menu.
"She's here because she knows the highway better than any of us." Foxfire stood at the opposite end of the table, too wired to sit. "She's been watching that corridor from a diner window for six years. She mapped Pratt's route. She identified the warehouse gap that let me kill Landis. She sits."
"Nobody said she doesn't sit." Cottonmouth's voice was slow, measured. "I'm just noting that we've never had a civilian at this table."
"She hit Marco Rios with a skillet," Burial said quietly from his corner. "That's less civilian than half the prospects."
A ripple of something that wasn't quite laughter moved through the room. Patty filed it away. Humor meant acceptance. Acceptance meant they'd listen.
"Garza's alone." Foxfire spread the map across the table—not the hand-drawn sketch from weeks ago, but something bigger.
Crossroad's work, detailed and precise, every road and back highway marked.
Patty's notes were layered on top in her sharp handwriting.
"No escort chief. No warehouse coordinator.
No message-runner. He's got drivers who signed up for shift work and a corridor that hasn't moved product in a week. "
"He's bleeding money," Outlaw said. "A pipeline that stops flowing stops earning. His buyers downstream are already looking for new supply."
"Which means he's desperate," Foxfire said. "And desperate men do one of two things. They run or they double down."
"Garza's not a runner." Patty said it before she could second-guess herself.
The room's attention shifted to her like a spotlight.
"I've been watching his operation for months—the convoys, the schedules, the way his crews moved through the corridor.
A man who builds a pipeline from a two-man cigarette hustle doesn't walk away from it.
He built this route the way my mother built her diner.
It's his. He'll die on it before he leaves it. "
Cottonmouth studied her. Those river-mud eyes reading her the way they read everyone—slow, thorough, missing nothing.
"You think he'll fight."
"I think he'll try to restart the corridor.
That's what a builder does when something breaks—he rebuilds.
He'll recruit new drivers. Find new muscle.
Get the product moving again because the product is the only thing keeping his buyers loyal.
" She leaned forward. "But to restart, he needs the warehouse.
That's his staging point. That's where the product sits between runs.
Without it, he's just a man with trucks and nowhere to load them. "
"We already hit the warehouse," Hollow said. "Landis died there."
"You hit it during an active operation. It was full of product and workers." Patty pulled her notes from the stack and laid them flat. "But you didn't destroy it. The building's still standing. The infrastructure's still there. If Garza's going to restart, that's where he starts."
"So we hit it again," Foxfire said. "But this time we hit it when Garza's inside."
"How do we know when he's inside?" Crossroad asked.
"Because I know when his product arrives.
" Patty tapped her notes. "The incoming runs—the ones that bring product to the warehouse from Louisiana—they come between midnight and two AM.
I've been hearing those trucks from my diner for months.
The walls shook every time they passed. Woke me up so many nights I started tracking them just to know when I'd be able to sleep. "
She spread the schedule across the table. Times, dates, patterns—a year of disrupted sleep turned into intelligence.
"The product arrives at midnight. It takes about an hour to unload and stage.
By one AM, the warehouse is fully loaded and the outgoing runs don't leave until three.
" She drew a circle around the two-hour window.
"Between one and three, the warehouse is at maximum product with minimum crew.
Just the overnight workers and whoever's overseeing the staging. "
"And if Garza's restarting the corridor—"
"He'll be there himself. He has to be." Patty met Foxfire's eyes across the table.
"His escort chief is dead. His warehouse man is dead.
His enforcer is dead. There's nobody left to oversee the restart except Garza.
If he's trying to get product moving again, he's in that warehouse between one and three AM, personally making sure his pipeline doesn't collapse. "
The chapel was quiet. The officers absorbing the information, processing it the way they processed everything—through the filter of men who'd been running this club through Delta trouble for years.
"When?" Cottonmouth asked.
"Tonight," Foxfire said. "Every night Garza's corridor stays dark, he loses buyers. He can't afford to wait. If he's restarting, he's doing it now."
"You're guessing."
"I'm reading the pattern." Foxfire's hands were flat on the table, the knife scars catching the overhead light.
"Garza built his operation on speed. Fast runs, fast replacements, fast decisions.
He lost three operators in two weeks and his pipeline's been dead for a week.
A man who operates on speed doesn't sit still for seven days. He's already moving."
Cottonmouth looked at Outlaw. That silent communication again—president and vice president reading each other across years of shared decisions.
"The hit," Cottonmouth said. "How?"
"Fast." Foxfire pointed to the warehouse on the map.
"One road in, one road out. The south access from the highway.
We come in after midnight, after the product trucks have arrived and left.
The warehouse is full. The crew is small.
And Garza—if he's there—is focused on getting his corridor back online, not watching for an assault. "
"If he's not there?"
"Then we destroy the warehouse, the product, and whatever's left of his infrastructure. He can't restart a pipeline without a staging point." Foxfire's jaw tightened. "But he'll be there. Patty's right—a man who built this from nothing isn't trusting the restart to hired drivers. He's there."
"How many brothers?" Hollow asked.
"Full assault. Every officer, every available brother. We're not picking off operators one at a time anymore." Foxfire looked around the table. "This is the corridor. The whole thing. We shut it down tonight or we fight this war for another month."
"He'll have guns," Crossroad said. "Whatever muscle he's scraped together for the restart—they won't be Rios's caliber, but they'll be armed."
"Good." Foxfire's grin came—the cold one. "Armed amateurs in a warehouse at two AM. I've fought worse in bars with less backup."
"You've fought worse in bars with no backup," Burial corrected. "That's the problem. You go first and think about numbers later."
"Going first is the plan. That's the whole plan." Foxfire straightened. "I breach the warehouse. The brothers follow. Anyone who fights, we put down. Anyone who runs, we let go—they'll spread the word that the corridor is dead. And Garza—"
"Garza answers for the highway," Cottonmouth finished. The president stood. "For the diner. For the businesses he burned and the woman he tried to silence."
"For the pie case," Patty said.
Every head turned.
"He burned my mother's pie case." Her voice was even.
Steady. The voice of a woman who'd been managing men across a counter for thirty years and knew exactly how to hold a room.
"The glass case where I kept the pecan pie my grandmother taught me to make.
The case my mother saved for three months to buy because she wanted her customers to see the pie before they ordered it. "
The chapel was very still.
"Kill him for the highway if you want. Kill him for the territory.
Kill him for the heat he brought and the money he cost and the principle of a smuggling operation running through Destroyer country.
" She looked at Foxfire. "But I want you to know that what he really burned was a glass case that cost a woman three months of twelve-seat diner revenue, because she believed that if people could see the pie, they'd want it. "
"They'll see it again." Foxfire's voice was rough. "New case. New counter. Same pie."
"Damn right." She folded her notes and pushed them across the table to him. "Now go shut down his corridor so I can start rebuilding."
Foxfire took the notes. Held them for a moment—her handwriting, her highway, her year of sleepless nights turned into the weapon that would end this.
"Church is done." Cottonmouth moved toward the door. "Foxfire has the lead. Full assault, tonight, the warehouse. We ride at midnight."
The brothers stood. Chairs scraped. The energy in the room shifted from planning to purpose, the particular charge that filled a space when violence had been decided and only the waiting remained.
Patty stayed in her chair while the officers filed out. Foxfire stayed at the table.
The chapel emptied. The heavy doors swung half-closed. And they were alone in the room where the Destroyers made their decisions.
"You gave me the corridor," he said. "From the first day—the truck schedules, the convoy patterns, the route map. Everything we used to take Garza apart came from you watching a highway through a diner window."
"I was just counting trucks."
"You were counting the thing that was going to save your life. You just didn't know it yet." He came around the table to her. Stood in front of her chair, looking down at her with an intensity that had nothing to do with the fight ahead. "When I come back tonight—"
"When you come back tonight, I'll have coffee ready."
"I don't want coffee."
"You always want coffee."
"I want you. Behind a counter. Pouring coffee I didn't ask for because you already know what I need." His hand found her face. Tilted it up. "That's what I'm fighting for tonight. Not the highway. Not the territory. A woman behind a counter who knew my order before I asked."
"That's a stupid reason to fight."
"It's the only reason that matters."
He kissed her. Fast—the only speed he had for the things that counted. His mouth on hers for three seconds that tasted like coffee and certainty and the particular heat of a man who was about to ride into the last fight of a war he'd started for her.
Then he was gone. Moving through the chapel door, boots loud in the hallway, his voice already calling for Crossroad and Hollow and the brothers who'd ride with him into a warehouse at two AM.
Patty sat in the empty chapel and pressed her fingers to her mouth where his kiss still burned.
The rumble started twenty minutes later.
Engines in the lot, one after another, the compound shaking with the sound of every available Destroyer mounting up for the final hit.
She listened from the kitchen—her kitchen, the counter she'd claimed, the space where she'd been feeding these men since the night Foxfire brought her through the door with flour on her apron and a skillet under her arm.
The bikes roared out of the lot and onto the highway.
She turned to the stove. Put the coffee on. Started cracking eggs, because a diner woman's answer to everything was to feed people, and the men riding toward a warehouse full of armed smugglers were going to come home hungry.
The kitchen was quiet except for the sizzle of butter in the pan and the steady drip of the coffee maker.
She cooked. She waited. She kept the lights on.