13. Paperwork #2
He turned right into her, but she'd already left the floor.
Both legs up, both boots out, all that height and weight coming at him through the air, and both feet took him dead in the chest. She dropped out of the kick and hit the concrete on her shoulder, smooth, rolling the fall out of it, and the man flew back off his feet.
Vega was behind him and ducked. The man's momentum carried him straight over Vega's bent back, and Vega drove up out of the crouch with everything his legs had left in them, and the man went up and over, spinning, arms flailing at nothing, and crashed flat on his back on the concrete with a thud that emptied him.
His hands moved once, both of them, and then they fell loose onto the floor.
Three left. The boxer, holding his jaw with one hand. Santos's man. Blade's man against the van with his eyebrow pouring.
They looked at the two on the floor. I watched it land on them, the way their eyes went from their friends to each other to us, and the thing in those eyes was fear. The numbers were not even anymore.
They went for the guns.
All three at once, and late, like they were reaching for a thing they'd forgotten they had.
The boxer got his out from under his shirt clean and then fumbled the slide, because there was nothing in the chamber.
Santos's man had his half out of his coat and snagged on the cloth.
Blade's man clawed at the small of his back and came up with the pistol turned the wrong way in his fist.
The sight of that first pistol put ice straight down my back. A hospital parking structure at two in the morning. One shot, and every cop in the city would be on the ramps, and Liam would be upstairs with nobody on his door.
Blade and I drew at the same instant. My Glock came out of my jacket pointing at the boxer's chest before he'd found the safety.
The Desert Eagle came out of the small of Blade's back and sat on his man's face.
Fast. Faster than anything those three had ever seen, and I watched all three of them see it.
Santos's gun came up on his man. Valkyrie, up off the concrete, had hers out in one motion.
The three of them went still with their guns half out and ours all the way.
Five men who'd come here carrying and fought us with their fists. They'd only reached for the steel when they saw it going wrong, and then they'd reached for it like it was the first time. Maybe it was.
"It's over." My voice came out at a speed I didn't use.
Flat. Cold. The one I'd found in a kitchen, days ago, with my hand on Caleb's shoulder when he got that payment notification, and it scared me a little, how easy it came.
"You're beaten. We don't want to kill anybody tonight.
" I let the Glock hold the boxer's eyes.
"But reach for a gun again, and I will."
Nobody reached.
"Drop them." Blade. Two words that ended the situation.
Three pistols hit the concrete.
"Santos." I didn't look away from the boxer. "Collect them."
He went down the line, searching the two unconscious ones on the floor too, and every pistol that came off went into his pockets, and when he straightened he had a look on his face I'd seen on Tank when a client told him how to tune an engine.
"Five." He turned the last one over in his hand. "And every safety is still on. Pathetic."
"Van." Blade tipped his head at it without taking the Desert Eagle off his man.
Valkyrie went. Ten seconds, and she came back out with a plastic bag in one hand and held it up under the light so we could see it.
"Zip ties." Her voice had gone rough. "A whole bag. In the door pocket. Next to the straps. No other weapons in there. Just what they had on them."
A gurney with straps and a bag of ties. A blind spot picked out on purpose. They'd come for a sleeping man with a tube in his throat and they'd packed for a fight. For a just in case.
"Use them," I told her, and I heard my own voice and didn't recognize it.
Somewhere quiet. I'd said it days ago in a kitchen with my hand on his shoulder. We take him somewhere quiet and he tells us everything he knows.
Somewhere quiet was a dead strip-mall lot a mile off Charleston, the van backed into the corner farthest from the road with its lights off and its engine ticking as it cooled.
Blade's bike was already in the back of it, run up the ramp and set on its stand between the legs of four zip-tied men.
Santos and Valkyrie stood at the open doors with their pistols out, and Vega leaned on the panel beside them with one eye swelling shut, holding his own weight up.
Blade and I took the fifth one. The youngest, the one Santos had been fighting, a kid with a burst lip who couldn't have been more than twenty, whose eyes had gone wide when the Desert Eagle came out.
We walked him thirty feet across the lot with his hands tied behind him, to where the light from the road didn't reach.
Blade turned him around and put him against the wall of a shuttered nail salon, and the knife came out.
It never touched him. It didn't have to. Blade held it low where the kid could see it and asked his questions in a voice that never rose and never hurried. I stood a foot off the kid's other shoulder and asked mine, and between the two of us the answers came out of him wet and fast.
"Thursday." His voice cracked on it. "It's Thursday, it's always been Thursday, the whole crew's there, he's there, everybody he's been watching goes one more time and the winners go up?—"
"How many of you?" Blade.
"Forty. Fifty. I don't know, man, forty at least, everybody who came up through the pit and got kept?—"
He said the number proud, even then, with his back against a wall and a knife a foot from his belt. Blade let him, because a proud man told you more than a scared one, and either way the number was an army.
"The brother." My voice came out at the speed I'd used on the concrete, and I didn't try to change it. "Why?"
"I don't know why. Nobody tells us why." His eyes went from the knife to me and couldn't decide which was worse. "Bring him alive, keep him under, take him to the clinic the boss has paper on. That's it. That's all they said."
I stood a foot from that kid and understood what it looked like to be a tool in that man's hand. You picked up what you were pointed at. You didn't ask.
"Steel Phoenixes." I let it sit. "Mean anything to you?"
His face didn't move. His eyes didn't go anywhere. He looked at me like I'd asked him the capital of a country he'd never heard of.
"He's fresh." Blade, beside me, the knife still low. "Or he's good."
"Nobody's that good."
"You are." The knife slid home in its sheath.
Two options, and my head ran both. One, he was lying, and better at it than at everything else.
Two, he was fresh, weeks out of that pit, and the ranks were fighters, gym rats and cell-block brawlers, men who'd never worn a patch or heard the word club used for anything but a place you drank.
Gravedigger didn't tell his tools what he was afraid of. He pointed them.
I leaned toward two. I didn't like how much I wanted to.
The ride home was the cold hour.
Four in the morning, and the desert had gone as cold as it got, the air so dry and clear the stars sat right down on the ridgeline.
I rode point with the highway empty ahead.
In my mirror the van's lights rode the dark a hundred yards back, Blade behind the wheel, and behind the van one more headlight, Vega on his own bike with one eye closing and a nose that was going to need Rosa's hands before it needed sleep.
Santos and Valkyrie had stayed at the hospital.
They'd taken hits and stayed standing, and they'd hold the doors until Tank and Cuervo got there to double them.
Reaper had made that call over the phone before I'd finished asking.
Five zip-tied men rode in the back of that van with Blade's bike between their legs, and if any of them had wanted to complain about the room, none of them had found the breath.
Prisoners. The word sat strange in my head. We'd started the night with a camera and a whisper.
My hands were steady on the bars and my knee was still, and all twelve channels were running the same thing.
He hadn't sent a gun.
Gravedigger owned a revolver. I'd stood in a room and watched him put Whitfield on a marble floor with it and straighten his cuff after.
And tonight he'd reached for a man with a tube in his throat and a brother in my bed, and what he'd sent was a folded piece of paper.
A transfer order with the right account number on it.
The same as the bill he'd built under Liam for four months, until the number had a weight Caleb carried.
The same as the wire, a hundred and fifty grand and a headstone emoji, dropped on that bill like beer money.
Every time that man had reached for the Rossi brothers, he'd reached through paper, and the men with fists were only what he sent to carry it.
Bills. Wires. Patient transfers.
The compound's floodlights came up out of the dark, and the gate started rolling before I reached it.
Caleb was asleep in there, in my bed, the deep sleep he'd only found this week, with his brother's fingers still moving against his somewhere behind his eyes. He'd wake in three hours and go stand in the clubhouse kitchen and feed fifty people.
Or he'd wake in ten minutes to my hand on his shoulder and the words they came for Liam, and I'd watch everything he'd built this week come apart on his face in the dark.
I rolled through the gate with the van's lights in my mirror and the whole ride's cold in my hands, and I still didn't know which scenario I owed him. Whether to wake him now… or to tell him at all.