Chapter 11
Jinx
I find her the only chair in the room that isn’t piled full of junk. When she sits, I squat down beside her. “Did you get the photo I sent to the group chat?”
Striker’s grin evaporates in an instant. “Yeah, I fuckin’ well did. Fuck the Hyenas all to hell. I can’t believe that shit. The altitude’s at least sixty feet,” he mutters. “They’re using a commercial zoom lens.”
“Yeah, I agree. That’s probably why nobody heard it. The question is, how can we keep their fuckin’ dirty eyes off us?”
I watch his fingers fly across the keyboard. “The way they sent it is what interests me. Photo files, especially one that size, need a strong, steady connection.”
“I don’t get why that matters,” I say bluntly.
“Whoever sent that image bounced the signal through three relays to hide himself, but the last hit pinged a tower I recognize.”
I hate to get my hopes up, but this sounds like information that might lead us to a location. A map of the county blooms across one of his monitors. He drops two location pins on the map, maybe half a mile apart. “Pin one is where the upload originated. Pin two is that old cannery site.”
I stare at those two pins. “It’s like we thought. They’re operatin’ out of there. Maybe they even store the equipment they stole from us there?”
“Probably.” He glances up at me. “How is the auto parts store holding up?”
“Benji’s holdin’ down the fort for me. He’s a good man.”
Jasper appears in the doorway with a mug of coffee in his hand and a scowl on his face. “What’s all this about a second drone? I thought we shot their drone down.”
“Time stamp says this photo was taken two days after Striker slingshotted the first one,” I tell him. “There must have been at least two drones. We killed one and the other one’s been watchin’ us ever since.”
“What the fuck do you mean, watchin’?” he grumbles before taking a sip of his coffee.
I nod towards Nora. “I mean they seem to be watchin’ their club princess.”
Jasper looks at me for a long, hard minute. “I’m sure they made enough time to scope out our club’s routine as well.”
I just grunt in agreement. “That too.”
I gesture towards the second monitor. “Striker found something useful.”
Jasper looks at the pins on the map. I can see him doing the math I already did.
Taking another sip of his coffee, he tells me, “Wake the brothers. Tell them church is in fifteen.”
Fifteen minutes fly by. The chapel fills up with men in various stages of dress and states of alertness. The brothers don’t complain because they are used to being roused from bed at all hours when there’s a need that justifies it.
When the door shunts, Jasper brings everyone up to speed.
He talks about the photo, there being a second drone, Striker tracing the signal, and the cannery being the most probable place for them to be holed up.
He finishes by pulling up the photo they sent on the big screen.
Nora is sitting there wearing my property cut, looking all innocent and oblivious.
An attack on an old lady is not something our club will tolerate.
The route falls to me because I’ve been there already, and I know these roads better than any brother in this room. I pull up the mapping program and build it while the meeting continues. Brothers ask questions and the club officers answer them one-by-one.
I finish the route and send it to our group chat. “We’ll take the industrial route with our lights dark. We’ll stage in the tree line west of the property. There’s a tunnel there we can fall back to if their drones start trackin’ us.”
Slate assigns four brothers to hold the clubhouse. “Lock the place down tight. Nothin’ comes in or goes out until we get back.”
Onyx stands up next. “I’ll be looking for paperwork.
Anything that might tell us where their money is comin’ from, exactly who their backers are or how their operation runs,” he says tightly.
“Grab anything that looks like a ledger, manifest, or receipts. Somewhere at that site is the answer to where Coal’s money comes from, and we need to find it if we’re gonna win this war they fuckin’ started. ”
“You heard him,” Jasper says in a booming voice. “Check desks, drawers, and grab anything that looks like a briefcase. Also, it goes without saying, we take back our own property if it’s there. Everything else goes up in flames. We ain’t givin’ them a chance to retaliate.”
That’s when Nora speaks up and every head in the room turns when she clears her throat.
“There’s a second building,” she says. “Set back about a hundred yards behind the cannery. Spark used to brag that it’s where they keep the bikes they don’t want anyone to see. He sounded like that’s where all the important stuff was kept. I can show you where it sits.”
“You’re not comin’,” I say, before my brain catches up with my mouth. “It’s too fuckin’ dangerous.”
Her head turns, and the look she gives me is stone cold. “I didn’t ask to come. I volunteered to show you.”
When I walk across the room, she lowers her voice so only I can hear. “You want to pick my brain and then shove me in a room while the men handle it.”
“I’m not tryin’ to be controllin’,” I tell her quietly. “It’s just that you would be a beautiful distraction that might get in the way of completing the mission safely.”
She studies me for a long moment before responding.
“I’ll help you,” she says. “You know I will. But I want you to do me a favor back. Instead of pacing in my room, worrying myself sick about you, let me sit with Striker tonight so I can see the drone feed and hear the comms. I might turn out to be useful in the heat of battle. And anything that gives you and your club brothers a better chance of making it home alive should be a no-brainer.”
“Done,” Jasper says before I can even think about answering.
Nora walks us through everything she remembers.
The second building has no power and no plumbing.
They haul water in and run the whole operation, security included, off a generator.
Striker’s face lights up, and he starts typing away on his keyboard, mumbling, “A generator means one power source. And one power source means one point of failure.”
Yeah, I guess. Only I can’t see how that matters in a smash and burn mission. When Jasper brings down his gavel to end the meeting, we gear up and head out to the courtyard. It’s still dark outside.
I take a minute with Nora. It’s times like this that make a man think about the future and what would happen if he were to fall in battle.
We stand by my bike, away from the others.
I dig into the inside pocket of my cut and press something into her palm.
It’s a silver ring made from a Morgan dollar I’d been saving for something special.
“This is a little something to remember me by, in case I don’t come back. ”
Her expression falls. “Don’t even think that, much less say it out loud. You are coming home because I can’t stand the thought of living without you in my life.”
“Look,” I say, before she can panic. “I made it a while back. I just wanted to make you a little piece of pretty to wear with my cut.”
She turns it over in her fingers, and her bottom lip trembles. I know she’s thinking about the other ring, the one Stripe gave her, the one that came with a threat instead of a choice. This one comes with no expectations. I watch all that click into place in her expression.
She slides it onto her right hand and jumps onto her toes to kiss me. “Come back home safely and let’s make a life together,” she murmurs against my mouth. She suddenly pulls back, turns and fast-walks away, like she doesn’t want me to see her fall apart.
I’m grinning the whole time I’m putting on my helmet. She basically just fuckin’ claimed me. I love hearing her say she wants to make a life with me.
***
Twelve of us roll out in staggered pairs, a couple of minutes apart.
We don’t form up into a column until we’re past the city limits.
The cannery sits right where the map says, where I remember it being.
We use the tree line as a staging area, just like we planned.
Striker’s voice squawks through my earpiece.
“I hacked their feed and am killing their cameras in three, two, one.” The little red lights along the fenceline stop blinking, one by one.
We come over the back fence, hustling towards the second building.
It’s exactly where Nora said. There are two brothers standing out front.
They’re sharing a smoke and a conversation rather than guarding the building.
That makes it easier to sneak up on them.
I put one in a sleeper hold before he knows what hit him.
Slate’s stun gun drops the other one. We stop long enough to zip tie them and drag them out of sight.
Inside is everything we hoped to find and more.
Franken-bikes line the back wall and hang off ceiling chains.
We can now see they put junk paint jobs over racing engines, just like Nora told us.
A workbench runs down the middle of the room.
It’s mostly covered in drone frames, all in various stages of assembly.
I fast-walk to the back shelf because I see something I recognize.
Everything they stole from us and haven’t used is stacked neatly on one shelving unit.
My hand runs across the shelves. Our GPS trackers, dash cams, and signal boosters are just waiting for us to reclaim them.
A door bangs open near the rear of the building, and a Hyena walks out still zipping his pants. It stinks, which tells me they’ve got a toilet rigged up back there. He gets one yell off before Merc puts him down with one mighty punch to the chest. That fucker has muscles sitting on muscles.
Unfortunately, that one sound is enough to alert the others. Three more come running out of a room that looks like it might be an office. There are two Hyenas and a third man in slacks and a button-up shirt.