Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Dodge
The sky's just starting to lighten at the edges, gray easing into black, and we're seven bikes deep on the interstate, riding tight.
Seven men who've bled for this patch and would do it again without blinking.
The engine noise fills my head, drowns out everything I don't want to think about right now.
Everything except her. I push the thought down, same as I have for two years now.
There's no room for Adalynn on this stretch of road.
Not yet. Glacier pulls up beside me. I catch the set of his jaw in the headlight glow.
He jerks his chin forward. I nod once. We ride.
We stop thirty miles back at a decommissioned pump station off the highway, a stretch of nothing that nobody drives unless they're lost or hiding.
I spread the folded topo map across the flat concrete pump island and mark it with a red Sharpie.
The Winlaw compound sits on twelve acres outside of Henryetta.
Chain-link perimeter with razor wire. Two guard posts on the north and south access roads.
A main structure that doubles as Gallows' operations center and a row of outbuildings along the eastern fence line where his soldiers bunk and his money moves.
“How many we looking at?” Rebel leans over the map, tracing the perimeter with one scarred finger.
“Enough to matter,” I tell Rebel. “Not enough to stop us.”
Nobody argues.
Cobra points to the south access road. “Speed and Creeper take the south post quiet. Blades only until we need noise.”
“I can work with that.” Speed nods, already checking the knife at his hip.
Pyre steps forward. “What about communications?”
“You cut the relay on the east fence,” I tell him. “Before we move on the main building.”
“Done,” he confirms.
Rebel studies the layout, jaw tight. “So we push through the front with you?”
“You and me both,” I confirm. “Cobra holds the exterior perimeter. Phoenix stays two miles out with a laptop and a very specific task that can unravel Gallows from the inside out.”
Creeper whistles low. “That's a lot of faith in a computer.”
“It's not faith,” I tell him. “It's strategy.”
Cobra rolls up the map, satisfied. “Good plan. Clean. Brutal in the right places.”
I nod and turn for my bike, but Glacier catches my arm before I get there, and I already know what's coming.
We saddle up anyway, the whole line of us rolling back onto the highway, and a mile up the road Glacier signals again, pulling off onto a shallow turnout that's nothing but gravel and scrub grass.
The rest of the formation idles down fifty yards ahead, giving us room.
Glacier cuts his engine, pulls his helmet free, and runs a hand through his cropped hair. I kill my own engine and wait.
“Talk,” I order.
“You're running hot.” His voice is low, measured. The voice he uses when he's already made up his mind and is choosing his words carefully anyway. “I need to know you've got your head in the job and not in that house we left behind.”
I hold his gaze. “My head is where it needs to be,” I assure him.
“That's not what I asked,” Glacier challenges.
The rest of the men hang back fifty yards up the road, keeping their distance without being told to.
Glacier steps closer, dropping his voice another notch.
“Dodge. I've ridden with you through some ugly nights.
The Tulsa thing. The cartel job down in McAlester.
You're always cold when it counts. Surgical.” He pauses.
“Tonight you're not cold. You're lit up. I can see it on you.” I don't deny it.
There's no point. He's known me since I was twenty-three years old, running errands for the previous president, and he doesn't miss much.
“She and those kids are in my mother's house,” I tell him. “A man named Gallows put a price on their heads because a ten-year-old girl used his criminal ledger as a coloring book. Tell me I'm not supposed to be lit up.”
“I'm not saying it's wrong.” He crosses his arms. “I'm saying make sure the fire's controlled. You go in there wanting to burn everything down for her, you get sloppy. You get sloppy, you don't come back. And if you don't come back—” He stops there, lets it sit.
If I don't come back, there's nobody standing between Adalynn and whatever's left of Gallows' organization. He's right. He usually is, which is why he's my VP and not some enforcer I send out to collect debts.
“I hear you,” I tell him.
“Do you?” Glacier asks.
“I said I hear you, Glacier,” I mutter.
He studies me a second longer, then nods and reaches into his cut. He pulls out his phone and holds it out. “Phoenix called while you were checking the map. Wants to talk.”
I take the phone and dial. Phoenix picks up on the first ring, sounding like he always does, a man who hasn't slept in three days and doesn't much care. “Tell me you're not already inside,” he warns.
“Thirty minutes out. What do you have?” I ask.
“Everything.” He doesn't hesitate over the word.
“Spent the last four hours imaging that ledger Hulk photographed.
Every page. Forty-six entries of wire transfers, bribe logs, names of three law-enforcement officials in Latimer County, two in Pittsburg, one sitting federal magistrate.
There's also documentation of six contract killings, including—” He stops. “Including the two in Colorado.”
Adalynn's parents. My jaw tightens.
“What's the plan?” I ask.
“I've got a contact at the U.S. Marshals field office in Oklahoma City.
Off the books. Once Gallows is out of the picture, the ledger is what takes down everything he built.
Accounts frozen, the corrupt names exposed, the rest of Winlaw scrambling with no leader and no cover left.
I send this package the second you confirm and it doesn't matter what happens to the warehouse after tonight. The evidence survives either way.” He pauses.
"So whatever you do in there, that book doesn't need to make it out. I've already got what I need."
“Good, because Gallows isn't walking out,” I say. “Not tonight. Not ever.”
“Dodge—”
“He doesn't see a cell, Phoenix. He doesn't see a courtroom. He put a bullet in two people for opening a ledger, then spent months hunting three kids for owning it. That ends with him in the ground.”
Phoenix is quiet for a second. “Copy that. I'll transmit the second you confirm you're breaching. If things go sideways—”
“They won't,” I insist.
“Dodge,” he warns.
“I said they won't.” I hand the phone back to Glacier.
“Tell him to transmit in twenty-two minutes whether he hears from us or not.” Glacier nods and relays the order.
I pull my helmet back on, and for just a second, I let myself think about Adalynn.
Not last night, in my bedroom, I can't afford that on a road like this.
I think instead about her at Mom's kitchen table two mornings ago, hands wrapped around a coffee mug, eyes carrying every mile she'd driven and every nightmare she hadn't slept through.
She sat up straight anyway. Kept her voice even with the kids.
Still asked me how I was doing. Ashley walked out because she decided I was too much to carry.
Adalynn looked at all of it, the cut, the club, the ugly parts I don't bother dressing up, and stayed anyway.
I kick the engine over and ride.
The Winlaw compound comes up out of the dark, the chain-link fence right where the satellite image said it would be.
The guard post on the north road glows orange with the ember of a cigarette, one man, tired, not expecting company.
Creeper takes him down in under twelve seconds.
I keep my eyes forward. Speed signals from the south.
Clean. Pyre moves along the eastern fence line, quiet and quick.
The communications relay goes dark forty seconds later.
No alarms. No lights beyond the compound's usual flood lamps casting yellow circles on the packed dirt.
Rebel falls in on my left shoulder as we clear the perimeter breach.
Cobra holds the exterior with two men, a kill zone nothing exits from.
The main building sits forty yards across open ground, a squat, reinforced structure, more warehouse than headquarters.
Steel door. One camera above the entrance, already blind courtesy of a directional jammer Phoenix couriered to us last week.
We cover the ground fast and low.
Rebel hits the door with a ram on my signal and it gives with a sound like a gunshot.
We pour through. The entry hall is narrow, fluorescent-lit, stinking of motor oil and cigarettes and the kind of stale desperation that soaks into places where men make choices they can't walk back.
Two Winlaw soldiers are in the hall. They reach.
They don't get far. We move deeper. The hallway branches left toward what looks like a storeroom and right toward a set of heavy interior doors with light showing beneath them.
I go right. Rebel stays on my shoulder. We hit the doors and push through, and the room beyond is bigger than I expected, a war room of sorts, maps tacked to corkboard, a long table scattered with phones and laptops and paperwork that moves money without looking like it.
Three men spin toward us from the table.
A fourth stands at the far end of the room with his back to us, studying something on the wall.
He doesn't spin around. Doesn't reach for a weapon.
Just stands there. The room goes quiet except for the sound of Rebel handling the three at the table.
Takes maybe eight seconds, and then it's just heavy breathing and the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead.
The man at the far end still hasn't moved.
He's broad across the shoulders, gray at the temples, wearing a charcoal suit that looks like it cost more than my bike.
The fabric's pristine, not a wrinkle anywhere, which is wrong in a way I can't quite name—not here, not in this place.
He reaches up with one unhurried hand, pulls a photograph off the wall, studies it for a moment, sets it face-down on a nearby shelf.
When he finally turns around, he doesn't look surprised. He looks satisfied. “Dodge.” Gallows drawls. “I was wondering how long it would take you to find your way to my door.”