Chapter 16
They came exactly where Nora said they would.
Switchback stood in the shadow of the old freight depot two hundred yards east of the compound with the chain-link fence at his back and the industrial flats stretching dark and empty in front of him, and he watched Devane's cars roll in like a funeral procession — headlights off, engines low, three black sedans nosing into the staging lot behind the abandoned body shop exactly where Nora's map had marked them.
She'd drawn it from her regulars' reports: the lot behind the body shop, the side street by the freight depot, the gap in the fence where the compound's property met the old rail yard.
Three approach vectors, three staging points, the geometry of an assault by a man who planned his moves and expected them to land clean.
Devane had planned it. The Wreckers had planned for it.
Switchback keyed his phone once. The signal went to Jackpot at the compound gate, to Bustout positioned behind the dumpsters on the north side, to Viper crouched in the freight depot's loading bay with the patience of a man who'd grown up behind a pawn shop counter waiting for trouble to walk through the door.
Blizzard held the south perimeter on his bike, engine off, ready to cut off anyone who ran.
The car doors opened. Men spilled out — ten, twelve, moving in pairs through the dark lot with the discipline of hired guns who'd done this before.
They wore dark clothing and carried the kind of hardware you brought to a fight you intended to finish: bats, pipes, and the glint of something heavier in the hands of the two closest to Devane.
Devane himself stepped out of the lead car last. Silver-templed, unhurried, buttoning his jacket like he was arriving at a dinner reservation.
He surveyed the dark industrial flats with the calm of a man who'd staged a dozen of these operations and never lost one, and he pointed toward the compound fence and said something to the men around him that Switchback couldn't hear.
They moved. Two groups, splitting along the fence line toward the compound's back lot, exactly the way Nora's intel had predicted — through the gap in the chain-link, into the kill box between the freight depot and the compound wall.
Switchback let them come.
The first group was six men deep when the freight depot's loading-bay door crashed open and Viper came through it like a bullet. He hit the nearest man with a length of pipe across the knees and the man went down screaming, and suddenly the dark industrial flats erupted.
Bustout came off the north side like a landslide.
The big man waded into the second group with his fists and his bulk and the absolute indifference to pain that made him the most dangerous man in any room he entered.
The first hired gun swung a bat at his head.
Bustout caught it with his left hand, ripped it free, and put the man on the ground with a single right that landed like a cinder block.
The kill box closed. Devane's men were caught between the freight depot wall and the compound fence, penned in the dark with Wreckers on three sides, and the disciplined assault turned into a brawl in thirty seconds.
Switchback moved through it.
Not around it — through it. He sidestepped a hired gun who lunged at him with a pipe and put an elbow into the man's throat as he passed, dropping him choking to the gravel.
Another man came at him from the left and Switchback grabbed a fistful of his jacket and threw him into the chain-link fence hard enough to bounce. The man stayed down.
He wasn't here for the muscle. He was here for Devane.
The silver-templed lieutenant had pulled back when the trap sprang — retreated toward the gap in the fence with two of his close men, the disciplined planner recognizing in an instant that his geometry had been turned against him.
He was heading for the cars. Heading for the phone call to Vane that would say the club was ready and the assault had failed and the last lieutenant was pulling out.
Switchback wasn't going to let him make that call.
He broke through the edge of the brawl and sprinted across the gravel toward the gap in the fence. Devane's two close men saw him coming and spread to block the path, and the first one drew something from his waistband — short, metallic, not a gun but close enough to make the math ugly.
Switchback didn't stop. He hit the first man at a dead run, shoulder into chest, and they went down together in the gravel.
The man swung the weapon — a blackjack, lead-weighted, illegal in every state that cared — and it caught Switchback across the ribs.
Pain detonated through his side like a bomb.
He grabbed the man's wrist, twisted until the blackjack dropped, and drove his forehead into the bridge of the man's nose. Cartilage crunched. The man went limp.
The second close man kicked him while he was down. Boot to the kidney, a burst of white-hot fire that arched his back, and then a second kick aimed at his head that he rolled away from just far enough that it caught his shoulder instead of his temple.
Switchback got to his feet. The second man was big and fast and had the dead-eyed confidence of someone who'd been paid to hurt people his whole adult life. He came in swinging and Switchback took a fist across the jaw that snapped his head sideways and filled his mouth with copper.
He spat blood and hit back. Low, hard, a punch to the liver that doubled the big man over, and then an uppercut that straightened him out and a right hook that put him on the gravel face-first. The man tried to get up. Switchback kicked him in the ribs and he stopped trying.
Devane was at the fence.
The silver-templed lieutenant had reached the gap in the chain-link and was pulling it open, his jacket still buttoned, his face still composed even as his operation collapsed behind him.
He moved without panic — the discipline that made him dangerous, the cold control that had kept him alive while Rourke and Ott died in his place.
"Devane."
The name stopped him. He turned, and in the dim light from the distant streetlamp, Switchback saw his face clearly for the first time — fifties, lean, silver at the temples, eyes like stones in a dry riverbed.
The face of a man who'd ordered an old man roughed up in a laundromat parking lot and a dozen businesses strangled to death, and had never lost a minute of sleep over any of it.
"You sent a man to her lot," Switchback said. He was walking forward, steady, the pain in his ribs and his kidney and his jaw fading behind the hot, clear focus of a man who'd reached the thing he came for. "He put hands on an old man. Over paper. Over a debt she never took."
Devane reached inside his jacket.
Switchback closed the distance in three strides.
He grabbed Devane's hand before it cleared the jacket and slammed his wrist against the chain-link fence post — once, twice — and whatever he'd been reaching for clattered to the gravel in the dark.
Switchback drove him backward into the fence.
The rusted chain-link bowed under Devane's weight, the metal singing, and Switchback pinned him there with a forearm across his throat.
Devane fought. He was lean and strong and he had the desperate energy of a man who understood that the trap had closed and the only exit was through the man pressing him into the fence. He clawed at Switchback's arm, got a hand free, and jabbed two fingers at his eyes.
Switchback turned his head and took the jab on his cheekbone instead of his eye socket. He hit Devane in the stomach — hard, deep, the kind of punch that emptied a man's lungs — and Devane folded against the fence, gasping.
Switchback grabbed the back of his head and drove his face into the fence post.
The sound was sharp and final. Devane's body jerked once against the chain-link and then sagged, and Switchback pulled him back and hit him again — not frenzy, not rage, but the deliberate, certain violence of a man finishing a job that needed finishing — and Marco Devane, the last of Curtis Vane's lieutenants, the disciplined planner, the man who handled the examples, slid down the rusted chain-link and didn't get up.
Switchback stood over the body with his lungs burning and blood running from his mouth and his ribs screaming where the blackjack had landed, and the industrial flats went quiet around him.
The fight was over. He could hear it in the silence — the brawl dying out as Devane's hired guns broke and ran, Blizzard's bike firing somewhere to the south to cut off the runners, Bustout's low voice telling someone to stay down.
The Wreckers held the field. The kill box had worked. Nora's map had been perfect.
Jackpot's voice came from the compound gate, low and steady in the dark. "Clear."
Clear. Devane dead on club ground. His crew scattered or down. Nobody left between the Wreckers and the tidy man who'd sent every one of them so he wouldn't have to come himself.
Switchback wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand and looked at the compound, where a single light burned on the mezzanine level — the window of the bunk that was his and Nora's, the warm square of light that meant she was there, waiting, alive.
Vane had no one left to send. No collectors, no saboteurs, no lieutenants, no professional muscle.
Every man he'd thrown at the block and the club was dead or running, and when the word reached him — tonight, tomorrow, whenever the survivors made the call they didn't want to make — Curtis Vane would understand for the first time that the next fight was his, and his alone.
The message had been sent. Written in Devane's body against the rusted chain-link, in the blood on the gravel, in the silence of an industrial lot where a disciplined assault had died in the dark.
No one left between the Wreckers and the man behind the paper. And the Wreckers were coming.