I grinned as we booked it back to our bikes and took off while people watched us with their mouths hanging open and their phones raised. We were probably already streaming all over social media, but there wasn’t anything to distinguish us by. Most of our bikes were black and looked like any other Harleys out there. Relay would have to use his back-up bike for a bit, ‘til shit died down because his had a custom paint job, but that was fine.
The adrenaline pumped through my system as my bike started up with a roar. It wasn’t going to be long before we had The Collective dismantled and destroyed.
CHAPTER 29
Bolo
“You mind if I clean up in your apartment?” I asked Relay. There was blood all over my t-shirt, but the bullet had only grazed me. “I don’t want to freak Devyn out.”
He shook his head. “You’re such a bitch. All that blood from a little scratch.”
“Fuck off. Not my fault I got so much blood pumping through these puppies.” I flexed my arms, causing the wound to start trickling again.
“It’s open. Go on in.” He waved dismissively. “Just don’t bleed on anything.”
“Finally,” I said with a grin. “An open invitation into your place.” I thought about waving my arm around and flinging some blood toward him, but decided against it. Best not to spoil this ‘good’ mood of his.
He narrowed his eyes. “Into my apartment. Not into my house. Don’t be going in my house, fucker.”
Shaking my head, I took the elevator up and went into Relay’s place. I shucked my t-shirt, leaving it on his kitchen counter because it would bother the shit out of him, then grabbed a new one from his bedroom. It looked like I was one of those gym bros who liked to wear their shirts too small to show off how ripped they were, but it’d do for now.
I lifted it and shoved some paper towels against the thin gash in my side. It had mostly stopped bleeding on the way up, but this would keep it from soaking through the shirt if it started up again.
We’d been back at the clubhouse for over an hour, unloading the cages. We were a lot more careful this time. Ruck and Flir had taken inventory as we unloaded.
I went back downstairs and laughed. Flir was sitting on the floor, looking like an eight-year old at Christmas. He looked up at me, eyes shining as he counted out bills. “You going to count all of those?”
He shook his head. “Just getting a baseline on denominations.”
“The fuck?”
He ignored me and went back to counting. I looked around at the bags. The guys were pulling bills out of them and stacking them in rows against the wall.
There had to be thousands of dollars in here. Maybe hundreds of thousands considering how many damn bags there were. It wasn’t as many as we’d left behind, but we’d been in a time—and space—crunch and had done the best we could.
“How the fuck?” I asked. “I mean, we know that they are into all kinds of shit, but…these guys are what? Just printing money.” Which explained all the chemicals that had been in the apartment. I hadn’t really stopped to ask Flir about it while we’dbeen there because he would’ve gotten going on one of his rants, and we didn’t have the luxury of letting him go on and on like a damn wind-up toy.
Flir popped up from the floor. “Yeah, that’s exactly what they’re doing. Come with me.”
Everyone paused what they were doing and went over to the machines stacked in the corner.
Behind me Kilo whistled as he walked in. He looked like shit. I was pretty sure he hadn’t slept in days. Or that was what it looked like. “Sweet. Daddy needs a new motorcycle. Car. Hell, a yacht.”
“You look like hell,” OD said, echoing my thoughts. He grinned when Kilo flipped him off.
“Counterfeiting,” Ruck said, nodding toward the machines as he crossed his arms over his chest. “They were running a counterfeiting operation. Using the rest of the apartments as a blind for it.”
Flir nodded, running his hand over one of the machines, then he grimaced and wiped his hand on his jeans.
“In that shitty apartment? To what, the tune of millions?” Strike asked.
“Depending on the denomination of bills,” Flir answered. “That’s what I was checking. They’re all twenty, ten, and five dollar bills. I haven’t counted them all yet, but if they packed each duffel bag with the same stacks of bills I can estimate.”
“Means they had to have somewhere that was laundering that shit,” Ruck replied in a tone that said he was thinking out loud. “Get all those bills out into circulation where it didn’t come back on them.”
Flir nodded and continued, “That looked like it was three studio apartments with the main walls taken out to make one space. So, I’m approximating twenty to thirty million. Give or take.”
“Dollars?” Kilo sputtered, eyes wide.
