Page 22 of Crash’s Secret

My brothers are already at Church when I arrive.

Duke is at the long table with his laptop open and his phone face-up beside it. Joker leans over his shoulder, a whiskey in his hand that he hasn’t touched.

“Talk,” I say.

“Shipment rolled out at nine, on schedule.” Duke turns the laptop toward me. “Driver checked in at the county line. After that, nothing.”

“Was Bear driving?” I ask.

Duke nods. “Buyer sat at the drop for an hour, then started blowing up my phone. I’ve called the driver eleven times.”

“The van?”

“Found it.” Joker sets the whiskey down without drinking it. “Jinx ran the route with a prospect. Van is in the ditch off Oak Road, doors open, cargo gone. Bear was face down in the dirt twenty feet off. Breathing. Barely. They’re bringing him in to Doc now.”

Thank fuck he’s alive.

“Cameras,” I say.

Joker is already pulling his own laptop across the table. He scrubs through gray-green footage at triple speed from the cameras we have set up around checkpoints.

Then he stops.

At eleven forty-one, high beams swing across a wall of corrugated metal. Then bikes. Five of them, single file, riding dark until the last hundred yards.

Duke leans in. “That’s the old copper mine. We put a cam on that turnoff just three months ago.”

The mine has been dead longer than I’ve been alive. A big metal processing shed, some rusted-out equipment, and one dead-end road in and out. A mile inside our eastern border.

“That’s our shipment.” I watch two men haul a crate off a flatbed trailer, and the crown stenciled on the side catches the beams for half a second. Ours. Stacked in a building on Kings’ territory.

All three of the guys in the room are looking at me.

We warned the Prez of the Crimson Warriors that if any of his guys crosses into our territory, we’ll declare war. Nitro’s men did a lot worse than that.

“Get Jinx. The four of us will check out the mine,” I say. Then I list off the other brothers who will join us. “I want guns sitting on that access road in case anybody else shows up. Trapper follows us out with the box truck. If our shipment is in that building, it’s coming home. The women and kids come to the clubhouse. Anybody not coming with us is on guard duty.”

We kill the engines a mile out and walk in.

The desert at two in the morning is cold and dead quiet. The four of us spread out, boots silent on the hard dirt, the old shed a black shape ahead of us. Armed reinforcements are sitting dark on the road behind us.

There are five bikes parked behind the shed, the flatbed trailer next to them, and through a gap in the metal wall, a battery-operated lantern lights our crates.

Voices are laughing from inside.

I pull the guys in close and keep it to a whisper. “Duke, Joker—the back. Jinx, you’re with me. Fast and quiet.”

We move.

The side door isn’t even shut. That’s how comfortable they are on our territory. It’s the last comfortable thing that happens to them.

I put my boot through the door, and the whole building turns into noise.

It happens fast. These things always do. Two of them are dead before they’re off the crates they’re sitting on. Bullets tear through the wall a foot from my head, and shards of metal sting my cheek.

Jinx handles the shooter. Dead. The fourth runs for the door and doesn’t make it.

And the fifth comes out of a back room nobody had gotten to yet, and his pistol is level with my eyes from four feet away. No reason on earth for him to miss.