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“Caleb and Lonnie, you scout the clubhouse.” Both men nodded, looking at Caleb’s screen.
“Gargo and Geno, the Silver Bullet.”
The Silver Bullet was a bar owned by the sister of one of the Dragons, and they thought of it as their ‘annex,’ though it was across town from their clubhouse.
“Ben and Reed are with me. We got the stash house.”
It hadn’t been said in the group, and there hadn’t been time for any side talk, so Zach didn’t know if the other Bulls were thinking like he was, but he thought Cooper had been smart as fuck to split them up the way he had—a patch in every group so they could all be trusted equally, and the teams made up of people with enough in common that, even if they didn’t know each other before this, they’d probably work well together.
“Just scout for now,” Cooper was saying. “Don’t get ambitious, and don’t get fucking seen. We want to know where they are, if they’re together, and if the cargo is still at hand. Have your sidearm handy, but do not put yourself in a situation where you have to use it. If you shoot before we’re all together, the plan is fucked. When you have the info you’re assigned to get, call me and then wait until we’re all regrouped. Keep your burners on vibrate, but put ‘em somewhere you won’t miss a call. Got it?”
Everybody got it.
“Good,” Coop said and slipped his burner into his jeans pocket. Among their tasks before leaving Laughlin had been a run to Best Buy for fresh burners for everybody. “Then let’s fucking ride.”
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~oOo~
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“Looks like nobody’shome,” Kai said.
Wash Duggar’s house was a rundown clapboard box on a weedy dirt lot at the farthest end of a sparsely populated street. A car and two trucks, all at least ten years old, were parked on the dirt in front of the house. But no bikes out in the open, and all the lights in the house were off. It wasn’t late enough for grownups to be asleep, so Zach was inclined to agree that nobody was home. A big sodium arc light at the street provided the only light—and prevented Zach and Kai from getting close enough to peer into the windows to make sure.
However, Zach was more interested in the building beside the creaky old house: a huge garage, much newer and in much better repair, with a pale ribbon of smooth concrete running from the double overhead doors to the cracked and pitted asphalt street. Apollo’s satellite images hadn’t shown this garage for what it was, likely because a row of very old and very large oak trees blocked most of the roof from above.
No windows on that garage. With no evidence but instinct, Zach thought there was an excellent chance the van was in there, maybe with their cargo still in it. He pulled the night-vision binoculars from his pack and focused on the steel door beside the overheads.
The first thing he noticed was a security camera, bolted about eighteen inches above the door. He zoomed in until he had the best look at that camera he could get. It was no discount model. There was definitely something in that garage Wash wanted to protect.
Keeping the zoom tight, Zach shifted down to examine the door. Typical steel security door, pretty similar to the exterior doors on the Tulsa clubhouse. Not easy to bust in. It also had a high-tech lock, with fingerprint and code access. Those fuckers were pricey, too. This whole garage looked state-of-the-art, right next to a house that looked decidedly unloved. Zach didn’t know if Duggar had an old lady, but if he did, she was not the house-proud type.
The thought made him think simultaneously of his mom and Lyra—which at first felt very weird, but then was exactly right. How many times had he thought he’d settle down if he could find a woman like his mom?
Beyond a motivation to get himself home in one piece, Lyra was a distraction right now, so he set thoughts of her aside. “I think we need to get into that garage.”
Crouched at Zach’s side, Kai was quiet.
So far, that was probably the first word Zach would use to describe the guy: quiet. He was big—a couple inches taller than Zach and broad as fuck and shredded almost like Eight or Apollo. Way bulkier than Zach. When he spoke, his voice was so deep it rumbled.
He wore his hair long, and he had the wildest tattoos—a series of five thin, straight lines running from each cheekbone, down his cheeks, over his jaw, down his neck, and into his shirt. Zach hadn’t asked because the question seemed intrusive, but he assumed ink like that was something from Mojave culture.
“Cooper said we don’t do anything but get info,” Kai said. “You sure you want to get in there?”
“Not now, I’m saying we should tell the others this is probably where the van is. But there’s a camera and a high-tech lock on that door.”
“If we had a rifle, we could shoot out the camera. We’re not close enough for a handgun. We can shoot out the light, too—there’s no other house close enough to give a shit, probably.”
“I’ve got an AK in my saddlebag. Just need a couple minutes to put it together. But that camera looks like one that’ll send an alert to a phone when it goes offline, so unless you know something we could do to keep that from happening, when we kill it, we better be ready to hustle. Also, the lock is pretty high tech. Fingerprint and code.” Feeling dumb, Zach asked, “Is that something you’d know how to ... circumvent?”
Kai glanced at the binocs, then held out his hand. Zach gave them over, and Kai had a look of his own. “I don’t have the gear I’d need, or the time to use it, to loop in a dummy feed for the camera. The lock, that’s a Home Depot special. Standard keypad for a four-digit code. I can’t do shit about the fingerprint unless we have his thumb, but we could maybe break the code. What do we know about this guy? Birthday, kids, woman, any of that?”
“I can ask Apollo. I don’t know anything but his name and this address. Nothing I see here suggests there’s a woman.”
“If there is, she ain’t fussy. There are ten thousand possible combinations of four numbers. I have a code generator at home, and that thing can try combos faster than we can think of ‘em. But without it, I’d have to run the possibilities manually, and with nothing to go on, that could take hours. Those locks come out the box with 1111 or 1234. Most folks don’t bother to change it, ‘cuz most folks are idiots. If this guy’s got something to hide, he probably changed it. But unless he’s a techie and paranoid, he probably used the same code he uses for his ATM—which is probably some combo of birthday numbers. It would help if I had something to work with.”
“Okay. Let’s back off a little and find good cover to keep watch from. I’ll call Coop and let him know what we see, then I’ll call Tulsa and see if Apollo’s got something we can go on.”
