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When I come back from the shower, Dane is sitting at the counter with his laptop open, and Steel is handing him breakfast and setting mine beside his. “Dane, come on. Don’t be a dick. You know we can find the stuff easier if you help us with your big fancy computers at the base.”
“Steel, I love you, but I'm not interfering. I promised Ray.”
“Dane, she’s gone. We need to destroy the cocksucker that helped Roach. We need to find him, and we need to destroy him.”
“Steel, just stay away from it all, okay? There are still things going on that need to be dealt with, and you two playing fucking Lone Ranger and Tonto is only gonna make matters worse!” He shakes his head. “Please listen to me when I ask you to leave this alone.”
“But—”
“Steel, nope.” I get a kiss on the head as he scoops up his laptop, throws it under his arm, grabs his breakfast, and is out the door.
“Shall we follow him?”
“No, Steel, we’re not following him. Let's go have a snoop and see what we can find on Roach.”
As we head into the tech room, Viking and Blade join us. “Why aren't you at Carmen’s?” Steel asks.
“Told her I wasn’t going back till I find Ray.” He shrugs. “Now I can’t bring myself to go back till I’ve found the fucker that caused all this. How can I hold my head up and say I can protect Car if I can’t find this fucker?”
“So, have we decided who it is?” Blade asks. He has his butterfly knife in his hand, rolling it around through his fingers and back over his thumb. It's a distraction for him when he's feeling more than he wants to. He's been doing a lot more lately.
“Dante fucking Crane!” I spit. “It has to be him. If it walks like a fucking duck, quacks like a fucking duck, then my bet is it's that motherfucker, but I’m missing something I can’t place: why Ray?”
“There's no connection?” Steel asks. We keep going over this, and we’re at a loss.
“I’ll be fucked if I can find one other than him wanting to take over The Armoury, but he hasn't gone after any of the others that we know of, not like Ray.”
“So where the fuck do we go from here? Do we even know what this motherfucker looks like?” Viking asks, and it's a valid question. It's just no, we don’t. No one who has had dealings with him seems to be breathing.
I start tapping on the keys. “We're gonna start at the end and work backwards. The night Ray lured Roach here and kicked his ass.”
We track him and trail, and lots of footage has already been recorded over. A few places have everything backed up, so we run a map and a timeline, and as it's starting to get dark, we notice a pattern, “There's an area here.” I mark it on the map. “He disappears for hours on end. That must mean something.”
“This whole area here seems to be rundown, condemned, virtually derelict buildings. That must be where they're either running their gang from, or that’s where they had Ray. I’m printing the maps off and giving you all an area, we need to search every building. Take note of everything in them, no matter how small.”
I start the printouts.
“So what's in that area? Why's it so run down?” Viking leans in closer.
I start running some searches. “It's like it's a whole town, fucking area is a good ten blocks, maybe twelve. The buildings all belong to… fuck knows, they’re hiding behind shell corporations. It's gonna take a bit, but they were purchased for regeneration around twenty-three years ago. There’s a thirty-year hold on them. They can't regenerate the area till the thirty years have expired. It seems they bought all the properties within a year or so, and then nothing, just sitting there decaying.”
“What's the name of the company?”
“Hang on. I'm working on it!”
With our plans in our hands, we decide to divide up the area so we can cover it more efficiently. Texting all the guys, we sort ourselves into pairs: Steel and Ares, me and Priest, Tank and Viking, Blade and Dozer. We have an area of about two to three blocks each. We decide to call it a night and head out at first light.
“Wait, I've got it … It's SCYLLA.”
“Scylla? What the fuck kind of name’s that?” Blade asks.
“I fucking knew it!” Steel blurts out, “Everything comes back to them fuckers.” He starts to pace, fists clenched.
“Steel, who the fuck are they?”
“It’s the fucking pas. The fucking Armoury, the fucking bastard family, my fucking in-laws. How the fuck does everything keep coming back to them? This is all twisted.”
“How do you know that?”
