“We’ll give ourselves the option to back out at any moment. If shit gets hairy, we can leave. If we fail, well, we’re just accelerating a war that we know is already bound to explode at any moment. So in a sense, all we’re doing is speeding everything else up.”
That was a damn good point. We’d been fighting the Bandits to varying degrees for a full decade now, more or less since the incident with Rachel. Did we really want this shit to drag on for another decade? Fuck, did we really want it to drag on for another year? I sure as fuck didn’t.
At some point, being the mean motherfucker got exhausting. I was never going to be Garrett, encouraging people to do shots and dance and laugh, but I would have liked to have a morning where I didn’t wake up wondering if I was going to have to send someone to the hospital or the grave because they shot at me.
“All right,” I said. “Are you going to get Zack involved?”
“Yes,” he said. “But no one else.”
“Agreed,” I said. “No prospects. We need to keep this tight. If we have any luck, we can kill Damian, dispose of his body, and buy time while the Bandits wonder where the hell he went.”
“That won’t work forever,” Mason said.
“We don’t need it to,” I said. “Just long enough to get the upper hand.”
Mason clasped my shoulder and smiled.
“Now you’re fucking getting it,” he said. “We’ll leave the house at eight o’clock. Hell of a lot easier now that Steele and Garrett have moved out.”
“I guess there are benefits to the boys getting pussy whipped, huh?”
Mason could only laugh as he stood, nodded to me, and walked back to the repair shop.
* * *
Mason came home last.
Zack and I hadn’t said a word to each other since Zack walked in an hour before. We never talked much in the first place anyway; I wasn’t much for small talk, and Zack was more introverted than I was. But there was also the undeniable fact that we both knew we were about to engage in something arguably far too dangerous and far too stupid.
If we fucked up, while I knew we wouldn’t get kicked out of the club, we’d be in for a world of shit with Brock and Cole. Maybe we’d suffer some demotions or some shit. I didn’t know. I just knew that no one liked having someone go over their heads.
When Mason came in, we both sat up. He had a bottle of whiskey he’d brought from a nearby store. He put the whiskey in the middle of the room, grabbed the remote, turned the TV off, and turned to the two of us.
“This, right here,” he said. “This is our celebration drink after we kill that fucking prick. But we have a task to take care of first. Are you two ready?”
“Yep,” Zack said.
I rose. That was my answer.
“Let’s go,” Mason said.
We made sure that we had pistols and silencers from the stash of equipment Butch had recently given us. Although the silencers wouldn’t keep someone else in the house from hearing us, at least Sheriff Davis wouldn’t have reason to think full warfare had broken out on his streets. That was the hope, at least.
We’d also already grabbed body armor. I had no worries about us dying on this run. At least we had that going for us.
We hopped on our bikes, roared the engines to life, and started the drive south before heading east. We rode like a sideways triangle, with Mason at the front, me staggered to his right, and Zack at the back, covering our six. To the rest of the town, we probably just looked like three bikers out for an evening ride.
We went for about ten minutes before Mason slowed down and had us park our bikes on a side street. The area we’d come to felt somehow even more desolate than what we’d anticipated; we knew this was prime Bandits territory, so we never made much effort to come here, but Mason had somehow undersold the whole damn thing.
At the entrance of the neighborhood was a house that was probably one bad storm away from just collapsing on itself entirely; rotten panels and weeds grew all over the damn thing. There were no cars, the windows were broken, and the front door just didn’t exist.
“You took us to the ghetto of the ghetto,” Zack said.
“What did you expect from the fucking Bandits?” Mason said. “Riches and bitches?”
“I didn’t think they’d look like they lived in Afghanistan.”
Mason could only shrug. He motioned for us to move to the side of the dilapidated house, and he gave us the rundown.
