“I’ve done my homework on King. I’ve known about what he can do long before anyone else in this room has. It’s not going to be easy.”
“Of course it’s not fucking easy. Why the fuck would I think it was?”
But Cole wasn’t backing down.
“That man has that place run with a tight control, but he also knows to not be so tight that he causes dissent in the ranks, at least from what I can tell,” he said. “He’s got a sergeant-at-arms, Crush, that will not bend and will not betray him. He might as well be a perfectly programmed robot for how tough he is. We haven’t seen anything yet from his son, Prince, to suggest that he can be pulled apart. Anyone else is too far down the chain of command to act.”
“That we know of so far,” I said, but Cole’s concerns were registering with me.
“If this is going to work, you’re going to have to get to understand at least those two on a much deeper level than you do now, and you’re going to have to have someone on the inside spill the guts. You don’t have that right now, do you?”
I shook my head. Even if we captured a King’s Men biker, it was unlikely we’d get more than cursory information out of them. Part of an efficient operation was having everything be on a need-to-know basis, and the only people who knew everything—probably—were Crush, Prince, and King.
And even then, King probably didn’t tell everything to Crush and Prince.
“The alternative is to sit back and do nothing like we are right now,” I said. “And if we do that, we’re dead. My father might as well be, and that’s because he was an easy target. He let his ego get in the way. We fight in the streets, we’re dead. We don’t come together, we’re dead. If we find a weak point from within and split apart, maybe we’re still dead, but I’d much rather take a maybe over an absolute. So do we know anyone who is weak from within?”
The silence was incredible, but in the complete opposite sense this time. It was like the instant we turned off our “fight mode” brains, we couldn’t think of a fucking thing. And that went for me as well—it wasn’t like I had a lineup of prospective candidates who could go rogue on the King’s Men.
“Maybe we can find someone who knows some things in Vegas, but I doubt we’d have any luck here in Phoenix.”
“I get that,” I said, trying to keep the temperature from rising any higher, “but I’d rather not go to Las Vegas if we can help it. That’s going right into the belly of the beast. Everyone there, even the people we don’t think about, will be eying us suspiciously.”
“But there would also be more spots for people to break,” Brock said.
That was true. The more complex something was, the more likely it was to completely crumble apart. I could understand that.
But I wanted us to at least consider our options in Phoenix first, if for no other reason than our home base was here.
“Well, we got forty-eight hours to figure this out,” I said. “King, when he told me about my father, said we had until Sunday night to figure out what to do. If nothing else happens, if we don’t have any ideas…”
The idea came to me in a flash.
“I’ll request a meeting with King myself and try and kill him there.”
“You’re dead if you do that,” Lane said.
“No way,” Brock said at the same time.
“Fucking suicide,” Cole said. “Look, I know you want to be brave, and I admire the creative thinking, but you’re not going to get yourself killed.”
Fuck.
I just hated that even with everyone in agreement on what was best, we had no fucking clue how to act on it. In some respects, maybe that was why my father had insisted on charging full fucking steam ahead—at least it was a plan we knew how to execute and it was a plan we could feel comfortable with. This just felt like someone had suggested invading Mexico and studying how to do it.
“Well, I’m willing to do whatever it fucking takes,” I said. “And we don’t have much time.”
“You’ve got the right idea, I think,” Cole said. “I’m not saying it’s wrong. I’m just saying it’s going to be really fucking difficult to act on. We have to be prepared to come up with something that we understand will fail more often than not.”
He sighed.
“This is what we get for not nipping this shit in the bud sooner, or not thinking bigger sooner.”
I didn’t bother to ask what he meant. The past didn’t mean anything.
“Look, we’re just going to bang our heads against the wall if we keep thinking on this here,” I said. “Let’s plan to reconvene tomorrow morning. They probably expect us to strike back tonight. Let’s lay low and plan something for tomorrow or Sunday.”
“Now that’s something I agree with a hundred percent,” Cole said.
