Sonny
It seemed too good to be true.
Which meant that it almost certainly was.
We had brought Butch into the clubhouse to hear more. He was adamant that he’d seen a warehouse on the north side of Phoenix, an abandoned looking place, that had at least two dozen bikes in front of it. I confirmed there were no other clubs in the area that could possibly have used it, which left only one possibility—the King’s Men.
Of course, that would have only been an assumption, if not for the fact that Butch said he saw King’s sergeant-at-arms, Crush, leaving.
“They are concentrated,” Butch said, “leaving them vulnerable to attack.”
“And how long ago did you see this, Butch?” Spawn asked.
“Within the hour.”
It was an opportunity. But…
King didn’t leave himself vulnerable like that. It was too easy. King didn’t fight in the conventional sense. He didn’t lay out his men and dare you to attack him. He always hadsomethingin his back pocket.
But all the same, was I really going to tell Spawn and the Black Reapers that we shouldn’t attack? And even if I knew for certain there was a trap and no one else did, why the fuck should that stop us? Could we not adapt on the fly? Was there really going to be a trap so deadly that it would wipe us out?
“It’s a chance, Sonny,” Cole said.
Cole had been reading my expression. He understood better than anyone else in the room, save for perhaps Brock, the full potential of King. He knew that what seemed obvious was not so.
But in the end, as I sat there and stewed, I knew the fucking truth.
There was no such thing as a good opportunity against King.
There were either bad opportunities that could turn good, or there were squandered opportunities that would ultimately lose us the war. It sounded pessimistic, but I believed in our capabilities to defeat King—provided we accept that we’d lose some battles and, unfortunately, some men. I was not my father; I would not go on believing that the Devil’s Patriots were indestructible.
But that did not mean I thought either outcome was inevitable.
“Get every man in the Devil’s Patriots here in fifteen,” I said, “and you, gather everyone. We’re going to roll out. We form a perimeter and then have a strike team go inside and kill who they can.”
And just like that, roughly twenty minutes later, I found myself on the road with several other men, blowing past the landmarks in Phoenix—including the hospital where my father was—toward a warehouse where Butch swore he’d seen the King’s Men gathering.
Upon passing the hospital, for a sliver of a moment, I thought I’d seen Leigh. The girl standing out front of the hospital had looked like her, and even the mere possibility of her appearance sent unexpected goosebumps and shivers down my body.
But now was no fucking time.
Five minutes later, the density of Phoenix cleared out. The roads got less crowded. The buildings got rustier, the engines louder, and the general decor grittier and rougher. Soon, the sight of us roaring through the area became less of a novelty for affluent white folk and more a sign to blue-collar folk to stay the hell out of the way.
We’d left the “civilized” part of Phoenix and entered into the grimier parts. If the King’s Men were holing up here, at least it made a lot more sense than for them to be in a downtown Holiday Inn.Though perhaps it makes sense that King would be there.
Butch had us slow down to take a right at a stop sign. When we rolled around, he came to a complete stop at the top of the hill. Lane and I pulled up on either side of him.
“There,” he said, pointing to what, generously speaking, looked like a warehouse that hadn’t been occupied in twenty years.
We were looking at it from the rear. Butch had wisely made sure we didn’t announce our presence with a chorus of chopper engines at the front door. But even from here, we could see King’s Men motorcycles. Not an entire fleet’s worth, but enough to suggest there wasn’t one random who had sneaked away from his crew to do drugs or fuck a hooker.
“Sure seems like a spot,” I growled. “All right, let’s get a perimeter going. Butch, Lane, you two will come with me as part of the strike team. Let’s get a half-dozen other men to join us, and let’s see who we can fuck up and kill.”
“And if we find King?” Butch asked.
I would have loved for the answer to be cave his skull in while keeping him alive so we could torture the fuck out of him for everything he’d done. But unfortunately for evil shitheads like him, they usually got off easy with a quick death.
“Kill him,” I said. “He’s the big gun. We don’t need info from him. The others will drop like flies if we kill him.”
