“Good,” I said.
The neighborhood wasn’t the greatest in the first place, but the extra layer of buffer would only help. And at least the residents wouldn’t be alarmed by a bunch of biker dudes running around the area.
“You met with Crush Thursday, right?” Sonny said. “How did that go?”
I shrugged.
“Fine.”
“Details, Asher,” he said. “Focus and get it together.”
He was right. Callie was still in my head. Probably would be until I saw her again, but I owed it to myself to at least block her out for a minute or so at a time so I could focus.
“He’s a wild animal, which is no surprise,” I said. “King has him on a leash, but that doesn’t mean he’s controlled. Quite the opposite—it’s like narrowing the tunnel for the wild animal to run through. But I told him that he’s being held captive. I think it got through to Crush.”
Sonny looked to Spawn, who sighed.
“As wonderful as it is that you’re playing therapist for the redhead, do you care to tell us if any action was done?”
“I mean, what the fuck did you expect, me to act like a fucking magician and make him come to us?”
“Yes.”
I groaned.
“Crush is blind, which means he’s loyal, but if you open his eyes, he won’t be. That shit just doesn’t happen overnight—”
“Unlike our clubhouse going up in flames,” Spawn said with a sneer.
“Look, you want my fucking input or not?” I snapped back.
Spawn and Sonny didn’t exactly recoil, but that shut them the hell up.
“I’m in this as deep as you fucking guys are. You got me good by tying me up with her, but I’m also doing this for my own selfish purposes. OK? We’re all just trying to fucking survive, and the sooner we get King out of the picture, the sooner we can go back to normalcy. I knew there was no fucking way I was turning Crush against him in that meeting. None. So I just planted a seed. That’s all. I planted the idea that he’s not a free man. And maybe in a week or two, maybe a little beyond that, he’ll start to rebel. Or maybe he won’t. I don’t fucking know. But what I do know is that this is war, and that doesn’t mean we ditch common sense for screaming for bloodshed. If anything, it makes it more fucking imperative we keep our shit together!”
I closed my eyes and drew a deep breath. Fuck, it felt good to get off that chest.
“You’re right, Asher,” Sonny finally said. “You’re right to spread our bets. And it probably was for the best that you did what you could in that meeting instead of trying to push for more. But we can’t rely on hope. Hope is not a strategy, as every damn soldier will tell you. So we hope that works, but now we turn our focus to why we’re here.”
“And that is?”
“Do you remember where all of the King’s Men hideouts are?”
How could I forget? It was Vegas, a city laid out in almost perfectly organized fashion with so many identifiable, distinguishable landmarks that it was the perfect city to live in if you only searched for things with your eyes and without a map. I never did anything better than telling people to go west or east from a certain casino, and that still gave ninety percent of the correct directions half the time.
“Yes, they’ve got several,” I said, “and I’ll just warn you now, you’re not going to hit King’s place. He’s got a home at the top of Bellagio and a second at the top of Cosmopolitan; he has them close by so he can see if one is being taken over. So not only do you have his security, you have casino security.”
“But there are still spots we can strike at, maybe bases of equipment, maybe hideouts for Crush and Prince,” Spawn said.
I nodded.
“There are three main locations. One in east Las Vegas, sort of near Mount Pleasant Lane. There’s one sort of straddling the area between the end of the Strip and downtown. And then they have one on the west side, near Chinatown. They move essential personnel among the three locations seemingly at random, and it’s never quite clear what is where. They’re very good at not being able to be watched, and even if someone gets a bead on them, keep in mind King has more than just the seedy parts of society on his side.”
It was what made him so damn good. It was one thing to have a crime syndicate made up only of bikers, thugs, and gangsters. But when you got cops, federal agents, and judges on your side? You were practically indestructible.
Which, in some respects, made it even more remarkable that we were in a position to fight back in the first place. Or maybe we were just fucking crazy; both were pretty extreme possibilities.
“I know what you just said, but if you had to pick one to strike, where would you go?”
