“No, you ride with us.”
“Okay.”
Panther gets into the passenger seat of the van while I take the driver’s seat. We take off, with some of the brothers in frontof us and the other half behind, blocking us in. Tonight, we have to go down to Trinidad, just north of the southern Colorado border, to meet up with another group. It isn’t the furthest run by any means, but enough of one that we have to have several plans.
At first, the drive starts out smoothly. We get off on the turnpike to avoid going through the middle of Denver. That’s when it all turns to shit. Right away, I notice traffic is considerably slower than it should be, and our lane is starting to come to a stop.
By the time I see the fifth set of flashing headlights as they pass, I know what’s going down.
“Shit, we need to get off here.”
“Why? What’s wrong?” Panther asks, looking up from his phone.
I ignore him and cut through the grass, heading to the closest off-ramp that’s a hundred yards away.
“What the fuck, Asher?” Panther hisses.
“There is a goddamn checkpoint ahead,” I tell him.
“How the hell do you know? There wasn’t one scheduled for tonight.”
“Trust me, I fucking know the signs.”
I get off the turnpike and head south on 25.
Panther’s phone starts to ring. “Yeah?”
“Hey, you need to change course. There’s a checkpoint on the turnpike,” Meek says.
Panther looks over at me. “Yeah, figured that out. Why weren’t we aware?”
“It was a last-minute decision. Our guy is out of town, so we didn’t get a heads-up. I heard it over the scanner,” Meek says.
“Got it. Let us know if you hear anything else.”
“Will do,” Meek says before hanging up.
“You were right,” Panther says after a moment.
I bite my tongue to stop myself from being a smartass.
I know I was right.
“Any recommendations for our change of plans?” he asks after a moment.
Taking a deep breath, I think about it, a plan forming in my mind.
“Have a couple of the guys get ahead of us again. Everyone else breaks off into pairs, trailing. We don’t know if there are going to be any more checkpoints, so we need to make it look like we are all separate.”
“Can do. What else?”
“We need to decide which route we want to take. We can take 25 all the way down, or we can cut through Littleton and head south on 85. That will turn into 105 and eventually meet back up with 25 north of the Air Force Academy.”
Panther turns in his seat and studies me. “If I didn’t know better, I would think you planned for this.”
He’s not wrong, but he’s not right either.
“I looked at a map and came up with a couple of optional routes. That’s it. I didn’t plan for this to happen.”
