Rae
I never slept the night before a hunt, even if I didn’t spend it trespassing on landowner’s property and vandalising their vehicles, so I was wide awake when Cash’s message came through, ambiguous as it was.
His van had blacked out panels in the back. I could see out, but no fucker could see in. I figured that meant if I stared hard enough, I’d see him approach, but I didn’t. A few hours before dawn, he appeared like a ghost.
“What have I told you about letting randoms wander onto your camp?”
I sat up, disentangling myself from my sleeping bag. “You’re not a random.”
“Could’ve been, though, eh?”
“What do you suggest? We borrow a hound from up the road?”
Cash snorted and opened the van door wider so I could see him.
And he could see me. His eyebrows rose.
“What?” I demanded. “Don’t tell me you came all the way here to tell me I look like shite.”
“The opposite, actually. You look like the night I first met you.”
I’d forgotten that the last couple of times he’d seen me I’d been a coughing, limping disaster. “Yeah, well. I’m better now. Back in business. Question is, are you?”
Cash held my gaze a long moment, then he stepped back and nodded to a rucksack at his feet. “Get your boots on. I’ll show you.”
Twenty minutes later, we were edging towards Goon’s place. I nodded to the open windows. “There’s a bloke up there with night vision or some shit, and someone else patrolling the yard. Even if I got over the wall, I’d never get to the vehicles.”
Cash nodded. “I thought as much. In my old patch, the main house was like Fort Knox. We only got over the gates a couple of times, and we always got caught.”
If Cash’s landowner was anything like Goon, I didn’t want to imagine what had happened next. “So what did you do? Disabling the vehicles is the only reason we’re still going.”
“I know. That’s why I brought these.” Cash dropped his backpack on the ground and unzipped it. “Stingers. Little ones that won’t send a lorry full of dogs off the road.”
Some sabs didn’t care about the hounds. I did. That Cash did too made me warmer than the icy twilight deserved. “How many do you have?”
“Three. They’re so small that one won’t stop the lorry on its own, but if we spread them out, we should get lucky.”
“What if they figure it out after the first one and drive around the rest?”
“They won’t be able to if we target the bend with the ditch. To get out, they’ll have to reverse, and that’s when we lay the last one.”
We. Adrenaline kicked through me. Cash had turned up with his bag of tricks, but little to tell me about his intentions. I couldn’t lay a spike strip on my own, without someone at my back. Was Cash gonna be that man? For real?
He answered my unspoken question with a grim nod. “You ready?”
Fuck yeah.
We didn’t have much time. The bend Cash had earmarked was a quarter of a mile from the house and hidden by trees, but I couldn’t guarantee there would be no Goon squad knobbers out looking for me already, and Iknewthey’d be gunning for me by sunrise.
Cash shouldered his bag and we jogged through the woods, him following my lead until we got to the road.
“Hold this. And keep your gloves on.” He gave me the end of the first stinger and dashed across the road. Seconds later—or so it seemed—he was back.
“That’s it?”
“Yeah. They used to take longer to set, but we got some prototypes from an anti-terrorist lab a few years back. The police use the bigger version in London all the time. Anti skid, see? Stops the vehicle without killing anyone.”
Personally, I wasn’t particularly worried about the fate of the people driving the hound lorry, but I was trying to be better man. “What if the police pick these up? Will they know where they came from?”
