Lights on in the downstairs windows. No perimeter watch. No cameras that Ounce can see.
Comfortable. They're comfortable in my town, in a house fifteen minutes from where my daughter is sleeping with bruises on her arm, and these bastards are comfortable.
That ends tonight.
We park a quarter mile out and kill the engines.
Twelve men on a dead-end road in the West Virginia dark, and not one of them makes a sound.
Ruger runs it. Hand signals. No voices.
He points at Ounce and Bracken. Front door.
Points at Maddox. Back door. P
oints at Krypton, Wraith, Daemon. Perimeter.
Nobody runs. Nobody leaves this property.
Points at me. Stays on me for a second longer than the others.
I nod. He nods back.
We move.
The approach is silent.
Twelve men crossing a gravel driveway without a sound, which shouldn't be possible but is, because every man here has done this before and the stakes tonight are high enough that even the gravel cooperates.
Maddox hits the back door first.
I hear it go—not a kick, not a breach.
Maddox doesn't breach doors.
He erases them.
The sound of wood splintering and metal tearing reaches the front of the house half a second before Ounce puts his boot through the front door, and then the world goes loud.
Shouting inside. Scrambling. A chair falling over.
Someone reaching for something on a table—a weapon, a phone, doesn't matter which.
Ounce is through the front door first. I'm behind him, Bracken behind me.
The entry opens into a living room, and the first thing I see is one of the suits.
The younger one, the Latino, the one who stood a half-step back on my porch—rising from a couch with a pistol in his hand and confusion on his face.
Ounce puts him down before the gun clears his waistband.
Two shots, center mass.
The man drops and the pistol clatters across the hardwood and Ounce kicks it under the couch without breaking stride.
The living room opens into a kitchen.
Two men at the table—cards, beer, an ashtray full of cigarettes.
