"How many in his crew?" Phantom asks.
"Three on a normal day."
"Good."
"My boys have been on the property since Friday. Watching from a hunting blind in the live oaks at the back of the property. Asher's wife is at the house. She doesn't go out to the barn. She runs the books from the kitchen."
Roan looks at the map. "Loretta."
"Yeah."
He looks at Phantom. "Brother, about the wife."
"She gets dealt with," Phantom says.
"How?"
"We send one of Cash's men to the house when Asher's down. He puts a gun in her face and tells her her husband died in astock accident. He tells her to stay in the kitchen for the next two hours. He tells her if she calls anyone, the men who came for Asher will come back for her. Then he leaves."
Cash nods. "She'll know."
"Yeah," Phantom says. "She'll know. And she'll know what happens if she opens her fucking mouth too."
Roan looks at the map for a long second. "All right."
Phantom speaks. "We move at four-thirty. Trucks parked behind the live oaks. Walk in on foot. Two men through the front of the barn, two through the back. Spur goes through the front with me. Roan and Banshee through the back. Coyote stays with the trucks. I don’t want anyone on bikes. Get in, get shit done, and get the fuck out. Take the plates off everything, and I want us to put wraps on the vehicles on the off chance there are cameras around. Cash's men hit the house when Asher hits the barn floor."
"Yes, Prez," sounds from around the hood.
Phantom rolls the map up. "We eat, rest for the day, and move first thing in the morning."
The afternoon at Cash's place goes slow.
Cash's chapter clubhouse is a metal building on a piece of land outside Big Spring. Industrial. No frills.
We eat brisket sandwiches his ol’ lady brought over and don't talk much.
I lie on a couch in the back room for two hours and don't sleep but rest my eyes. I think about Dakota in the kitchen of the main house six hours away.
I think about her wrapped wrist. I think about her face at five o'clock this morning when she figured out where I was going.
Any sane man would pray everything goes well. But I don't pray. I haven't prayed in twelve years.
I lie there on Cash's couch with my eyes closed and silently vow to the woman I love that I'm coming home tomorrow, and I mean it.
The day goes by as slow as molasses, and when it’s finally time to ride out the next morning, we’re all yearning for it.
The five of us—Phantom, Roan, Banshee, Cash, Coyote, me—in two trucks, plus Cash's two brothers in the Suburban, drive out of the clubhouse and ten miles south to the access road that runs back to Asher's property.
We park behind the live oaks Cash named.
The hunting blind one of his boys has been in for two days is fifty feet off, and the brother climbs down out of it and meets us at the trucks with a thermos and a face like he's been awake for forty hours.
"He's already out there," the brother says.
"What?" Phantom asks.
"Came out fifteen minutes early. He's in the barn. Lights on."
