Chapter 11
Jinx
Ifind her the only chair in the room that isn’t piled full of junk. When she sits, I squat down beside her. “Did you get the photo I sent to the group chat?”
Striker’s grin evaporates in an instant. “Yeah, I fuckin’ well did. Fuck the Hyenas all to hell. I can’t believe that shit. The altitude’s at least sixty feet,” he mutters. “They’re using a commercial zoom lens.”
“Yeah, I agree. That’s probably why nobody heard it. The question is, how can we keep their fuckin’ dirty eyes off us?”
I watch his fingers fly across the keyboard. “The way they sent it is what interests me. Photo files, especially one that size, need a strong, steady connection.”
“I don’t get why that matters,” I say bluntly.
“Whoever sent that image bounced the signal through three relays to hide himself, but the last hit pinged a tower I recognize.”
I hate to get my hopes up, but this sounds like information that might lead us to a location. A map of the county blooms across one of his monitors. He drops two location pins on the map, maybe half a mile apart. “Pin one is where the upload originated. Pin two is that old cannery site.”
I stare at those two pins. “It’s like we thought. They’re operatin’ out of there. Maybe they even store the equipment they stole from us there?”
“Probably.” He glances up at me. “How is the auto parts store holding up?”
“Benji’s holdin’ down the fort for me. He’s a good man.”
Jasper appears in the doorway with a mug of coffee in his hand and a scowl on his face. “What’s all this about a second drone? I thought we shot their drone down.”
“Time stamp says this photo was taken two days after Striker slingshotted the first one,” I tell him. “There must have been at least two drones. We killed one and the other one’s been watchin’ us ever since.”
“What the fuck do you mean, watchin’?” he grumbles before taking a sip of his coffee.
I nod towards Nora. “I mean they seem to be watchin’ their club princess.”
Jasper looks at me for a long, hard minute. “I’m sure they made enough time to scope out our club’s routine as well.”
I just grunt in agreement. “That too.”
I gesture towards the second monitor. “Striker found something useful.”
Jasper looks at the pins on the map. I can see him doing the math I already did.
Taking another sip of his coffee, he tells me, “Wake the brothers. Tell them church is in fifteen.”
Fifteen minutes fly by. The chapel fills up with men in various stages of dress and states of alertness. The brothers don’t complain because they are used to being roused from bed at all hours when there’s a need that justifies it.
When the door shunts, Jasper brings everyone up to speed. He talks about the photo, there being a second drone, Striker tracing the signal, and the cannery being the most probable place for them to be holed up. He finishes by pulling up the photo they sent on the big screen. Nora is sitting there wearing my property cut, looking all innocent and oblivious. An attack on an old lady is not something our club will tolerate.
The route falls to me because I’ve been there already, and I know these roads better than any brother in this room. I pull up the mapping program and build it while the meeting continues. Brothers ask questions and the club officers answer them one-by-one.
I finish the route and send it to our group chat. “We’ll take the industrial route with our lights dark. We’ll stage in the tree line west of the property. There’s a tunnel there we can fall back to if their drones start trackin’ us.”
Slate assigns four brothers to hold the clubhouse. “Lock the place down tight. Nothin’ comes in or goes out until we get back.”
Onyx stands up next. “I’ll be looking for paperwork. Anything that might tell us where their money is comin’ from, exactly who their backers are or how their operation runs,” he says tightly. “Grab anything that looks like a ledger, manifest, or receipts. Somewhere at that site is the answer to where Coal’s money comes from, and we need to find it if we’re gonna win this war they fuckin’ started.”
“You heard him,” Jasper says in a booming voice. “Check desks, drawers, and grab anything that looks like a briefcase. Also, it goes without saying, we take back our own property if it’s there. Everything else goes up in flames. We ain’t givin’ them a chance to retaliate.”
That’s when Nora speaks up and every head in the room turns when she clears her throat.
“There’s a second building,” she says. “Set back about a hundred yards behind the cannery. Spark used to brag that it’s where they keep the bikes they don’t want anyone to see. He sounded like that’s where all the important stuff was kept. I can show you where it sits.”
