So here Rad was, his retired kutte on his back. Eight had insisted he could only park his ass behind the wheel and wait for the getaway, but when it came down to it, he knew Rad would do what the fuck he wanted.
With a sigh, Eight turned in the passenger seat and got to work. “Alright. Here’s the plan. Apollo pinged these guys in the building on the corner. Third floor, which means a messy fucking exit, anyway we cut it. But we do what we do upstairs, then take out the trash. Rad, you fucking stay in the van—”
“I told you—” Rad growled at once.
“And I’m fuckin’ tellingyou.” Eight slapped the flash on his chest. “If this means anything, shut the fuck up. You’re here as a courtesy, old man.”
As Rad’s face went so red Eight could clock the color in the dim, Zach reached out and grabbed his old man’s arm. “You promised Mom, Pop. Gave her your word.”
Well, shit. If Eight had known that, Rad would be sitting on his can in the clubhouse right now. As it was, he glared at his oldest boy, and Eight could see him fighting the truth. He’d promised his old lady. Rad was a stubborn son of a bitch, but he was honor to his eyeballs. If he made a promise, he kept it.
“Fuck,” he snarled. “Jesusfuck.”
That settled, Eight looked to his VP. “Lay it out, Mav.”
As Mav laid out the plan he’d devised—a refresher, since they’d talked it out at home—Eight took a breath and let the readiness course through him. Fights like this, righteous or not, gave were like a literal injection of adrenaline. Go juice. Always got him up.
It was one big reason he and Maverick were such a good team—and probably a lot of why they had so many conflicts. Mav was a thinker. He was great at strategy, saw a problem from lots of angles. Eight’s nature was to charge like a bull straight through everything in his life.
He was trying to get control of that. Good leaders had to be thinkers.
Was he smart enough?
He had no idea.
~oOo~
The building was a squat. Not necessarily a crack house or meth den, but a derelict five-story skeleton the city had owned for years. It was slated for demo, but in the ways of all cities, the whole thing was wrapped tight in red tape and would probably sit just here, rotting like one of those zombie walkers from TV, until it crumbled into the ground.
City Hall had, at some point, boarded up the windows and doors, but most of those plywood planks had been pulled loose or were missing entirely, probably used inside for firewood on cold nights.
Eight, Mav, Dex, Zach, and Duncan climbed up the decaying concrete stoop, pushed the plywood that served as a front door, and went straight up the stairs, ignoring the flickering lights of lanterns and cookfires, and the various murmurs of sad, sick, strung-out people settled in for a long, hard night.
Nobody hassled them. Of course not. Five large men in Bulls leather were to be feared, not hassled.
The first rooms on the third floor they checked were not the right people. In the third room, Duncan nodded. “That’s them.”
He charged in right away—just like Eight would have—and Mav grabbed the nape of his kutte, barking in a whisper, “Hold up!”
“Jesus,” Zach muttered. “Look at these shitheads.”
Two men. Skinny and filthy. The room around them stank of waste—they were using a red plastic bucket as a commode, and it was full. Greasy fast-food bags and old snack wrappers were spread thickly enough through the room to make a crackly carpet. One small, battery-operated lantern sat on the broken mantelpiece over a small fireplace, casting an indifferent, bluish glow over the scene.
All the adrenaline washed out of Eight’s blood. This was no fun. Just a couple sad-sack junkies. There wasn’t even a message worth leaving here.
Both men were unconscious, sprawled over ancient sleeping bags, flying high. One was bruised and bloody, snoring through a broken nose. JJ had beat down the guy he was supposed to deal with.
“That’s the one shorted JJ?” Eight asked.
“Yeah,” Duncan confirmed. “The other one shot him.”
“Find the fucking gun first,” Mav said, pulling his own piece. “Dunc, out in the hall. You stand watch.”
“Noway, Dad. I want in on this.”
Maverick gave his son a hard, implacable glare. “You are not a patch. You are aprospect. And you are on borrowed fucking time as it is. You will do what you’re told, or I will rip that leather off your shoulders right here and shove it in that bucket. You hear me?”
Similar blue gazes locked tight as Duncan glared at his father. Eight could see the boy’s jaws twitching like crazy. Finally, though, he gave a terse bob of his head and stepped into the hall.