“You ready?” Butch asked.
“Hold on a sec.” V scrolled up and did a full start-to-finish on the reporting. “It was a pharmacy.”
“I’m sorry?”
As his roommate came over, he pointed to his screen. “Last night, upstate, someone broke into a pharmacy in Leczo Falls, New York. Ransacked the place.”
“Yeah, and? They were probably looking for oxys or something.”
“They took more than that, though.”
“So they wanted some Mountain Dew and a bag of Doritos along with their federal felony charges. Mmmm, tasty.”
When V just stared at the website, like he was somehow going to pull out extra details from between the glowing lines of typey-typey, Butch put a hand on his shoulder.
“Are we going to Leczo Falls, by any chance?” his roommate asked. “Maybe you’ll tell me why?”
V glanced at the brother. “If you were running a prison camp, and you had just moved it how many miles away? Wouldn’t there be casualties you’d need to treat? Or what if there was an escape and the wrong people got hurt? You’d need medicine.”
“But how do you know what they stole?”
“It’s all here. Bandages, tape, surgical gloves… that’s not just oxys.” V pointed to the lines in the article and shook his head. “Little town upstate. Not many prying eyes, lots of land and privacy, but it’s next to an exit on the Northway for transporting product. Come, it’s not that farfetched—and even if they didn’t steal from the town they’re in, they’ll be somewhere close.”
Butch shrugged. “Well, it can’t hurt to head up there. God knows we have nothing else to go on, and the drugs will always be waiting for us in Caldwell.”
“You got that right,” V muttered as he grabbed his holster off the floor to arm himself.
“Only problem is it’ll take forty-five minutes to drive there. You need backup.”
“No, I don’t—”
“What if you find the prison camp.” Butch shook his head. “Sorry, but safety first, and I’ll tell on you if you don’t take someone else.”
“What are you, five? And since when have you become Tohr.” When the brother just stared back at him, V rolled his eyes. “Fine. And I know who I can ask.”
As he took out his Samsung again and sent a text, the former cop cleared his throat. “Can I ask you something?”
“No, I don’t know why Lassiter is still hanging around when he could be cooling his jets in mymahmen’s Sanctuary.” As the response V wanted came back on his phone, he strapped his weapons belt around his waist. “Come to think of it, maybe I need to install a TV up there.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
V reached down for his leather jacket, picking up the dead weight with his gloved hand. “I also can’t comment on Rhage’s calorie count. Simple mathematics states infinity has no limits, but he tests those boundaries on the regular—”
“Why is finding this prison camp so important to you?” Butch put both palms out, all calm-down-hothead. “I’m fine with it. Whatever you want to do is good and I’ve always got your six. But you’re pushing hard on this.”
V pulled his jacket on and went through his pat-down ritual. Ammo, check. Lighter, check. Hunting knife, check. Daggers—
Shit. He’d forgotten his dagger holster.
He took off the jacket and let it fall to his chair, the thing landing in a series of dull thuds as the poke-and-tickle of weapons inside of it settled. Reaching down for the black-bladed weapons he had made himself, he pulled the straps of their mounting onto his shoulders and around under his arms. The securing of the holster was such second naturethat he didn’t have to look down. He could stare into his roommate’s eyes while he tightened it properly.
“I grew up in the war camp,” he heard himself say. “I didn’t choose to be there. It was a fucking horrible place. If what the Jackal’s told us is true—that a lot of those prisoners were tossed in prison because the aristocracy wanted them out of the way for their own goddamn reasons? Then that’s bullshit and we need to get the ones that aren’t criminals out.”
His roommate nodded. “Fair enough.”
V glanced back at his screens.
“That’s the point,” he murmured as he pulled his jacket back on. “It hasn’t been fucking fair, and what the hell good are we if we can’t fix shit that’s wrong.”