Page 64 of Resilience

Monty and Sam had been carrying full-blown war in the back of the club van—and their attackers had tried to steal it.

Had actually stolen it, in fact, if only briefly. While Sam was lying unconscious on the ground with Fitz trying to stanch the blood pouring from his neck, while Mav had Gunner, while Reed was with his father, the rest of the Bulls then present had chased down the last surviving asshole and run him off the road about four miles from the compound.

Who were the assholes—and who had they been working for? Those were the main questions under discussion here now. They were all, including Jordan, dead. Six had died in the firefight. Jordan, despite taking Sam’s bullet to the chest, had not died then. He and the guy who’d got the van off the compound had died under interrogation.

Cooper, president of the Nevada charter, had just confirmed that it was Hoss Harridan, Clark County sheriff, who’d contracted the hit on the Bulls. The fucking sheriff. The reactions of the Tulsa Bulls to that piece of information ranged from stunned shock to loud fury. The Nevada Bulls greeted the news with weary resignation.

Eight’s reaction was the loudest and most furious. He kicked over the lectern and threw a large vase full of fake flowers—which bounced but did not break. “Motherfucker!” he roared—and then he wheeled on Cooper and stormed at him, his limp more pronounced than usual.

“HOW MANY TIMES DO I GOTTA TELL YOU TO GET THE GODDAMN SHERIFF UNDER CONTROL!” he yelled as he cocked his arm.

Cooper blocked the sledgehammer punch with some of his martial arts shit. He knocked Eight back with a flat-hand strike to his chest, looking like John Wick or something. The hit took most of Eight’s breath.

“You don’t tell me what I gotta do, asshole,” Cooper snarled as Eight got his lungs working again. “I’m not your fucking errand boy.”

“Enough, both of you,” Maverick said quietly. He stepped between them. “There’s no point meeting somewhere we know’s not wired if you’re gonna be so loud they can hear us on the street. Let’s settle down and talk like the family we are. Jay, Monty, pick that shit up, please, and set it right. We can’t tear apart the goddamn hospital. We’re being watched as it is.”

More quietly, but no more calmly, Eight snarled at Cooper, “This shit with the sheriff’s been goin’ on almost as long as we’ve chartered here. You say you’re gonna handle it, but when?”

“It’s not that easy, Eight,” Zach, the Nevada SAA, said, stepping forward from the second pew. “Harridan’s reach is long. He’s been building an outlaw empire under cover of his badge, and every crew in the state is caught up in it somehow. We can’t do shit alone, and holding together a coalition with the other big crews is fuckin’ impossible. Somebody’s always backing out, or changing the game, or fuckin’ rattin’ us out straight to Harridan. We’re tearing each other down instead of him.”

“You picked this location for the charter, Eight,” Cooper said quietly. “It’s outlaw central out here, and it’s a fuckin’ nightmare trying to work around it all.”

“Just kill the motherfucker,” Eight grumbled. “How hard is it to end one fat old asshole?”

“We can’t kill him. He’s got multiple fail-safes in place against that,” Kai said. Kai was their Apollo, in charge of tech and digital intel. “He’s been wearing that star for a long time, and he’s a bastard, not an imbecile. He knows we all want him dead, so he’s got about a dozen different attacks that would deploy if he’s killed. Getting this guy is a real finesse job. We do it wrong, we all go down with him. And we haven’t found the way to do it right yet.”

“Why did he hit us?” Dex asked. “Any guesses?”

“My guess? He meant it as a lesson.” That was Reed. His voice was flat and slightly slurred. He sat in the third pew, next to the aisle, and looked like he was about to fall over. More than two days after the hit, he still wore blood-soaked clothes, and his hair and face were still streaked with it. As Reed hadn’t been hit during the fight, Sam was pretty sure he wore his father’s blood.

Sam turned to his own father; Dad looked weary to his marrow. Tears charged forward in Sam’s head. He blinked and swallowed them away before anybody noticed.

“What kind of a lesson?” Caleb asked.

“We had a plan go south a few weeks back,” Zach explained after a glance with Cooper. “We were four crews working together, months we worked on this job. But one crew was a no-show at the last minute. It left all our asses hanging out. We’ve reached out to the other crews involved, and they got hit the same night we did—but we were the only ones with major cargo on the premises at the time. Harridan didn’t know about that until Jordan hipped him to it, the fucker.”

“The guys who hit us,” Cooper said dully, “were bench players in the crew that bailed. The Cortezes. Harridan flipped ‘em. This is the shit we’re dealing with.”

“And your prospect?” Eight asked, making the word sound like the filthiest insult. “When did he flip? How far does your bullshit have our asses hanging out?”

“He was a prospect,” Geno barked. “He didn’t know shit.”

“He knew enough to be point on a fucking multimillion-dollar lift,” Eight pointed out.

Just as it looked like Eight might be ready to punch something again, Jay cleared his throat and stood up. “It’s wack that we just pull the truck into the garage and go party for the night. That’s always felt wrong to me—and this is why. It’s cool to hang out together and all, and I know we gotta work with other people’s schedules, but Jesus, it freaks my shit to have the kind of cargo we’re moving just sitting there, right in the middle of our house, while we drink and smoke and eat and whatever. You ask me, we need a new procedure.”

The room was quiet for a minute while everybody processed that, but nobody engaged with Jay’s idea. Eventually, he sat back down.

Apollo looked to Kai. “What can Tulsa do to help you with the sheriff?”

Kai thought about that for a second, then looked to his president. When Cooper nodded, Kai said, “Volkov needs to get involved. The Bulls don’t have the cred here yet to swing this on our own, not even both charters. We are, by far, the youngest crew in this game. We don’t have the history. But Volkov can swing a big stick.”

Cooper nodded. “If Niko wants his product to sail through the southwest, he needs to dip one of his thousand-dollar loafers into this shit. “

Maverick turned to the Tulsa president. “It’s time for Niko to do something for us, Eight. If this is still a partnership, then he needs to pull some weight, too.”

Eight glared at Maverick. He glared at Cooper. He glared at everybody else. Then he heaved a huge, loud sigh. “Yeah. I’ll talk to him.”

---