Page 36 of Hendrix

I had to refrain from rolling my eyes. Iceman was on a first-name basis with all his toys. PJ—or private jet—being his favorite girl.

“She’s all fueled up and ready to roll,” Colt informed us, tapping on his phone. “We take off in an hour.”

My stare went around the table, taking in every man. “Thanks for this, brothers. I appreciate you all doing this. It means a lot.”

“We’ll get her out in one piece, Drix,” Picasso assured me. “She’ll be okay. We’ll make sure of it. Every man here would take a bullet for her ‘cause she’s yours, which means she’s ours. We look after our own, and your woman’s no exception.”

“We’re taking on the Polish Mob. There may be kickback,” I warned him. “You gotta know what you may be gettin’ yourself involved with.”

“That may be the case, Prez,” Gambit answered. “But you also gotta remember something else.”

I looked at him expectantly.

“We may be taking on the Polish Mob, but they’re also taking on the Speed Demons.”

My mouth curved into a grin. “Good point, brother, but I still need to give you one last opportunity to back out. This may be club business, but for me, it’s personal, and there’s no obligation for you to do this. If you don’t wanna take on my shit, there won’t be any hard feelings.”

“Fuck off, Drix,” Breaker muttered. “You know I’m in.”

“Me too,” Gambit stated emphatically.

Picasso deadpanned at me. “Can’t believe you’d even ask.”

I cracked my neck from side to side, something I did whenever I was about to go into battle. I’d done it since my first mission as a Ranger, and it helped me get into the zone.

“Then there’s only one more thing left to say, boys,” I rumbled. “It’s time to rock ‘n’ roll.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

HENDRIX

It had already gotten dark by the time Iceman landed the plane in a private airfield just north of Philly. Dark was good; dark meant we could move in the shadows and turn ourselves invisible, which was perfect for what I had in mind.

I’d taken many lives in the military and also since I’d popped smoke. I’d reconciled this with my conscience a long time ago. It was easier when I served because the majority of my kills had been in situations where it was either them or me.

Since then, I still hadn’t lost much sleep over killing. The men I’d taken out were threats, not only to me but also to innocents. The nature of my job meant that I had a license to kill; we all did, but even so, if the nature of our work for the government ever came out, they would deny having any knowledge of it.

However, was I licensed to kill the man who married Anna and then proceeded to hurt her? No. But that wasn’t going to stop me. My soul was already damned, so what difference would one more death make?

After checking our knives and firearms, we disembarked from the plane and headed straight into the big, black SUV that Colt and Shep had arranged to meet us at the airfield.

We were silent all the way to the area of Rittenhouse Square, where Anna’s husband had purchased a massive five-bedroom townhouse just after they got married. Antoni Lis owned his own firm of financial advisors but moonlighted as the money man for the Polish Mob.

Owning a business gave him an air of respectability and an excuse as to why he had so much money. Colt’s team had been investigating the Lis family for a while but hadn’t been able to pin anything on them. Colt knew Anna’s husband laundered his cousin’s drug proceeds, but without proof, he couldn’t do much about it.

Not for the first time, I could’ve kicked myself for not investigating him more thoroughly. Admittedly, at the time, I think I was burying my head in the sand. I missed Anna, and constantly checking on her was stopping me from moving on. I had to let her go, so it took Colt to draw my attention to what Lis was up to, and by then, it was too late.

Even then I reserved judgment. Just because Lis worked in organized crime, it didn’t automatically make him bad. I knew plenty of good men who operated outside the law. Hell, I was one of them. It was only when Colt dug deeper that we realized what was going on, and even then, I had to wait for Anna to be ready to leave. If I went in to extract her from the situation when she wasn’t prepared, I knew it would do more harm than good.

The mood in the car was subdued. Hours before, we’d been animated in our planning and plotting. We’d covered all scenarios and settled on making the scene appear to be a professional hit organized by a rival. The Lis family distributed heroin, crack cocaine, and crystal meth, the real nasty stuff, though they dabbled in everything that could make them a buck.

They had a network of street dealers and small-time urban gangs who ran their shit through Philly and the surrounding areas. They didn’t discriminate against who they supplied, and nobody was off-limits. In fact, they went out of their way to target schools in the area. The sooner they got the kids hooked, the better because, in the long run, it would make them more coin.

Taking these assholes out would be a pleasure. I’d seen what hard drugs could do to a person, and the thought of young kids being exposed to that kind of sick bullshit made me want to make it more painful for Antoni Lis and his asshole family.

Killing him would be my way of giving something back to society, as well as Anna.

Colt turned the SUV into Delancey Place and I felt Shep sit forward from the seat behind me. He pointed to a large, three-story mansion nestled in its own huge grounds. “That’s it.”

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