“Neck. One-handed strangulation. Right hand. Large hand. Male, at least six feet tall.”
She set the photo down and looked at me. Her swamp-colored eyes were perfectly steady. “What’s the plan, Alpha?”
I told them everything. About Cat. About Victor Crooked. About Tony.
About the local police bought and paid for. About Collins at city hall. About the threats. About the massage parlors and brothels. I talked for twenty minutes and nobody interrupted once. When I finished, the silence in that garage was thick enough to lean on.
Then Bulldog spoke. “How many guns?” I answered.
From what I knew, Cat had three or four regular bodyguards plus a crew of ten enforcers. Firearms for sure. Bulldog grunted.
“Seen worse.” Shade spoke his first sentence of the evening. “Locations, routes, schedules. I need three days.”
I nodded. Liz was already spreading out her map. Not printed. Hand-drawn, with notes she’d kept for years.
“Every block, every address, every spot. Here’s Cat’s restaurant,” she said, tracing with a finger. “Called The Silk Road.”
“Here are the car washes, here are the brothels in the warehouse district. He lives in a big house outside town past the bypass. Fence, cameras, guards, dogs.”
“But there’s a weak point.” I looked at them—my brothers and my sister in arms—and felt something warm spread through me. Not happiness.
Confidence. The four of us had been through things most people never recover from.
And now we were about to do what law enforcement and the whole rotten town had failed to do. We were going to restore justice with our own hands. “We start tomorrow,” I said. “Shade, surveillance. Positions, routes, guard schedules.”
“Bulldog, you check the house outside town. Approaches, perimeter, weak spots.”
“Liz, you gather information through your channels. Victims, witnesses. Anything useful.”
We had three days for reconnaissance. On the fourth day, we moved. They all nodded.
No speeches. No grand vows.
No wasted words. Just nods, then they split to their sectors. Because between us, words weren’t necessary.
Twelve years of war had built a bond prison, time, and distance couldn’t break. They didn’t come because I asked nicely. They came because there was no other way they knew how to live.
In three days of reconnaissance we learned things about Russell Kane’s organization that would turn a decent person’s blood cold. And I’ll start not with routes and schedules, but with what Liz found. Because her information changed this from personal revenge into something bigger.
Liz worked through her contacts at urgent care and EMS. Medics, nurses, aides. People who see the underside of a city every day.
In two days she put together a list of Cat’s victims. Not five. Not ten. Thirty-seven people over the last three years.
Thirty-seven documented cases. Beatings, extortion, arson, and in two cases disappearances where the victims were never found. The list included market vendors, small business owners, bus drivers, even a schoolteacher who dared complain about noise from a brothel across the street…
They broke her arm right on the school steps in front of students. But the worst were the girls. Liz said the word and stopped for a few seconds before going on.
There were twelve women working in Cat’s massage parlors. The youngest was nineteen. Every one of them trapped.
Debt, threats, some had their IDs taken. Emily was supposed to be number thirteen. One of the girls, a young woman named Sarah, came into Liz’s clinic four months earlier with a broken arm and cigarette burns on her back.
Liz asked what happened. Sarah looked at her with dead eyes and said, “I fell.” They all fell.
They all stayed quiet. Because they knew if they talked, they wouldn’t live long enough to testify. That changed everything.
I sat in that garage looking at a list of thirty-seven names and understood. This wasn’t just about Emily anymore. It was about a whole city choking under the boot of one thug and the men who fed off him.
And if we took him down, we wouldn’t just free my sister. We’d free all of them. But back to the reconnaissance.
Everybody worked their sector, and everybody brought back gold. Shade took position on the roof of an abandoned warehouse across from Cat’s restaurant. Perfect spot.
Height, visibility. And not a soul had gone up there in years because the ladder was rusted and shook so badly no sane person would risk it.
Ian was not a sane person by ordinary standards. He lay on that concrete roof for hours without moving, binoculars to his eyes, writing everything down in a notebook with the small neat handwriting of a sniper who records every detail. In three days he built a full picture.
Restaurant security. Two at the front, one at the service exit, one inside the dining room. Four total.
Shift change at nine in the morning and nine at night. Cameras. Eight outside, three inside.
Blind spot. Narrow alley between the restaurant and the warehouse next door. Dark, no cameras, because the warehouse wall was solid.
Cat’s route. Leaves the house around ten in the morning with two vehicles. Black SUV in front with security, silver sedan behind.
Drives to the restaurant. After lunch, rounds to his locations. At night around nine, back home.
On Wednesdays he goes to a private sauna on the edge of the warehouse district with Victor Crooked and Tony. The next Wednesday was two days away. Bulldog worked the house outside town.
That was the most dangerous part. The house sat in a subdivision beyond the bypass. The property was enclosed by a ten-foot metal fence topped with razor wire.
Cameras on every corner. Automatic gate. Remote access.
Two Caucasian shepherd dogs in the yard. Big. Mean.
Sam spent a day and a half crawling through brush around the property and found what he was looking for. On the east side, where a drainage ditch ran up to the fence through weeds and brush, there was an old concrete storm pipe. About three feet wide.
It ran under the fence and came out inside the property near a shed. Clogged with trash and branches, but clearable in a couple hours. Bulldog also found that the house got power from a single overhead line running down the road on wooden poles.
He didn’t see a backup generator on the property. Cut the line, and the house goes blind. Meanwhile, I worked Cat himself.
I needed to see him with my own eyes. Size him up. Understand how he moved, how he thought, how he reacted…
