Total pages in book: 48
Estimated words: 44774 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 149(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 44774 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 149(@300wpm)
I’d figure it out.
* * *
Styx
How could one place be so God-awful redneck? Always had been. Every fucking neighborhood in town had at least one car up on concrete blocks and numerous pink flamingos in the front fucking yard. Nothing had fucking changed since I was a teenager.
Red had a tip on a Mercedes Maybach that was supposedly being held in storage until the right buyer came along. In this fucking hick town. I had my doubts, but Red said it had been confirmed by our intel guy, Ripper. If Ripper said that’s the way it was? Well. I’d gotten on a plane to fucking West Virginia, hadn’t I?
My job was to scout. Using the little gizmos Red’s woman, Rosanna, had developed, I had no doubt I could steal the car. The problem was getting it out of storage and into the enclosed trailer. Again, Ripper was on the issue.
Poison and Lock pulled up to the designated area about half a mile from where the car was being stored. They’d driven a nondescript Ford with a beat-up-looking trailer, and another, smaller car to act as lookout for the payload on the way home. Smokey and the Bandit style. The car was rough-looking, but souped up under the hood. Hopefully, the extra horsepower wouldn’t be needed, but better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it. Neither looked new, nor did they appear in disrepair. The vehicles were designed to blend in. To not stand out anywhere they went.
The plan was to load the car and get out of this place as quickly as possible. Use the app to give the thing a new VIN number and program our own FOB. Lose ourselves on the interstate, then the lesser-traveled highways off the interstates on a roundabout route back to Salvation’s Bane and Red’s underground garage. Once that was done, we’d ditch the truck and trailer and begin the rest of the cleaning process on the car. Which was the easy part.
I studied the area around the storage building from the remote screen provided by a drone. It wasn’t more than a barn on the outside, but the reality was, inside the barn was a climate-controlled warehouse with state-of-the-art security. I knew the place well because it was owned by Marshal McCoy. I’d been poking my nose into the business of the McCoys since I was a kid.
McCoy was well off, having a legitimate business of some sort in the community. But his real money came from smuggling. This barn and a couple others like it were the reason for that success. From the outside, it looked like a big tobacco barn. Inside, the place was locked down tighter than a snare drum. Which was the beauty of it, I supposed.
Security outside the building was just as tedious. There were cameras all over the place. And traps. Thankfully, McCoy believed in electronics. Heavily. Always had. All the scouting we’d done had turned up a few rudimentary things, but nearly every single safeguard relied on electricity and electronics. Ripper had scoffed and told us it was too good to be true, that we needed to really recon the hell outta the place. We’d found a few pits and spikes and other simple shit that looked like it hadn’t been well-maintained. We’d left that part until the evening we’d planned to do the job. Just in case someone did a manual security sweep.
Our planning was meticulous. Starting two months before we were ready to make our move, Ripper had messed with security at the same time he kept anyone interested in the car off the scent. If McCoy was going to upgrade things or do an extensive check, we’d know it well in advance. Ripper had the guy’s entire place bugged. House, office and every car they owned. McCoy thought he was the smartest man in the room, but the fact was, he was on the verge of losing everything to a rival. Montgomery Hatfield.
Made me snicker to think about it. Generations of Hatfields and McCoys. They’d officially ended the feud in the eighteen nineties, symbolically in the early two thousands. But here in Appalachia, it was alive and going strong. Just… more civilized. At least on the surface.
Which was why we were here. Montgomery Hatfield was a half brother to my father, the bastard. While I didn’t associate with that side of the family -- other than my half brother in Black Reign, Shotgun -- I did enjoy taking them down a peg or two. If I could take down Marshall McCoy while I was doing it? So much the better. Call it a character flaw.
“How’s it going, Ripper?” I’d been touching base with the tech guy regularly. If there was a problem, we needed to identify it before we backed the trailer in.