Page 72 of Obey

Hank still looks like he’s itching for a fight, but he finally looks at Jim and deflates. “A few bruises. Nothing I can’t handle.” His girlfriend rushes over to him and starts fussing over him.

Maddox steps aside so he can help me with Jim. “Jim,” he starts to say, only to stop when he sees the blood. “Fuck.” We barely even have to trade a look before we’re both grabbing Jim, hauling him up so we can get him into the truck.

I get into the driver’s seat and start up the truck.

“I’ll call Sheryl to let her know you’re on your way,” Hank says, waving to us.

I pull the truck out of the parking lot and start driving toward the clinic.

“We need to take them down,” Maddox says.

I give him a quick glance before turning my attention back to the road. “Yeah. We’ll make those fuckers regret everything.”

Never mind abandoning our mission.

We’re going to get our weapons back, and kill every single one of them in the process.

SEVENTEEN

MADDOX

Knives hands me the binoculars. “Five guys inside, including Tommy and Pyre. At least another seven getting drunk by the firepit. I haven’t spotted Boar, though.”

I hold up the binoculars and do my own counting even though I trust Knives’s abilities. It’s dark, and it’s possible he missed something.

We’re sitting inside an old, rusty sedan that we’d borrowed from Hank. It blends in surprisingly well on this abandoned farmland that has easy boat access to the swamplands. There’s an old tractor and a rusted over truck without wheels within the vicinity.

The barn, which has seen better days, is where the Demon Gators have holed up. I spot all of their motorcycles parked near it. No obvious signs of illegal goods, but I guess that’s what the swamp location was for.

“It’d be a shame if those nice bikes got caught in a fire,” I mention casually.

Knives chuckles. “I had that same thought. That would lure them all out. If we stay in the overgrown field, we could probably take out most of them without them ever being able to spot us.”

“They could put out a fire pretty fast, though,” I say, considering. I pull out one of the knives I’d gotten—also from Hank, who was extremely eager to find out that we are, in fact, undercover agents tasked with taking down the Demon Gators—and consider it. “Slash the tires first. That way, they can’t go for help. And the signal out here…” I check my also-borrowed phone. “Sucks. How do people live around here?”

“Without reception,” Knives answers with an amused snort. “I think I’ll take New Bristol any day. You got violence anywhere, but at least in NB, I can stream tv without issues.” He glances at the backseat of the car, where we’ve got our collection of tools. Two shotguns, as many shells as Hank could get his hands on, a handgun from Sheryl, and enough gasoline to burn the entire place down and then some.

It’s not the arsenal we would have had access to at home, but it’ll have to do.

Part of me wants to call Silvano and run the plan by him, to ask if he has thoughts and what he would improve. But Knives and I both agreed that we’d do this on our own, because we still can’t be sure what Silvano’s reaction would be. It’s not like he can do anything from where he’s sitting in New Bristol, anyway. We can’t afford to wait and have Boar and his friends leave on the off chance Tommy believed Hank about the federal investigation.

“Yeah. Streaming TV. That’s my life goal right now,” I say dryly, but I’m distracted. “All right. I’ll get the bikes. You get into position in case they sniff me out before I get back.” I wait for his nod, then head over as carefully as I can to the row of bikes.

I feel better knowing that Knives has my back. There’s no one I’d trust more, now that we’ve started to work through the issues that have been plaguing us for so long.

I work as swiftly as I can to slash the tires of the bikes, having to work a little harder than I’d like with the less than brutally sharp knife. If every single one of these bikes has an owner here, we might be in trouble, though. That’s more than the twelve people we’d counted earlier.

I tense when I hear voices growing louder, and I quickly duck down behind the bikes.

“Why’s she giving me the cold shoulder?” a voice asks in a tell-tale drunken slur. “I told her I’d get her the ring.”

That’s Pyre, I think. It’s hard to tell with only the nearby firepit to light things, but I spot the fauxhawk.

His friend claps him on the back. “You should dump her. She’s a stuck-up bitch, and we’ve got more than enough easy pussy to go around.”

I wince when Pyre wobbles around the bikes and toward the barn wall. He unzips his jeans and, one hand resting against the barn, starts pissing.

All while he’s sobbing. “She’s not… she’s not a bitch. I love her, man. She’s so beautiful. Not just her pussy. All of her.”

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