Page 12 of Absinthe Dreams
“Two for one deal on that one,” Hex said, grinning.
“You got a line on their meth lab?” Collier asked, sitting up straighter.
“You fuckin’ know it.” LaCroix’s soft grin turned somewhere between demonic and feral.
“Well, alright then. Let’s stop beating around the bush and see how many we can take out with it,” Saint said, and I laughed, mostly because he was just speaking out loud what we were all thinking.
We had a coordinated attack to pull. We had a location of not only their meth lab but also their three main trap houses.
This was gonna require four teams to make it happen if we wanted to collapse his entire operation in one night.
We divvied up.
Axeman and me, we would take the main trap. Saint and LaCroix were taking the lab. Hex and Collier had the second trap, and Bennie and Cypress were taking the third, which ironically was here in the ninth, on the edge of the neighborhood.
We were an even number. We’d been nine, a nice odd tie-breaker when we’d brought Louie on board, but now? Therewasn’t a tie-breaker anymore, so it was a good thing we’d all been on the same page lately and didn’t need one.
Plans were made, the game was set, and we were all pieces dressed in black, moving across the board.
It was a hell of a thing we were doing, but it needed to be done. It’d needed to be done a hell of a long time ago. We’d been too lax and look where it’d gotten us.
I looked up to the wall where we’d relocated Louie’s picture and his urn here in the chapel on the Baron Samedi’s wall.
He was club. Not a fuckin’ prospect anymore. A patched member. He didn’t belong out in the bar where we spent less time these days until the renovations could be finished. The renovations that we’d had to put on the back burner as the build on the distillery moved forward around back.
We’d get back to it, but right now, we were all being stretched more than a bit thin.
One day, one death at a time, we’d get there. So long as it wasn’t any more of our crew doing the dying.
CHAPTER FIVE
Genesis…
“Jesus Christ, the only thing worse than lookin’ at it is the smell.” I didn’t see who made the complaint. I was too busy shining a light into the barbecued druggie’s eyes on the gurney.
“Pupils fixed and dilated,” I called out. They were already gone. I looked up at the clock and called it. “Time of death, 21:49.”
“There’s more coming in,” ReJeanne called to me from the door.
Shit.
I took a deep breath through my mask, which only barely cut down on the smell of fricasseed human, which honestly smelled entirely too much like cooking pork for my liking. The only saving grace from it smellingtoomuch like actual barbecue was the chemical burning plastic and hair odor that accompanied her.
She was gone, but there were still more out there to save, and I was getting really damn close to the end of my shift. I double-checked the clock and, yeah, nope, my shift ended almost four hours ago. It was just one of those nights.
I moved from trauma bay to trauma bay and was wonderingwhat the fuck?
“Just how many people were in that house?” I demanded when I got through with the fourth burn victim in a row.
“Houses,” Miguel corrected me. He was one of our best nurses.
“What, like a row of them?” I asked.
“No, from three different parts of the city,” he shot back, and I checked our unconscious patient. She had full-thickness burns on her legs and one arm, but she wasout,and it didn’t look good.
“Trap house?” I asked, going through the rest of the motions on her workup.
“Yeah, three of ‘em, and a meth lab,” someone called back.
