Page 59 of Under Cover
Chadwick, who had coldly consigned two men to their deaths, nodded his hatchet-thin face and then turned those absurdly gentle eyes to Toby.
“Mr. Trotter?” he said as the medics moved the stretcher to the ambulance, “Allow me to introduce myself.”
Harding gave a decisive nod, then took in Doba and Henderson, both of whom had the half-angry, half-terrified glare of guys who knew they’d just walked away from the life they’d known—possibly forever. “You two, any family in the city?”
They both shook negative, and Harding nodded as though that made it easier.
“You’re going to report to my office for the duration, and I think we can secure you an apartment for the next month.”
“No offense,” Doba said, voice suspicious, eyes hard, “but what’s going to change in the next month?”
Harding’s lips pulled back from his teeth. “We’re going to find the sources of this,” he said, gesturing around them with his chin, “and we’re going to uproot it, and we’re going to kill it, and we’re going to salt the earth around it. And if you still want to grow there, we’ll buy you a fucking pot. That good with you?”
The two men met eyes and nodded slowly. “I have a cat,” young Henderson said faintly.
Doba shrugged. “I’m only allergic to lead,” he muttered.
“Settled,” Harding replied, his anger still a palpable thing—but not aimed at them.
The team gave a collective sigh then, and Harding nodded, almost to himself, before unhooking a radio from his belt and issuing orders, asking each member of the team to tell him where their kill was.
Garcia looked toward each coordinate and shuddered, his heart suddenly thundering in his ears. Five dead bodies. Five men, lying in wait for a member of the SCTF to emerge with the innocent man they’d been trying to kill.
The police precinct had been surrounded, although Garcia didn’t know what the enemy looked like yet. McEnany had anticipated somebody coming for Toby, and whoever showed up had been slated for death.
They had wanted Crosby—and wanted him badly. And they’d wanted to take out anybody who might come to get revenge or protect him, with a vengeance.
“God,” Garcia breathed. “What’s our boy into?”
Harding shook his head. “Not here,” he said, voice gritty. “Team, get your vehicles. We’re not talking again until we’re in the office and the place has been swept. This shitshow was just the first fucking act, people. Crosby needs us all to live to the finale.”
Various forms of “Roger that,” and “Understood, Chief,” were murmured around the steps, and as the first whispers of dawn could be heard over the city’s rooftops, they all moved to start their day.
The real work had just begun.
Snake Pit
“SON OFabitch!” McEnany yelled, making all the men in the shitty room in one of Brownsville’s most infamous tenements jump. Except Crosby.
He’d put his game face on as he’d ridden the train from Garcia’s awesome little house in Queens to this project dump in Brooklyn’s Brownsville. He’d already decided he was going to be the baddest ass in the room, no prisoners, no mercy, no surprises, and that was how he had to play this thing if he wanted to survive to get back to Queens.
Garcia had texted him as he’d been walking to the tenement.All safe. Lots of casualties on their side. Someone’s gonna be pissed.
Understood,he’d texted back, because he did get it. Toby had been a trap for Harding’s team, but Harding wasn’t stupid. SCTF was safe. The same couldn’t be said for the guys who’d been trying to kill them.
And McEnany couldn’t even blame Crosby. He’d been following orders, right? If he showed up here in Brooklyn, Toby would be released back in Manhattan. Here Crosby was in Brooklyn, no blood onhishands. Apparently sitting in their conference room listening to the team work hadn’t been enough of an object lesson for McEnany. He hadn’t seen the intelligence, the intuitiveness of the team—he’d just seen that Crosby was a valued member and needed to be removed.
And apparently McEnany had been an awful enough person to try to take out the whole team in a fit of prissiness.
“What’s up, Cap?” said Donny Mazursky, one of the ten or so guys in the room, sounding worried, like a real cop, and Crosby tried not to seethe with hate.
What was up was that McEnany had coopted his own little fucking army—that’s what was up.
Being born into the Sons of the Blood didnotguarantee a person entry into the local PD. All the things that held true for the general populace still held true for the wannabes. They had to be sponsored through the academy, pass all their criminal justice classes, get a trainer to sponsor them through their rookie years.
But these guys—they’d been born into families as the sons and grandsons and great grandsons of cops. And they’d been told they’d fallen short.
That entitlement—and that denial—it rankled. It festered. It left a big chafing, rotting sore on their fragile souls and poisoned their blood.
