Lover Avenged (Black Dagger Brotherhood #7)(25)

But it wasn’t a total loss. He was copping a nice little comedy contact buzz from Dwight’s head-and bat-bagging scene in the Office’s kitchen.

Time to get a move on.

He hit up Butch, gave the Brother the address, and told the cop to drive like his foot was made of stone. Wrath wanted to get the guns out before anyone came, yes. But if he and his brother could get the crates out quickly, and Butch could ghost the shit, Wrath might still be able to hang around the premises for another hour or so.

To pass the time, he hunted through the apartment, patting surfaces down with his palms in an attempt to find computers, extra phones, more goddamn guns. He’d just returned to the second bedroom when something ricocheted off the window.

Wrath unholstered his forty again and back-flatted it on the wall next to the window. With his hand, he sprang the lock and pushed the sheet of glass open a crack.

The cop’s Boston accent was about as subtle as a loudspeaker. “Yo, Rapunzel, you going to let down your frickin’ hair, there?”

“Shh, you wanna wake the neighbors?”

“Like they can hear anything over that TV? Hey, this is the bat epi…”

Wrath left Butch to talk to himself, putting his gun back on his hip, pushing the window wide, then heading for the closet. The only warning he gave the cop as he winged the first two-hundred-pound crate out of the building was, “Brace yourself, Effie.”

“Jesus Ch—” A grunt cut off the swearing.

Wrath poked his head out of the window and whispered, “You’re supposed to be a good Catholic. Isn’t that blasphemy?”

Butch’s tone was like someone had pissed out a fire on his bed. “You just threw half a car at me with nothing but a quote from Mrs. f*cking Doubtfire.”

“Put on your big-girl pants and deal.”

As the cop cursed his way over to the Escalade, which he’d managed to park under some pine trees, Wrath headed back to the closet

When Butch returned, Wrath heaved again. “Two more.”

There was another grunt and a rattle. “Fuck me.”

“Not on your life.”

“Fine. Fuck you.”

When the last crate was cradled like a sleeping baby in Butch’s arms, Wrath leaned out. “Buh-bye.”

“You don’t want a ride back to the mansion?”

“No.”

There was a pause, as if Butch were waiting for the lowdown on how Wrath intended to spend what little was left of the night hours.

“Go home,” he told the cop.

“What do I tell the others?”

“That you’re a f*cking genius and you found the gun crates when you were out hunting.”

“You’re bleeding.”

“I’m getting sick of people telling me that.”

“Then word up, stop being an ass and go see Doc Jane.”

“Didn’t I already ‘bye’ you?”

“Wrath—”

Wrath shut the window, went over to the dresser, and put the three jars in his jacket.

The Lessening Society wanted to claim the hearts of their dead as much as the Brothers did, so as soon as the slayers heard a man of theirs was down, they reconnoitered and headed to the lesser’s addy. Surely one of those bastards he’d killed tonight had called for backup in the process. They had to know.

They had to come back here.

Wrath chose the best defensive position there was, which was in the back bedroom, and angled his click-click-bang-bang at the front door.

He wasn’t leaving until he absolutely had to.





NINE




Caldwell’s outskirts were either farm or forest, and the farms likewise came in two varieties, being either dairy or corn—with dairy predominating, given the short growing season. The forests were also binary, with a choice between the pines that led up the flanks of mountains or the oaks that led into the spun-off swamps of the Hudson River.

No matter what the landscape, naturalis or industrialis, you had roads that were less traveled and houses spaced by miles and neighbors who were just as reclusive and trigger-happy as someone reclusive and trigger-happy himself could want.

Lash, son of the Omega, sat at a beat-up kitchen table in a single-room hunting cabin in one of the stretches of forest. Across the weathered pine surface in front of him he’d spread every Lessening Society financial record he’d been able to find or print out or call up on his laptop.

This was such bullshit.

He reached over and picked up an Evergreen Bank statement that he’d read a dozen times. The Society’s largest account had one hundred twenty-seven thousand five hundred forty-two dollars and fifteen cents in it. The others, which were housed among six other banks, including Glens Falls National and Farrell Bank & Trust, had balances of between twenty bucks and twenty thousand.

If this was all the Society had, they were teetering on the crumbling ledge of bankruptcy.

The raids over the summer had yielded some good resellables in the form of looted antiques and silver, but realizing those funds was proving complicated, because it involved a lot of human contact. And there had been some financial accounts that had been seized, but again, siphoning off money from human banks was a complicated mess. As he’d learned the hard way.

“Y’all want some more coffee?”