Page 47 of Bram

Bram stood, gathered the ledger and the envelope, and didn’t look back. I watched his outline retreat down the hall, slow and careful, as if he was already in pain and didn’t trust his body not to betray it.

I wiped my face with the back of my wrist. The salt stung. Mom picked up the mug and drank the cold coffee without a flinch.

The sound of the meeting in Church filtered through the air vents—first a rumble, then the scrape of boots, then a quiet that was even heavier than before.

It was going to end, one way or another.

I squeezed Emma a little tighter. I wasn’t going to let her go, no matter what happened.

nineteen

Bram

Fourteen of us sat on our bikes off the county road, lights off, engines cut, every headlamp aimed at the Desert Scorpions’ compound four hundred yards ahead. A chain-link perimeter, eight feet high, topped with razor wire. Floodlights on both towers cut pale cones into the scrub. In the yellow-white glow, I could see the black outlines of two guards with rifles, boots propped on the railing, eyes downrange.

Last week’s knife job hadn’t closed the way it should—the tryst with Julie on my bike had made sure the wound didn’t heal. I’m not going to have sex with my lady if I’m injured, said no man ever. It would heal when it needed to.

Sniper stepped in front of me, the way sons do when they’ve been waiting years for the moment. He looked bigger in full gear: helmet, goggles, plate carrier over his kutte, sidearm and shotgun across his chest. Even his walk was different tonight—deliberate, like he’d made up his mind.

“Dad,” he said. He never called me that unless things were about to go sideways. “You command from the road.”

I stared at him, then past him, tracing the fence line for dead zones in the lights. He had to be fucking kidding me.

He planted himself again. “I mean it. You got a hole in your side. You wanna lead, do it from here. We’ll get inside, clear the buildings, and get the job done.”

Trace flanked from the other side, a head shorter than Sniper but twice as loud. “You’re stitched together with fishing line, old man. You go down in there, this whole thing falls apart.”

I watched them both, and let the words hang in the air like bad smoke. Two sons, both alive because I’d never once hesitated to step into the first breach. Now they wanted to wall me off from it, act like the job was above me.

“You want me to put you two assholes back into a playpen, through your ass a bottle?”

Kodiak moved up with the breach team: four men in black jeans and mechanics’ jackets, bolt cutters cradled against their ribs, faces already painted with hard intent. He didn’t say a word, just eyed the fence, then me, then the tower lights. He was the only one in the crew who’d seen a real raid, and he had the sense not to try and talk me out of anything.

Behind us, a loose phalanx of the Kingman and Santa Fe crews kept low in the dirt, the bikes lined up in a ragged wedge. Trace’s squad—four men, counting Drop Miller—fanned out left, while Sniper’s took the right. The men weren’t talking, not even among themselves. You could feel the battery in the air, an electric charge from every unspent fear and promise.

I let the quiet run a beat longer than comfortable. Sniper’s jaw flexed. Trace held his breath, waiting to see which way I’d break.

“You know we’re right,” Trace finally said, son number two trying to become son number one.

Finally I said, “Move. Cause if you don’t, I’m sending you back to your chapters to fix carburetors.”

That was it. That was the order. Neither son tried to change my mind.

“This is on you if shit gets out of hand,” Sniper said.

“Move your ass,” I said. “And it’s on me no matter what the fuck happens.”

Kodiak signaled, hand raised then dropped, and the breach team peeled off the line, low crouch, weapons up. The rest of us flowed behind, twin columns, boots slurping in the dry gravel. The bikes stayed put, but I could feel their engines in my teeth, the way a man feels thunder.

As we moved, every sound became a warning: the distant hum of the compound’s generator, the scuff of a boot, the metallic snick as someone chambered a round too soon. The men from Kingman carried old cop radios; in the earbud, I could hear the static whisper as we closed the gap.

The fence line was thicker than expected—someone had doubled the chain-link, maybe to keep out coyotes or men like us. The razor wire glinted, a wet black shine. I saw two red dots sweep the field, laser sights from the guard tower, but they skittered past and didn’t stop. Either we were invisible, or someone was about to shout an alarm.

The first cutter got the chain in two snips. The next man took a second to line up the bolt head, then snapped it clean. Ninety seconds in, and we had a loose flap big enough for a man to crawl through. The last guy in line reached up, cut the wire, and let it drop into the scrub.

Kodiak went first. Then the Kingman man, then Sniper and Trace. I could feel the others behind me, their breath sharp in the night air, no one wanting to be the one who lagged. I ducked, felt the bandage catch for a second, and rolled through.

We were inside.