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“Knox and Coop got jumped,” Prez answered, and the room went silent.
“What the fuck? Are they okay?”
“Doc’s looking them over as we speak.”
“When did it happen?”
“Bout an hour ago,” Prez answered. “They were leaving Jim’s.”
Jim’s was a small, slightly rundown neighborhood bar that the club owned and ran. There was a time when the place did pretty well, but those days were dwindling. But we didn’t care. The place was part of the club’s history, and the neon sign in the front window had been flickering long before I even joined Fury. It hadn’t changed much. Hell, it still had the same damn cracked vinyl on the booths that it had when I patched in. That was because Ace and the other old-timers believed, ‘If it ain’t bleeding, it ain’t broke.’
Which meant it had been around long enough for everyone to know that we ran the place. That in itself should’ve kept any and all trouble at bay. Clearly, someone didn’t get the fucking memo. “Who?”
“Three guys.” Prez tilted his head, popping his neck as he added, “They were wearing Viper cuts.”
“So, that’s it,” Reaper snarled. “These fuckers are going down, right?”
“Abso-fucking-lutely,” Prez bit back. “I put in a call to Tank last night. Left him a message that we needed a word, but fucker didn’t get back to me. He’s gonna regret that shit.”
“How we gonna handle it?”
“We’re working on a plan,” Ace answered. “That’s why we called you all in.”
I needed to hear the details of this plan, but I couldn’t wrap my head around any of it until I’d seen with my own eyes that Knox and Coop were okay. I did my best not to interrupt as I stood and slipped out the door. I charged down the hall, and when I stepped inside the infirmary, I found Doc standing over Coop, putting stitches in his brow.
Knox was sitting across from him with an ice pack on his eye and a bandage on his arm. He looked worse off than Coop, but the bastard was still breathing.
And smiling.
Which meant somebody else had probably gotten the worse end of the fight. “You two good?”
“Be better once I get a couple of cold ones in me, but yeah. We’re alright.”
“How the hell you let those assholes get the best of you?”
“We didn’t,” Knox answered proudly. “We knocked their damn teeth in. Hell, we even brought one of them back with us.”
“Where is he?”
“Vicious has him.”
I was wound too tight and had left the meeting before I heard anything about him and Coop actually getting their hands on one of the guys who’d jumped them. I sure as hell hadn’t caught the fact that they’d brought him back with them. “No shit?”
“Yeah. Brought him myself.” Knox shook his head. “Dude was about to shit his pants when we strung him up.”
Coop chuckled. “We would’ve gotten two of them, but the little one was a slippery fucker. He was halfway to the East side before we ever knew he was gone.”
“And these assholes were Vipers?”
“They were wearing Viper cuts, but they didn’t look like any Vipers I know,” Coop answered. “They weren’t inked up, and they didn’t have good sense.”
“How’s that?”
“They were too eager.” Coop motioned his head over to Knox. “Didn’t even wait until our backs were to them before they came charging out of the damn alley, and the big one fell on his ass before he landed the first punch.”
“It was the way they kept calling themselves the Vipers that got me,” Knox added. “Like damn, man. I see your fucking cut. I don’t need you to say it fifteen times for me to get it.”
They were right. That didn’t sound like any Viper I knew. The infirmary door opened, and Reaper stepped inside. “Figured you’d be in here.”
