Ride Or Bleed

Two Dogs, One Bone

The message was burned into the checkpoint wall like someone wanted to make sure they felt it. Two dogs. One bone. Easiest hunt of my life.

Dex stood in front of it with his jaw tight enough to ache, the smell of scorched wood still hanging in the cold night air, and felt the particular kind of fury that didn't shout. It just sat in his chest and waited.

"Talk to me," he said, without turning around.

Cairo's voice came from behind him, low and clipped, the voice he used when he'd already done the thinking and didn't want to waste time getting Dex caught up. "Unknown colors. Eight, maybe ten of them, hit the checkpoint just after one. Took two containers off the truck, roughed up Tobias and the Hale brothers bad enough they're at Mina's getting patched up right now. Nobody recognized a single face."

"Nobody." Dex finally turned. "Sixty three men in this club and nobody's seen these colors before."

"Nobody." Cairo's arms were crossed, his whole body braced the way it got when something genuinely worried him, which wasn't often. "Whoever they are, they came in clean, hit fast, left a message, and got gone before anybody could mount a real response. That's not amateur hour, Dex. That's planning."

Dex looked back at the burned letters. Two dogs. One bone. He thought about what it would take to plan something that specific, that confident, on a night a third party had no business knowing anything about.

"There's something else," Cairo said, and the careful way he said it made Dex's stomach drop before the words even landed. "Same window, same night. The Veil got hit too. North dock."

The room went very quiet around that sentence.

"How do you know that."

"Wolf Den's got ears everywhere, same as the Veil's got ears in our territory. Word travels fast when something this big happens twice in one night." Cairo watched him carefully. "Unknown colors. Same playbook, from what I'm hearing. Hit and gone."

Dex didn't say anything for a long moment. He didn't need to be told what that meant. Somebody had watched both clubs closely enough, long enough, to know exactly when and where to hit them both on the same night, in the same hour, with the same brutal efficiency. That took weeks of surveillance. Maybe months. Somebody had been sitting in the dark studying Wolf and Veil territory like a problem to be solved, and neither club had noticed until containers were already gone and men were already bleeding.

"Coordinated," Dex said finally.

"Has to be."

"Then it's not about us specifically." Dex made himself say it slow, made himself think it through instead of just feeling it. "It's about the corridor. Somebody wants the south corridor bad enough to come at both clubs holding it, same night, same hour. Test our response. See how we move."

"What do we do?"

"We find out who's stupid enough to move on both clubs at once." Dex's voice came out flatter than he meant it to, colder, the voice his men called the president voice because it didn't leave room for argument. "Get me everything. Cameras, witnesses, anybody who saw a patch, a plate, anything. I want a name by morning."

Cairo nodded and started issuing orders to the men gathering near the door, his voice rising into the particular rhythm of a sergeant at arms doing his job, and the room moved around him like it had been waiting for permission.

Dex stayed where he was, staring at the burned wall, and let the thought arrive that he'd been holding off since the word Veil first left Cairo's mouth.

Zane Calloway got hit tonight too. Dex knew it without anyone confirming it twice. Whatever this was, whoever this was, it had come for both of them in the same breath, which meant somebody out there had been watching Zane Calloway as closely as they'd been watching the Wolves. Which meant Zane already knew everything Dex knew right now, standing in some cold back room of his own, probably giving the exact same kind of orders in that low even voice that didn't need volume to carry weight.

Dex's mind, without asking his permission, went back three hours to a bar stool and a man who didn't move until he'd already decided where he was going to land. He thought about whether that stillness held up under something like this. Whether Zane was standing somewhere right now looking as certain as he always looked, or whether something in him had cracked the way Dex's own composure was currently fighting to stay intact.

He didn't know why the thought mattered. He filed it under rage, same place he'd been filing everything about Zane Calloway for six years, the file getting heavier and heavier without him noticing the weight.

Cairo left to manage the men, voice carrying orders down the hall, and Dex stood alone in the back room with the photograph of the burned message in his hand and the specific, unwelcome knowledge that Zane Calloway was standing in a room just like this one right now, thinking thoughts just like his.

He didn't know why that felt less like a problem and more like something else entirely.

He was getting very good at lying to himself tonight.