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“That shit why you had this idea?” I pointed across the street where the bulldozers were building up a lot for new construction.

“Yup, they won’t even realize we’re coming until we’re there.” Cam lit a cigarette and climbed from the van.

I followed and opened up the back door so the rest of the guys could climb out. The sound of Gunnar’s descent off the trailer in the dozer was absorbed by the construction site noise.

Cam lifted his eyebrows and grinned around his cigarette as we checked out weapons. With everything loaded and ready to go, he climbed into the cab of the dozer to give Gunnar final directions and then we followed him in, over the busted fence, crushing it completely.

Romeo moved the big truck, mostly blocking the view from across the street. Though not even the construction workers batted an eye. The cops wouldn’t come, anyway.

We were the Desert Kings. We ran this county.

Our positions were already planned. Romeo, between the dog on the chain and the big truck, rifle trained on the other two houses.

Cam in front of the main house. Drop Top and Chop around back but to the side and out of Cam’s line of fire, and me behind it all with the Uzi resting somewhere between the main house and that fucked up camper.

Ivan, the slighter built of all of us, ran up near the house, ducking beneath windows, banged on the front door like a SWAT take down, then jogged to flank Cam.

The rumble of the dozer made it hard to hear, but I was sure the occupants were buzzing about and dumping whatever they could. Sure enough, several seconds later a few guys burst from the back door, blew by Top and Chop and took off over the fence and into the desert.

Didn’t even take the time to see who was knocking. Pussies .

Gunnar dropped the scoop front of the dozer until it rested on the roof of the black Challenger.

When the front door opened, a skinny woman with greasy brown hair in only her panties and a white tank top stood in the doorway. Fear, real and almost painful to see, spread out over her expression, and she visibly trembled when she saw Cam and the machine gun.

“Harlan! It’s for you.” She called over her shoulder. “It’s not the cops.” With one last, wide-eyed glance at us, she disappeared into the bowels of the house.

Chop had said they didn’t look like they were on something.

I believed it. The man who came to the door shoved a lock of shoulder length black hair behind his ear.

He was lean, but muscular, with a healthy gut.

His right cheek had a jagged, puffy slash across it, like he’d taken a knife to the face at some point in the past few years.

But his eyes were narrowed and mean as he lit a cigarette, unsurprised that we were there. “What the fuck do you want?”

“Oh, you know…” Cam smiled even meaner. “Thought we’d stop by and say hello. Welcome you to the neighborhood and all.”

“That right?” He wasn’t watching Cam anymore. He’d noticed Gunnar’s contribution to the welcome party.

The guy twisted a hand behind him and there was movement at the windows. Likely someone putting guns on us.

Cam saw it too and fired his automatic rifle toward the boarded-up bottom of the house, dusting the crawl space with bullets and no doubt scaring the shit out of everyone inside.

Across the street, the construction workers ducked inside their equipment. Smart move, I took better cover right behind the dozer.

Gunner, on some cue from Cam I didn’t see, sank the scoop into the car. The roof buckled with a metal crunch.

“Let’s try this again. Everyone the fuck outside.” Cam wasn’t smiling. “Even the junkie whore.”

There was shouting from around the house, as someone must have tried to go out the back again and confronted Chop and Drop Top.

“We’re good!” Top shouted from the back before I could make my way around.

People filed out, three other men, two women. I recognized one of them from Chop’s description. Cam had made the right call, sending him to the back.

“Lay down on your stomachs, arms out.” Then he gestured to Harlan. “But not you.”

When a shot cracked from one of the other houses, ricocheting off the rocky ground near Cam’s feet, Romeo acted fast. And it was immediately apparent why he’d been given the hunting rifle.

Glass shattered from a window, followed shortly by a woman wailing from inside. As Cam walked in front of the group, I trained my Uzi on Harlan, whose hand was itching toward his right hip.

“Sounds like you might need an ambulance,” Cam said, kneeling in front of the guy with jet black hair on the ground. With the still smoking tip of his assault rifle, he split the guy’s forehead open. “Yeah, heard you stomped my friend Ditch when he was down.”

The guy spit at him, Cam dodged it, stood, and kicked him in the face with all the force of a football punter. The guy rolled. “Now I know y’all need a fucking ambulance.”

“Crush it,” he shouted to Gunnar.

I was already moving toward Harlan, who jerked a pistol from his hip pocket. I knocked it away with a short punch down on his arm, kicked it from him, and smashed him on the back of the head with the butt of the machine gun. He never saw me coming.

“Whoo.” Cam whistled. “Moves pretty fast for a big guy, huh?”

Rolling in the sandy gravel, the slimy redneck grabbed at the back of his head and grunted. I pocketed his pistol as Ivan slid into the house and Pork Chop herded two more guys around from the back.

Metal screeched and glass shattered, as Gunnar smashed the center of the Challenger down and folded it like a taco. Then he dragged it away from Jerry Wayne’s disciples and smashed it into a wadded-up hunk of unrecognizable steel.

Sirens sounded in the distance, that ambulance most likely, even as the woman inside the other house continued to wail. When our guys cleared the first house, I went to the RV and jerked the door open.

The inside was stripped down to bare walls with plywood floors, and it smelled more like sawdust than cooking crystal. Bins of miscellaneous bullshit were lined up against the wall. Ghost hadn’t lied. Jerry Wayne was just getting started.

“Gunnar!” I shouted over the noise as he rolled the dozer backward away from the car, then waited for him to kill the engine. “Can you topple that?”

“Fuck yes, I can.” He grinned and started that way.