Outlaws by Matt Rogers (phonics books TXT) 📕

about alerting one of the others I’ll put two rounds through the back of your head. Pop pop. Got it?’

‘Got it.’

‘You’re not going to fuck me over, are you?’

‘No,’ Quinn said.

‘Say it. I want to hear it from you.’

‘I’m not going to fuck you over.’

King nodded. ‘Excellent. After you, then.’

Quinn tried to relax his shaking hands, but couldn’t. Eventually he gave up, took a deep breath, and spun to leave Cal’s bedroom. King tucked the SIG under his shirt, then spotted something hanging on a desk chair in the corner of the room.

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Wait right there.’

Quinn froze.

King said, ‘Don’t move. Don’t turn around.’

He busied himself with the object. He was familiar with it, so it only took half a minute to achieve what he needed. When he was done, he said, ‘Okay. Go.’

Quinn set off, and King maintained a respectable distance, only a couple of steps behind.

Quinn stepped out.

King followed.

Cal was right there in their faces, a questioning look on his face.

Like, What are you doing in my room?

He looked at Quinn. Who was pale, and still shaking, and wide-eyed, despite his best efforts to mask it. Then Cal’s gaze switched to King.

Who had a distinct bulge at the front of his shirt, with one hand underneath it, too.

Cal knew what his own gun looked like.

And he was a lean, wiry ball of aggression.

He didn’t shout for help. He didn’t turn and run.

He lunged forward with venom in his eyes.

50

King sized up trajectories and angles.

His brain became a supercomputer, calculating a precise algorithm.

And it found a solution.

Cal came in fast and determined, his chin raised and his right arm in the process of cocking back to deliver a colossal hook to King’s jaw. An observer would have seen only a flash of rapid violent movement, but King saw every muscular twitch, every intention in the kid’s eyes, every inch of his footwork. It wasn’t slow motion, per se — just a fundamental understanding of how the human body operated in motion. It allowed him to predict where Cal was going to be a second from now, and therefore avoid it, setting up an elbow of his own.

It broke Cal’s face.

The kid didn’t cry or gasp or yell — he couldn’t. Pain like that is so overwhelming you can’t do anything but silently collapse. He hit the tiles on his stomach, and his chest and face followed suit, aggravating all the injuries King had just created. King dropped to one knee, right beside Cal’s head, and grabbed his skull with an open palm — like cradling a bowling ball — and drove it downward.

Bounced it right off the tiles.

Putting him out cold.

He didn’t bother with restraints. The moment he’d picked up the SIG he’d created an invisible countdown timer, inching steadily down to an inevitable explosion. There was no way to cover this up, so the key was rapid movement. The sooner he extracted the information he needed, the sooner he could get the hell out of here before he had to deal with four more angry criminals.

King stood up over the unconscious body and saw Quinn staring, slack-jawed.

The man had never seen anything like that.

Never seen anyone move like that.

‘What have I got myself into?’ he bemoaned.

Cal looked dead, but King knew he wasn’t. The man would wake up in a couple of minutes with an unstoppable headache and fuzzy short-term memory. He’d sit there on the tiles, feeling cold and confused for a few minutes more, before stumbling back to Duke and the rest of the crew. He might throw up. They’d think he’d fainted. On the off chance he remembered exactly what had happened to him, he’d still have trouble forming coherent sentences for at least half an hour. It’d take an impressive effort on Duke’s part to get the necessary information in time.

So King forgot about him, and turned back to Quinn, and said, ‘The den. Now.’

Quinn didn’t need further prompting. He’d just witnessed this volatile madman break his friend’s face by using his elbow as a whip. He led King straight down the hallway and into a sizeable den, complete with an iMac Pro desktop set up on a huge oak desk facing the driveway and courtyard. King looked down through the big windows at the jeep, the Maybach, and the Rolls Royce Phantom. Three tiers of wealth, all of which were affordable to Ryan Duke.

He gave the rest of the room a quick once-over. Beside a broad bookshelf covering one wall was a whiteboard with various indecipherable business dealings scrawled across it. King recognised at least one word — a formula written on the top left of the board.

Donati = 1R.

Payment instructions, maybe.

King grabbed Quinn by the back of the collar and dumped him down in the desk chair. ‘Work your magic.’

Quinn nodded, still trembling.

‘I’m watching closely,’ King said. ‘You do anything you’re not supposed to, and…’

He took the SIG out and rested the barrel against the back of Quinn’s head.

The trembling got worse.

Quinn tapped in the password. He navigated to an internet browser application that King didn’t recognise, but figured was something related to the dark web. What had Duke mentioned before? Tor browser?

Quinn dived into a complicated web of folders that King guessed were uploaded to a cloud buried in the deep web, so they could be accessed from anywhere with total privacy. He found a subfolder labelled Donati and opened it up. It contained a single file.

‘There,’ he said. ‘That’s what you need.’

King hunched forward and scrutinised the information.

From what he could gather, the payload in question was a refrigerated container (a typical twenty-foot TEU) connected to one of eighteen hundred plugs at the Pier 400 Container Terminal. That terminal rested between berths 401 and 406 in the port. The plug served to keep the container at a certain temperature in storage until it was collected.

It had already arrived. It was scheduled for collection tomorrow evening.

King didn’t want to wait that long.

He memorised the plug number and the details