Grit liked to run ideas by his men, just to see what they thought of given situations. He always had a plan in mind for what he wanted to do, but asking for opinions was usually a good way to check morale, and maybe pick up an idea of something else he hadn’t considered.

  “We need to be fucking careful,” said Stone. “This sounds like it’s the place, but we can’t just go barging in there. Good way to make a huge fucking mistake. Maybe even get killed.”

  The fourth man, Gray, a slim-bodied man with one of those worn faces that gives a man an appearance of being ten years older than he really was, took in all of the conversation in silence.

  “Maybe we need to wait a little while,” said Stone. “Wait until we’re sure.”

  Grit knew well by this point that Stone was a cautious sort of guy, the type who liked to have all the angles worked out before making any drastic actions. That was useful, but often had the result of hemming and hawing until opportunities slipped by. And Grit was certain that this was one of those times.

  “Fuck sitting around!” shouted Razor. “How many more of our brothers have to fucking die before we make a move? I didn’t join this fucking outfit to do goddamn recon!”

  Grit raised his palm to silence Razor, and he knew that the time for discussion was over.

  “We’re moving in tonight,” said Grit. “We’re not a hundred percent sure that the lab is there, but if we wait for total certainty then they’re gonna get this place locked up so tight that the only way we’ll get in there will be a surgical fucking airstrike.”

  Grit looked around at the men and saw from their faces that they were good with his plan.

  “And we’re moving out now. We’re gonna get in there, confirm that it’s the lab, and do whatever it takes to shut that fucking place down. The time for screwing around is over.”

  More nods from the men.

  Gray chose that moment to speak up.

  “I’ve been doing some recon on the place,” he said. “At two a.m. the guards take off for a half-hour to make a drop of something—probably supply. If we move in then, we should be able to break into the place without too much resistance.”

  Grit was pleased to hear that. He appreciated men taking initiative and going above and beyond.

  Might want to keep an eye on this guy, he thought, could be a man to move up in the crew. But let’s get this shit taken care of before I start thinking about shit like that.

  “That’s in an hour,” said Grit. “Let’s kill these fucking drinks and get geared up.”

  The men did just that. Moments later, their drinks were drained and they were back on their bikes, riding to one of the warehouses where the crew kept their gear. There, they located a black van they used for raid ops like this, situations where rolling up with roaring motorcycles wasn’t the most tactical decision to make. Grit and the men grabbed some guns and explosives—everything they’d need to wreck the hell out of the strip club and handle any asshole stupid enough to get in their way.

  Soon, they were loaded up into the van and heading out. Grit gazed out of the window at the neon lights of Vegas off in the distance, the bright glare of the Strip a contrast to the ink-black sky above. It’d been a while since he’d been on a raid like this, and he hoped that he hadn’t gotten rusty. Tonight, he knew, wasn’t just about wiping out the competition—it was about saving the lives of whoever else might get their hands on the poison.

  Eventually, they arrived at the club, and it seemed to be closed down for the night. The gaudy lights that normally washed the front of the place in a hard glow were turned off, and not a single car was in the parking lot. Stone parked the van a few blocks off, and once they were ready, the men strapped on a pistol underneath their leather vests and grabbed a bag of supplies.

  “Listen up,” said Grit, speaking clearly but softly. “No room for error with this shit tonight. Not one of you makes a move to do anything drastic unless I give the direct say-so. But if anyone in there looks like he’s out for blood, take him out. No more of our brothers are dying because of this shithole. Got it?”

  The men nodded in understanding and slipped on their masks. Moving silently across the road, the crew came up to the back entrance of the club in the rear alley. Stone opened up his bag and pulled out a small explosive while Razor disabled the camera above the door. After getting his gear ready, Stone slapped the small device onto the heavy-duty lock of the door, activated it, and gestured for the crew to back off. The device beeped a few times, then with a muffled “pop,” made a small flash of smoke and orange. Then the door opened a few inches.

  “Nice,” said Grit. “Now let’s get in there.”

  The men moved in through the door and entered into a dark hallway. Grit remembered just where the door down to the basement was and he directed them with careful steps towards it. It was strange to Grit to see the strip club after hours; what was normally a bustling den of seedy men, naked girls, and loud music was now as silent and still as a graveyard. It all struck Grit as eerie.

  They soon arrived at the door, pistols in hand. Stone did his thing with another explosive, and after a few more moments, the door to the basement was finally open; Grit would at last be able to see just what the hell was down there.

  “All right,” said Grit. “Stay fuckin’ frosty. If there’s anyone down there, then they know now that someone’s here. Could be anything.”

  The men nodded, guns in hand.

  Grit took point, opening the door and heading down the steep flight of steps beyond. The stairs led down to another hallway, with one end terminating in a heavily-secured door and the other leading to a large room that was aglow with bright, sterile lights.

  “Stone, you and Gray get to work on that door over there. You two, come with me.”

  The men did as Grit asked, and he headed down the hallway to the large room. Stepping into it, his jaw nearly hit the floor. It was a drug lab, all right—one of the most advanced that he’d seen in his life. The room was brightly lit, with three rows of tables packed full of drugs and drug manufacturing gear. It was like an industrial chemical lab down there, and Grit almost couldn’t believe that such a place was right below some regular strip club.

  “What’s the move, boss?” asked Razor.

  But before he could say a word, a pair of figures stepped out from closed doors in the lab.

  Grit realized in a split-second that they were guards. And they weren’t fucking around.

  Gunshots cracked through the lab, and Grit and the men took cover where they could. Lab equipment exploded all around them, sending shards of glass crashing onto the floor. Once Grit found some cover behind a desk, he took the safety off of his gun, raised it towards one of the men, and fired off a quick pair of shots. They both hit home, and the man dropped onto the floor in a heap. Killian and Razor went after the other one, bringing him down in a hail of gunfire.

  “You all okay in there?” shouted Stone from down the hallway.

  “Room’s clear,” responded Grit. “We good?”

  Killian and Razor stood up and nodded.

  His heart racing, Grit looked over the lab.

  “Fucking hell of a setup,” he said. “Thousands of dollars’ worth of shit in here.”

  Razor walked over to one of the tables, loaded down with drugs ready to ship.

  “This is it,” he said. “This is the fucking poison.”

  He picked up a packet of the powder, looked it over, and tossed it into the corner in disgust.

  “I say we burn this fucking place to the ground,” said Killian. “We’ve got the gear for it; what’re we waiting for?”

  “No fucking way,” said Grit. “You see all these fucking chemicals here? We set this place on fire and we’ll send all this shit into the air. All this poison.”

  “Then what the fuck’re we gonna do?” asked Razor. “Just smash the place up and send ’em a message? They’ll have this joint up and running in a week.”

  Grit thought the situation over. Then, he had an idea.

  “I saw this documentary once about how they’d seal up mines way back in the day. See, you don’t want to just blow the place—you’ll just fuck everything up that way. All you really need to do to make the place inaccessible is to smash up the entrance tunnels. The rock collapses in on itself, and no one’s fucking getting in there, even if the network underground is still intact.”

  “And what’s that got to do with all this?” asked Razor.

  Before he could say a word, Stone and Gary returned to the room, each carrying a loaded-up bag.

  “Jackpot, boss,” said Stone. “Must’ve just hit ’em before they had a chance to sock away cash from a recent buy. Must be hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

  Razor punched the air in victory.

  “Fuck, yeah!” he said. “Loot the fuckers, trash the lab, leave ’em high and dry.”

  Grit was still thinking.

  “Let’s get back up top,” he said. “We’re gonna wreck this place from the outside in.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Honey

  Honey had raced back to her home in a daze. After she’d called the police and waited for them to arrive, telling them everything she knew about Bethany’s death, she’d felt like she was in some sort of terrible, terrible dream. Every time she’d closed her eyes all she could picture was Bethany’s lifeless body sprawled out on the bed, her eyes glazed over and her limbs limp.

  She can’t be gone, she’d thought. This isn’t happening. They’re going to take her to the hospital and they’ll find out that she was just unconscious or something. She’ll be back to normal in a few weeks.

  Honey had known that thinking that way was delusional, but facing the reality of what had happened, what she had seen, was too much for her. She’d spent the day in her apartment, pacing back and forth and trying to come to grips with everything. She’d had a shift that night, but she didn’t give a damn; as far as she was concerned, her life at Fantasies had ended when her friend died.

  No one from the club had called her, and Honey’d figured that they’d known that she was hardly in a mood to work. After all, news of Bethany was likely rushing through the staff.

  But when midnight had rolled around, and she’d realized that sleep wasn’t an option, Honey had decided to call Charlie and figure out just what the hell he knew about what happened to Bethany. After all, he’d been the one giving her drugs, and he’d been the last one to see her alive.

  “Honey!” he’d shouted through the phone. “Where the hell are you?”

  “Didn’t exactly feel like working,” Honey had said, her voice calm and cold. “But I want answers. You were the last person to see Bethany alive, and I know you’d been giving her drugs. I want to know everything you know about what happened to her.

  A silence had fallen over the conversation.

  “We’re closing up early tonight on account of Bethany,” he’d said. “If you want to talk, meet me at the diner near the club at around two-thirty.”

  “In the morning?”

  “You know how this business works,” he’d said. “We don’t exactly have the luxury of regular hours.”

  “Fine.”

  And now the hour to meet had arrived. Honey checked her phone and saw that it was a little after two. She didn’t know exactly what she was going to say to Charlie, or how he’d react. All she knew was that she needed to find out just what kind of man Charlie was. It was all she could do.

  Honey arrived at the dingy diner on the corner down the road from the club and spotted Charlie in one of the back booths. She sat down with him and stared hard at her boss, the man she thought she knew.

  “What the fuck happened?” she spat out before he could say a word.

  “It’s a goddamn tragedy,” said Charlie, shaking his head sadly and looking away.

  “Don’t give me that bullshit,” said Honey, her words ridged with venom and rage that she didn’t know she was capable of. “I know that you’d been giving her drugs, and I know that you were the last person to see her alive. So tell me everything you know.”

  “I don’t know if I like this tone from you, Honey,” he said, taking on the tone of a scolding father. “I am your boss, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  “Maybe so, but I’m the one with a dead best friend, so I think at the very least I’m entitled to some answers.”

  Charlie sighed, looked away, and sipped his coffee. Honey got the impression that he was preparing to tell her something that would be very difficult to say. Or, at least, he wanted it to look like it was something that’d be difficult to say.

  “Bethany … well, she was troubled. You knew that, I knew that—we all did. She did her best to turn her life around and stay off drugs, but a girl like that is just an addict down to her bones. It was only a matter of time.”

  Honey said nothing, instead staring hard at her boss as she tried to figure just how much of what he was saying was bullshit.

  “I found out that she was using again, and it broke my heart. I asked her where she was getting her drugs from, and she didn’t even know the guy’s name. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. And I’ve been around enough users to know that going from clean to doing random drugs that you don’t know what the hell they’ve been cut with is a good way to end up OD’ing.”

  “So you figured you’d do the ‘nice’ thing and give her drugs of your own.”

  “I’ll come clean—we’ve been running drugs out of the basement of the club. And I’m telling you that because I know I can trust you with this information—I’ll even make it worth your while to keep it secret. I figured that if Bethany was going to be using, then at least I could give her what I had. That way she’d be using with drugs that I knew, and she wouldn’t be shooting garbage into her veins from god-knows-where. It was all I could think of.”

  “Aren’t you sweet,” said Honey.

  “I was looking into rehab clinics for her,” he said. “I wanted to save her life. If she had to do a little bit until I could help her, then I figured it was better than her buying from some random shithead who didn’t give two fucks about her. But I just didn’t know how low her tolerance had gotten. When I left her that night she must’ve woken back up and shot up the rest of what she had.”

  Honey crossed her arms and sat back in her seat.

  “And I’m supposed to believe you?”

  “Honey, you can believe whatever you want. But I tried to help Bethany in my own way, and you can think I’m a liar or you and trust me. Either way, I’ve gotta make sure that I can trust you with what I’ve just told you.”

  “About the fucking drug lab that you’ve been running under my goddamn place of employment?”

  “It’s just been a temporary thing. We’ve been cooking under the club while a bigger facility gets built outside of town; shouldn’t be longer than another month or two. And in the meantime, if you can keep this information to yourself, and tell the police that neither of us had anything to do with what happened to Bethany if they ask, then I can get you enough cash to make sure that you don’t have to work as a stripper ever again. Say, enough to pay for a full-ride to college, maybe?”

  It was a tempting offer, and Honey didn’t know what to do.

  Maybe he’s telling the truth? she thought. Maybe he was just trying to do right by Bethany, in his own fucked-up way. And that money sure would be nice, especially with the fact that she was pregnant and would need all the help she could get.

  But then she remembered Grit, the father of her child. He was doing everything he could to take that place down, and if she went to him with what Charlie had just told her, he’d have enough to move in and wipe that lab off the face of the earth. She could do the right thing, and maybe patch things up with Grit in the process.

  “And …” said Charlie, a small smile forming on his lips, “I know that you have other things going on in your life that you need to be worrying about.”

  “What?” shot out Honey.

  “Bethany let it slip the night she died,” said Charlie. “I know that you’re pregnant, and it’s with a man who you’re not exactly in a committed relationship with.”

  Fuck! thought Honey. She took a deep breath, letting the fact that Charlie knew about her biggest secret wash over her.

  But before she could give the matter too much thought, she saw that over Charlie’s shoulder a small group of diner patrons and employees was gathered near one of the front windows.

  “What the hell is that?” said one of them.

  “Is that a fire?” said another.

  “I think … is that fucking Fantasies?”