His phone buzzed again. I’m here.
He sank the axe into the stump and trotted along the shoveled path around the side of the house, skirting the big evergreens. A dark blue junker pickup with in-transit plates idled roughly at the end of the driveway. A watch cap similar to the one Cady had confiscated at the Christmas tree lot covered Shane’s white-blond hair.
Shane rolled the window down with an actual hand crank. “I figured I should do this incognito, yo,” he said with a quick grin. He handed a white plastic Radio Shack bag through the window. “It’s pretty easy to set up. Took me and Finn a couple of hours while the software installed on our computers. You have wifi?”
“Yeah,” Conn said.
Shane looked at the house. “Nice. Not what I expected a superstar to own, but it’s nice. Homey. I’m kind of surprised it didn’t come with a full security system and a trained guard dog.”
“She doesn’t want cameras,” Conn said, because he’d never lied to Shane and wasn’t about to start now.
Shane’s brows lifted. “So what are you doing?”
“The threat is getting too close. Too personal. I don’t want to lose her.”
His friend was too smart not to follow the chain of repercussions all the way to the bitter end. He shook his head. “You always had to do the right thing. Where do you want the tree?”
Even when he knew another fight to protect a smaller kid would mean getting shuffled to the next family member in the contact list. It didn’t matter if he was on the right side. All that mattered was that he was a pain in the ass. Not easy. He was big, loud, argumentative, stubborn, and in everyone’s face. Bag clenched in one hand, he said, “Got a minute to help me get it into the house?”
“Let me check with my boss,” Shane said. “Oh, wait. I am the boss. Yeah, I’ve got a minute.”
Together they wrestled the fir into the house via the sliding glass doors. It was considerably longer than a minute before they had the tree straight in the stand. “The branches will settle in a day or two,” Shane said. “It’s a nice one.”
Conn remembered tagging along with the Ward women to pick it out, the way Patty and Cady included him in their decision. The plastic bag with the cameras tugged at his conscience. “Does doing the wrong thing for the right reasons make it right?”
“Who the fuck knows?” Shane said philosophically. “Do what you have to so you can look yourself in the mirror, and pray. Mind if I wash my hands before I go? I left Mickey in charge of the shop. I just hope it’s still standing when I get back.”
*
He interpreted silence on the social media front to mean Cady was deeply entrenched in her songwriting session. The cameras were small, and simple, the batteries already installed. They were triggered by motion, the footage stored in the cloud. He borrowed a sturdy deck chair. Using the screwdriver attachment on his pocketknife, he had them installed and turned on in less than half an hour.
Observation was on his mind as he worked, surveillance, recording details, actions, which led him to Hawthorn’s meticulously compiled reports, the ones he barely glanced at during briefings. But between one turn of a screw, a thought occurred to him: How did the Strykers stack up compared to other gangs in Lancaster? Surely the units compiled the same metrics on other gangs. Hawthorn was a metrics freak. But Conn couldn’t remember the same chatter about the Twentieth Street Bloods, or the Murder Angels.
He folded up his pocketknife, put the deck chair back, and hurried inside. Behind Cady’s studio door the same fragment of the same song was now on some kind of loop. He didn’t stop, just took the stairs two at a time to the main room and opened his computer again.
Knowing what he was looking for and how to compile it meant the second round didn’t take him as long. The numbers were so interesting he did the same thing for the Solo Angeles. Then he sat back and blew out his breath.
Strykers were arrested as frequently as members of the Twentieth Street Bloods or the Murder Angels crew. Those statistics matched. What didn’t match was the rate of dismissals. Three years ago, the department’s ability to make a good case against the Strykers started to drop. Not off a cliff, but over the course of about eighteen months, something very interesting happened. The Strykers were the baddest guys in town, based on his experience on the streets. He’d assumed that the higher-ups were accumulating trends that contradicted his lone perspective.