Don Pendleton - Cold Snap

One man spoke up as the two Able Team undercover operatives entered. “RLRs? You’re far from home.”

“Would have thought this a safe harbor,” Lyons returned. He sized up the speaker, well more than six feet in height, with a reddish-blond beard and a scalp that was cleanly shaved, not even stubble on top. Lyons himself was a big man, but this guy had between twenty-five and forty pounds on him, depending on what he was like under his riding gear. Like Lyons, his arms were bare, displaying not only ink that told tales of his life as a biker and in prison, but muscles like knotted oak branches. Leather straps surrounded the man’s wrists and his green eyes glared with suspicion and hatred.

“Our berths are full, California,” the Heathens leader said. “But you can sit for a drink if you behave.”

Lyons sneered, looking the bald man over. “Behave?”

“No crippling, maiming or killing. You’ll get it back proper for every punch in the face,” the biker told him.

“You guys are no damn fun,” Lyons grumbled.

The leader laughed. “I’m Crunch.”

“Irons,” Lyons returned, holding out his hand. The two met halfway, tugging each other close with knuckle-cracking grasps and slapping each other on the shoulder. Conversations and music rose from the tension. “This is Geek.”

Crunch looked Schwarz over. “Why ‘Geek’?”

“Take your pick. I like chicken heads and I like radios,” Schwarz answered. “Why do your prospects look so squirrelly?”

Crunch rolled his eyes. “There’s heat coming down all around this part of the state since that shoot-up in D.C. An’ for some reason, the pigs think one of us might have been involved.”

“Heat over a buncha seal-humpin’ hippies?” Schwarz asked in his Geek guise.

Crunch shrugged. “I’d take a piece of that pussy action myself, but cops got smoked, too. Them’s the ones which got the bacon sizzling.”

Lyons shook his head, as if in agreement with the disgust over such a fuss over the protesters. Of course, being a lawman for most of his adult life left him with a queasy disdain for this smelly asshole Crunch and his slurs against fallen lawmen, especially those who had been gunned down in the performance of their duties.

Still, he was thankful to Crunch for reminding him that the men around them, despite their “welcoming” demeanor, were nothing less than thugs who had no regard for law or civilization.

“What brings you two here?” Crunch asked.

“We’re feeling too naked,” Schwarz answered. “Hoping for something more than pistols. A friend said this is a good place to go.”

Crunch narrowed his eyes toward Geek. “A friend?”

“Bones,” Lyons returned. “Heard of him?”

“He got pinched a while back,” Crunch said. “But he’s got some cred here in the east.”

Of course Bones has cred here, Lyons thought. I went over his rap sheet specifically in case I needed to infiltrate you animals ever again.

“How do you know him?” Crunch added as a question.

“I prospected under him,” Lyons said. “He jumped me in, too.”

Crunch nodded.

Lyons had done his homework on this particular thug, having placed him from the files he’d studied in preparation for this infiltration. Crunch had been born Alphonse MacCafferty. The Irish was evident in his beard and the few splotches of freckles that showed through the sleeves of tattoos up and down his arms. Crunch had plenty of tags for assault, but he’d managed to beat drug and arms traffic raps, thanks to Arrangement-supplied lawyers. He’d also been a person of interest in at least four murders, but nothing had stuck to the bald biker.

The .357 Magnum on his hip, a Blackhawk single-action revolver, showed he meant business in terms of ending a shootout with a minimum amount of stops. Lyons had his own Ruger, the double-action GP-100 with a six-inch barrel. Crunch eyed the revolver and nodded with approval, making Lyons feel nauseated. He didn’t allow it to show in his features, though. He’d spent time working as an undercover agent for the FBI after his stint with the LAPD, and his control was ironclad. But when it came time to break this little clubhouse open, Lyons had plenty of fuel for his berserker rage.

“Good to see at least one of you queer-coasters like American iron,” Crunch said, acknowledging the weapon on Lyons’s hip, then looking askance toward Schwarz and his shoulder-holstered Beretta, unmistakable for its magazine base pad and the lanyard ring behind it.

Carrying or riding anything that wasn’t American-made was forbidden among bikers, which was why they’d pulled up in a rented Jeep Cherokee rather than rented “rice burners” aka Japanese-built motorcycles. As big and brawny as Honda could make a motor bike, it still was not an American-made Harley-Davidson. There wasn’t one of these men who would spare more than a second glance at a foreign-made weapon or vehicle.

Schwarz had a Beretta M-9 A-1, which thankfully had Made in the U.S.A. scrawled on its slide, even though Lyons was fully aware that some might turn up their nose at him for carrying a gun with an Italian name.

“What part of ‘Made in the U.S.A.’ don’t you understand?” Schwarz asked nonchalantly. He twisted the cap off a beer and took a drag on it. “’Sides, good enough for Uncle Sam, good enough for me.”

Crunch shook his head. “Stupid European guns. Not even in a proper caliber.”

“So give us something,” Lyons returned. “We’ve got the cash.”

“What are you looking for?” Crunch asked.

“I’m not looking to screw around with follow-up shots,” Lyons answered. “I’m here for ‘fast-and-dirty and then get the hell home.’”

Crunch nodded. “You want 12-gauge air-conditioning, then.”

Lyons smirked. “You get me, brother. You really get me.”

“What about the guy with the pellet gun?” Crunch asked.

“He digs .22s,” Lyons said with an eye roll.

Crunch leered over at Schwarz. “Poodle shooters and pasta pistols. You need a new partner.”

“Despite his wimpy tastes, I’ll keep him,” Lyons returned. “He might have to shoot someone five or six times, but he always has my back.”

“That’s a good reason to keep him around,” Crunch said. “Listen, even our semi-only ARs are pulled for important stuff. I only have shotguns.”

Lyons narrowed his eyes. “Things that bad, eh?”

“You have no idea, and you never will,” Crunch returned. “Don’t dig in our business.”

Lyons shook his head. “I don’t shit where I eat.”

“That’s a rare admirable quality,” Crunch said. “Rucks, go get these two a couple of 870s from the locker. How much ammo you gonna need?”

Schwarz spoke up. “Twenty apiece. If we need more than that, we’re dead, anyway.”

“Says the faggot who needs fifteen in a clip,” Rucks chuckled.

Schwarz was not the biggest or strongest member of Able Team, but he moved with such fluid grace and swiftness that no one in the clubhouse even saw him go from lounging on his tilted chair, heels crossed on the table in front of him to standing over Rucks, pushing the biker’s head to the floor with one hand. Lyons knew the move that kept the smart-mouth pinned. He could see Gadgets’s two first knuckles up under Rucks’s Adam’s apple, the other two fingers extended and pressed against the nerve junction under his jawbone.

The Heathens wise-ass now had trouble breathing, his airway pressed down upon. The real paralyzing pressure, however, came from the ring finger and pinkie jammed against the cluster of nerves and juncture of blood vessels at that part of his body. Rucks’s eyes were wide, his mouth moving, gaping like a fish out of water.

“You better be talking about a cigarette,” Schwarz growled as he loomed over the biker.