Unlikely Meetings

CHAPTER 20 - FUNDAMENTAL MISUNDERSTANDING

Noah was sitting inside the small recently repaired home staring at the stag across from him, cleaning his old and trustworthy 1911 before dropping the slide and making the stag jump. "Bud quit scaring him, he's here to make up for his mistakes. Besides, it's bad to drop the slide on ol' reliable like that."

"Stupid mistakes that he should have known would blow up in his face." Dropping his pistol back into its holster he rose to his feet, full kit adorning his form over a black and white flannel and simple jeans. "Fuck you by the way. My gun, my rules."

Max just shrugged as he finished re-assembling his SBR and going through a quick functions check. "I'm still not letting you take the KS-23."

Noah deflated slightly as he looked over to the normally hidden gun rack. "Eli shot it..."

"That was life and death. What you plan to do with it is nothing short of a John Wick film and we can't stay out of prison on top of a mountain of bodies." Eli picked at a few of the scales on her hands as she was brought back to that moment but quickly pulled back by her lover. "You don't have to be there alone. I'm here with you." With a smile and a nod the attention was back onto the subject at hand.

"Tonight. I'm not risking them being there any longer than that." Max pursed his lips at the timeline. It was barely past eleven in the morning and there was much to do if this was going to go anywhere remotely good. "I'm getting my kids back. With or without you."

"Good thing it's with, raises your odds of not being shot." Max's brow furrowed as he thought about the massive time crunch they were now under. "Things are going to have to move fast if we're going to walk away from this. We need to force their hands into pulling back the curtain so we need three separate plans. Three big moves that show their crimes, the corruption of the police and who these people really are. We have half of what's needed but the other half will need to be a confession which I think I can squeeze out of Trevor, lord knows he likes to hear himself talk. I just need to figure out a way to get him 'alone.'"

"What about the kids? How are we getting them back?" Noah's voice cut through the air, the knife of his tone cutting right to the source of his vitriolic rage.

Max nodded, undeterred of the rage bleeding off of his best friends before unfurling a number of sheets recently printed on his work table. "That is where the trickier side comes up." A set of blueprints stitched together from public sources including the size of the ranch and listings of employees. "Some of this might be out of date seeing as how most of the records come from the twenty tens but it should be accurate enough. Easy ingress points here, here and here but we won't exclude windows for possibilities and worse comes to worst I doubt the wall are reinforced. Biggest question is where the kids would be."

Noah stood and moved to look at the plans along with Jeffery joining them, both studied the stitched together plans before the stag spoke first. "Here, they'd be keeping them in the basement. They had it renovated about a year ago and use it for a kind of daycare for their ranch hand's kids. A few of them talked about it when buying camping supplies a few months back." His brow furrowed as he recalled that his store was now a charred husk of a business by Trevor's hands.

"You'll get it back, hell we'll all get out of this better off if this stupid plan works." Max places a single nine mil round on the plans of what would be the edge of the property. "Diversion spot here would work best, longest travel time for them while still giving us the best cover."

Noah nodded as he looked over the patchwork of a map. "Who's on the distraction team? We'll need at least two people on it."

Max pursed his lips as he considered the people left, Chelsea, Jeffery and Eli. Noah couldn't make the call seeing as how he was compromised emotionally and neither could Max due to his Relationship with Eli."Jeff, who do you want with you?"