The Blades rallied at the nearby elementary school, waiting in the parking lot until all the members were there. They were going in force to make the takedown quick.
“We have no safety equipment with us, so when you get there, don’t touch anything!” Arsen cautioned his men. “There’s a reason we use respirators and nitrile gloves in the plant. Getting sulfuric acid or mercuric chloride on you will absolutely ruin your day. Go in, take down whoever we find, but let me handle the chemicals. Any questions?” There were none. “Let’s do this quick and quiet.”
They rolled up to the house in four vehicles and stopped out front. Arsen kept his men back out of site as he walked up to the front door and rapped. “Chimp? Roger sent me.”
“You know I hate it when you call me that,” the man said as he opened the door.
The Blades stormed into the room, but there was nobody in the house other than the man, and a woman who appeared a moment later to see what the commotion as about.
“What do you want?” Chimp asked, his eyes wide. He wasn’t a big man, but as Snakebite said, he was covered in hair, sporting a thick beard and arms that wouldn’t look out of place on a wolf-man.
“What we want, Chimp, is for you to stop making molly,” Arsen said softly, then nodded to Phil, standing behind the man and holding his arms.
Phil quickly wrapped a wire around Chimp’s neck and jerked it tight. Chimp struggled in silence, unable to breath to make a sound, clawing at neck, trying to get his fingers under the wire, but after an eternity, his struggles slowed and he collapsed. Phil rode the body down to the ground, but kept the pressure on until he was sure the man was dead.
Arsen stepped to Berk, holding the woman, his hand around her mouth, her eyes wide with fear. “Here’s the deal, sister. He’s going to turn loose of your mouth so you can talk to me. If you scream, he’ll snap your neck. Got it?”
He nodded to Berk who released her mouth. “What do you want?” she breathed. “I’ll do anything you want!”
“I’m glad to hear that.” Arsen peeled five $100 bills off and handed them to her. “If I ever see you in Arizona again, if you talk to anyone, you’ll end up just like him. We found you once, we can find you again. Now get out! Run!”
The woman didn’t hesitate, bolting from the house and running down the street. “Why’d you let her go?” Berk asked.
“We don’t kill women if we don’t have to. That’s the difference between us and the Horsemen.” Arsen looked around the lab in the house. It was a disaster, and it made his skin crawl just seeing the setup. Open containers with no labels, no ventilation, no nothing. They were doing the community a service by shutting this lab down. The man wasn’t completely stupid, and he found a box of gloves. He pulled two out and put them on, handing the box to Zane. Zane pulled two, and passed it on, until the box was empty.
Arsen pickup up a couple of containers. “Jesus Christ, would you look at this?” he said, sitting the box down. “There’s enough mercuric chloride in that box to kill every person on this street, and he has it in an open box. What a moron.” He picked up several other containers, but held them well away from his face. After several minutes of inspection, he started giving orders.
“I’m going to separate the toxic from the safe. Find something we can dump it into. The toxic stuff…I guess we’ll bag it up and take it with us and dump it in our hazardous waste stream at the plant. Zane, you and the rest of the guys start breaking down the equipment.” He raised his voice. “If you don’t have gloves on, don’t touch anything! Zane, put all the equipment in the shower. We’ll rinse it down before we leave.”
“Why are we doing this? Why not just burn the place or something?”
“Because there are houses close on both sides, and a fire station isn’t far from here. Second, I don’t want to leave the equipment. They’ll just setup somewhere else if we do. So we’ll take it back with us. Some of the reaction vessels we can sell on ebay or something. The rest we’ll sell for scrap or just throw out. But I want it out of here so they can’t reuse it.”
“We could just smash it.”
“Too much noise and takes too long. Leave the glassware!” he called to a brother picking up beakers.
“And why are we taking the chemicals?”
“What do you suggest, leave them here?”
“Why not? Or pour them down the drain.”
“Because that rubs the chemist in me wrong.”
Zane shook his head. “Whatever. This is your show.”
***
They spent an hour tearing the lab down. They found several five gallon buckets in the back of the house they repurposed. All the safe chemicals went into one bucket, the toxic items were triple bagged in sealed plastic bags, then placed in another. They’d also found a several large bags of molly, bagged and ready for sale. Those went into van as well for disposal. They didn’t want the drugs, but they didn’t want to leave them for the Horsemen either.
The equipment they were taking was given a good rinse to remove anything that might be on it. It bothered him they were potentially dumping heavy metals and other nasty substances into the Phoenix waste water system, but the quantities were low enough the city’s treatment plant would be able to handle it.
Satisfied they had done all they could, four brothers smashed the glassware while the remaining brothers piled the equipment into the van. Arsen sat the two buckets of hazardous waste, the lids sealed with duct tape, into the van and slammed the door. “Let’s roll,” he told Zane. “Straight back to the plant, and be careful. I’ll meet you there.”
Berk joined him in his Caddy, and they followed Zane and Phil in the van all the way back to the clubhouse. When they arrived, he took charge of the chemicals, chucking the non-hazardous chemicals into their dumpster. The toxic chemicals and molly went into their hazard waste tote while Zane, Phil and Berk unloaded the rest of the equipment from the van. Task completed, he breathed a sigh of relief. If Zane had an accident on the way back to the clubhouse, and spilled the contents of the two hazardous buckets, they would have to scrap the van. There would have been no way to get the chemicals out of all the nooks and crannies, so the acids would have eaten a hole in it, eventually, and the risk of poisoning by mercurial chloride was too great to keep it around. He would rather die a dozen times in a gunfight than die once from mercury poisoning.
“How long do you think it’ll be before the Horsemen know?”
“Tomorrow sometime,” Phil shrugged.
“Berk, tomorrow I want you to power-wash all that shit we brought back. We’ll get it cleaned up, then I’ll have Alex put the stuff that will sell on ebay. The rest we can scrap.” Arsen ordered.
“Anything else?” Berk asked.
“No. We did good tonight. Nothing we did will stop the Horsemen, but killing their chemist is going to put a big crimp in their style.”
“I like the fact we’re making money off busting up their lab,” Phil grinned.
“And we took a shit load of the fake Hearts and Daggers off the market too. What did you do with it, anyway?” Zane asked.
“Cut the bags open and dumped it into the waste tote. By now it’s just part of the chemical stew.”