Page 28 of Shadow Strike
“Go ahead,” she said.“Tell me where I’m wrong.”
He scrolled to the founding section first.She’d spent more time on those early years than she’d intended, sourcing them carefully.She’d decided to treat them with the same weight she’d given the criminal history, because the truth of what Ben Briggs had built mattered.If she was going to burn the Canon Outlaws to the ground with her podcast, she was going to do it honestly.She was going to show what it had been before she showed what it had become.
She watched CB reread it.His jaw relaxed, and the crease smoothed out.
She’d gotten it right.She could see it before he said a word.
He scrolled further and stopped.“This timeline is off by a few years.”He pointed at the screen.“The cargo route through the Bitterroot didn’t start until ninety-one.Your source has it at eighty-nine.”
She leaned in, frowning at the entry.“The court filing said eighty-nine.”
“The court filing was working from a CI report that had the dates wrong.The route didn’t exist until after Granddad had his first heart attack and stepped back.That mattered to him.He always said it.”
She pulled up a note field and typed:Timeline disputed—primary source places start date 1991, not 1989.Confirm.Then she looked at him.“Anything else?”
He scrolled further.She watched him read through the Ray section—the relationship with local law enforcement, the specific architecture of how the Outlaws had made themselves untouchable in the county for thirty years.
“This part.”He stopped on the internal structure section.“You have it as a flat hierarchy.It’s not.There’s an inner circle—six men, each in charge of a different branch.The illegal ones.Everything goes through them before it gets to Ryder.”
Her head came up.“Do you know who they are?”
“Of course.”A pause.“I can give you names.”
In eight months of research, she’d built the most comprehensive picture of the Canon Outlaws that had ever existed outside of law enforcement files.She had sources, documents, and interviews conducted carefully, obliquely, with people who hadn’t known what they were contributing to.
She had never had anything like this.
“CB.”Her voice came out careful.“You understand what you’re giving me.”
“I understand exactly what I’m giving you.”
A beat of silence.
“Why?”
He looked at the screen for a moment.When he looked back at her, his eyes were steady.“Because you’re going to tell the true story,” he said.“All of it.And someone should.”
She held his gaze.There was nothing in it she could argue with.No angle, no reservation.Just the plain statement of a man who had decided something and wasn’t second-guessing it.
She started another note.
He gave her the names.
They worked for another half hour after that, heads bent over the screen.
She asked questions, and he answered them.He didn’t embellish, and she stopped being surprised by what he knew.He’d grown up inside this world.He’d watched it from the inside with those observant green eyes, and he remembered everything.Now he was handing it to her piece by piece as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
It’s not natural.It’s extraordinary.Don’t forget that.
She scrolled back to the beginning of the history section.There was one part she’d been least sure of—the part she’d spent the most time on, hedged the most carefully, because she hadn’t wanted to get it wrong.
“This is the part I wasn’t sure about,” she said quietly.“Your grandfather.What he actually intended when he started it.”She hesitated.“I didn’t want to get it wrong.”
CB looked at the screen.She’d written it carefully, layered with sources.Ben Briggs had wanted something for men who had nothing.Who had believed in looking out for your own.
She waited.
“You got it right,” he said.
