After finishing a second cup of coffee, I set up my equipment on the kitchen table. I’ve been putting off the task of going through the surveillance tapes taken before I arrived in town. Sam will be at the shop all day, so this will give me a good chance to sit down and work on it uninterrupted.

I’m barely into the first tape when Sam commits his first crime on camera. A customer walks down the alley and knocks on the back door of the tattoo shop. Sam steps out and money is exchanged. He ducks into the building and then hands him two bottles of alcohol that he doesn’t even take the time to disguise in bags. Ten minutes later, another exchange happens and then another.

The tape date is a Friday night, and he’s doing more business than most big-city package stores. A truck backs up to the door and Sam helps a man load several boxes into the bed. By the time I finish a week’s worth of tapes, my hands are shaking.

I honestly don’t know what I expected to find. Maybe I was hoping he wasn’t really doing anything illegal. There’s enough on the tapes to put him away. And that’s without bringing the gun running into the equation.

Things are looking very bad for Sam.

***

I’m unusually nervous about meeting Sam’s family and the rest of the Steel Infidels. I don’t know why. It’s not like this is my first undercover operation. I’ve worked plenty of them over the past few years. After the first couple of times, it became easy to put on a mask and be someone else.

This feels different.

When we pull up into the driveway of Sam’s house, I see a group of men standing outside the house. I immediately recognize Jesse and Flint standing side by side. Both men are solidly built, with muscles like granite beneath their close-fitting shirts. Jesse is much bigger than I expected, with large muscular arms and a broad chest. He towers over Flint by several inches. They’re both deeply tanned with dark hair. I wonder how Sam ended up with his blondish hair and blue eyes.

They look up and smile when they see us walking down the hill to the house.

“You actually brought a date to this shindig?” one of the other men jokes.

I recognize him as Toby, a high school classmate of Sam’s and a Marine back at home after years in Afghanistan. He’s wearing an Atlanta Braves baseball cap turned backwards. Another blue-eyed, dark-haired, handsome hunk of a man.

Does an ugly Steel Infidel even exist?

If so, I haven’t seen him yet.