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“Yeah, it is. And don’t call me kid.” She waves a hand at me. “You need to go to work, so I’ll be fine.”
“You’ll be under watch again, as always.” With that, I go and change, sliding another clip into my pocket as I check my gun. I know it’s loaded, but I check it anyway.
I hand her a piece of paper.
“What’s this?”
“Wendy’s cell. She’s right outside if you want company.” Most of her sandwich is gone, and she looks a lot better now. There’s more color in her cheeks.
Those fucking bruises . . .
Karlee raises her hands to her face. “I’m fine, they don’t hurt.”
Of course, she saw me looking.
“I might be back late, so I left mac and cheese out. It’s in a box, so nothing fancy, and there’s other stuff too.”
“Don’t mother me. I’m fine,” she says. “I’ve got a ton of work to do, anyway. And yes, I’ll call her if I need her.”
“Stay safe, Karlee.”
Then I’m on my way.
With Leo out of town and Christian at the helm, Theo holding up the back end of things, we’re out here on our own. In a no man’s land part of Dallas on the outskirts, past the biker bars and honky-tonks, this is where a lot of back door deals go down. We’re here to straighten out potential trouble with a customer who suddenly doesn’t want to pay.
“What do you think?” Nicolo nods toward the house set back with nothing much around it. The place looks like it’s abandoned, but it’s not. “They gonna fucking play nice?”
“They’ll play, but I don’t think it’s gonna be nice,” says Diego.
I sigh. There’re a few cars along the road, and though there’s no light coming through the darkened windows, it’s only because they’ve been painted back. “It’s a stupid place to have a goods holding. Leo say why he let this through?”
“A test.” Nicolo doesn’t look impressed. “And they missed the deadline, so they’ve proved to Leo exactly who and what they are.”
It’s a typical cold and calculated Leo move. They’ll be opening the crates and finding not much in there about now since they started turning up twenty minutes ago. The last car arrived with a lone driver only five minutes back. Their boss. A craggy-faced guy with two guns strapped to him like he’s from the fucking old-timey west.
If they’re smart and survive, De Luca won’t be neutral or an ally, and that sucks for them.
“We can’t ambush.”
I flick Diego a glance. “Not the way to go. We go in through the front door.”
“Risky,” Nicolo says, grinning.
“The official business line?” asks Diego.
I look at the place, studying it. This isn’t their property. It’s something that’s used by us, our allies, and for first-time deals with new players.
We could lock them in. We have that capacity, of course, depending on their weaponry that might have been hidden on their persons, I’m not sure how long.
“Nicolo, what did Leo say about them?”
“A new outfit, small, that wanted arms, willing to pay and put a hefty payment down. They were meant to have the rest at nine this morning. Didn’t happen.”
So, Leo has a lot of questions and one of those was if he could trust him. A light load as we put in there, says Leo and Scarlett—because I know his pretty wife has a lot of say in things—were very low on the trust aspect.
“New. So, when did they arrive?” I ask.
“Fucked if I know,” says Nicolo, but last few months from the poking we did. At least, that’s when they felt confident enough to start asking around.”
