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Sugar and I shared a look.
We'd gotten good at the unspoken conversations over the years.
He had our vote for a prospect too.
"Eavesdropping is a favorite pastime of yours, huh?" Sugar asked, raising a brow at him.
"Never know what information might be useful," West said, shrugging, reaching to put a cigarette between his lips, cupping the tip to light it.
"So long as the information stays in the club," I added, tone barely masking a threat.
"I like this town. Wouldn't fuck up my chances of hanging around. I don't wanna be a loanshark. Or a fixer, whatever the fuck that involves. And I have a moral objection to selling Easy Lay."
"Easy Lay?" Sugar and I both asked at the same time, straightening up off the wall, turning to face him fully.
"Who is selling Easy Lay?" I asked.
This was the first we were hearing of it. And we all kept an ear to the ground about the organizations in this town. There was cocaine being dealt by a much more careful Abruzzo. And Third Street was doing the heroin. Maybe some meth. There was a trio of twenty-somethings selling pot. We overlooked all that. Adults made adult decisions. It wasn't our place to police the streets.
But date-rape drugs?
Had a feeling Reign would not sit back and let that fly.
In fact, none of the organizations would. Not now that they were all breeding like rabbits, had a bunch of girls aging up. In a town where GHB was easily acquired.
"You want to prove your loyalty, you tell us this," Sugar warned. "Otherwise, fuck off."
"I was planning on telling you," he said, shrugging, completely unconcerned with the ice in Sugar's voice. If I was right, Sugar was thinking about Peyton and her group of girlfriends going out on the town. To bars where maybe someone looks away from a drink for a minute. Long enough to have something slipped in. "Those bangers down on Third Street. Before I came here, I heard they were a pathetic facsimile of the organization they used to be. But it seems like they must have some new management because they are hopping to. Lots of little dudes on the street handing out GHB and Roofies. Lot of working girls on the street. With some bruises that makeup don't cover."
"We're going to go inside and tell the prez about this," Sugar declared, knocking the cigarette out of West's hand, grabbing the back of his neck, and turning him toward the door.
No one could claim Third Street were great to the women they pimped. But we'd never seen evidence of them being heavy handed with them. Or overlooking Johns who were.
Red flags.
These were all red flags.
Reign would want to check into it, put feelers out in town. Talk to Lo and her people at Hailstorm. Maybe even Paine who he knew kept tabs on the gang he used to run back when it was stable and - for all intents and purposes - a more respectable organization.
No beating on their women.
No selling date-rape drugs.
"Looks like we got a problem in town," Sugar announced, making Reign's beer slowly lower from his face.
I couldn't imagine what this man had seen over the years.
Sug and I had only been around for a short chunk of it, after most of the dust had settled.
His chest expanded and contracted with a small sigh.
"What else is new?" he asked himself. "Alright. What do we have now?"SIXFreddieI understood why Abby was a workaholic.
And this wasn't even my business. My name wasn't attached to it. My life savings wasn't dropped into it. I didn't have the risks she had.
But I finally truly understood the pride of a job well done resulting in hard-earned cash.
My check felt heavy in my hand as I looked down at it, waiting for Thad to change after his shift so he could show me how to put it into my bank account through the phone app.
It had been a busy week even if you didn't include work.
I had needed to get a new driver's license, a bank account, work attire, and get myself a bike since Thad's and my schedule overlapped some days and I refused to let him throw down several thousands of dollars on a used clunker to get me from point A to point B.
Besides, I liked the bike. The wind. The sense of utter freedom - something so foreign to me. And the ability to get anywhere I needed to without having to worry about bus schedules and sketchy dudes. I even had Colson attach a basket to the front for if I needed to go shopping.
A basket on my bike.
The girl I was before I went away would be red-faced in shame at the very idea of something as, well, old-lady-ish as a basket on her robin's egg blue beach cruiser.
