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No, he hadn’t heard any of this yet. JJ really must still be nursing his grudge; those boys had been all but joined at the hip most of the years Cooper had known them. And JJ had trouble with rules. Chapel seal or not, he surely would have told his brother, if they were speaking.
“We still got the agent, “Eight said. “Niko’s very persuasive. But he considers the agent a weak link, an unnecessary risk, so he’s killing the route after this last run.”
“Is he replacing it with something?” Lonnie asked. “Or are we? Did we just get fucked out of half our income?”
Eight gave him a lingering stare, and Cooper almost smiled. Eight Ball was becoming a great president, but he still struggled against his deeply entrenched instinct to start shit. He’d learned to control himself, but the struggle showed in his eyes.
Cooper knew now that Eight was irritated to have a Laughlin patch he barely knew poking at him.
“Nobody’s fucked.” He tossed a smirk Cooper’s way. “Not until the party, for those of you with the inclination and no old lady at home who’d gold-plate your balls and stick ‘em on the mantel if you indulge.”
“Like you,” Cooper said with a grin, and most of the table, including Eight, laughed.
“Yeah, like me. You’ll have to double up and take my weight, brother.”
Cooper laughed, but it also occurred to him that, if he wanted to be serious with Siena, he wouldn’t be partaking of their fresh batch of girls, either.
Did he want to be serious with her? Really? With that prickly, overclocked chick? He’d never wanted it before, with any chick.
But yeah, he wanted it. He couldn’t for sure say why—not yet, at least—but the feeling of her opening up to him, coming to trust him,leaningon him for help or comfort ... pretty much the only time he felt decent lately, or even like himself, he’d been with her. Even before he could have called her a friend, that was true.
“Nobody’s getting fucked,” Eight said again. “But the situation down in Mexico is stabilizing, so product is gonna start flowing more easily again. Niko’s shifting routes to capitalize on that.”
“Mexico is stabilizing because one cartel is climbing to the top of the pile,” Maverick said, taking over the thread. “Volkov’s established a relationship with the head of that cartel. You know the drugs and guns exchange is bread and butter for everybody.”
“We’re getting into drugs again?!” Zach asked. “Fuck that. I’m sorry, Eight, but don’t tell me we’re getting into that shit again.” He turned to Maverick. “You’regood with this, Mav?”
It was a good question; Maverick hated their dark work, and drugs was the darkest of all their work.
“Easy, kid,” Eight said before Maverick could answer. “Nobody’s making the mistakes we made back in the day. We’re not moving her product, only Niko’s.”
“Her product?” Ben asked. “Awoman’srunning this cartel?”
Eight grinned. “Looks that way. One badass little bitch. She’s climbed onto a mountain of bodies and put every other cartel on their knees at its foot.” He chuckled. “They call her La Zorra. I looked it up. Zorra means fox. She’s wily like one.”
“No,” Cooper said. Eight hadn’t told him this part during their one-on-one. He’d told him her real name: Isadora Vega. “It meansvixen. In Mexican slang, it means whore. She didn’t give herself that tag.”
“But she’s embraced it,” Simon countered. It was the first time he’d spoken since they’d sat down. He was generally a quiet guy.
“That’s pretty badass right there,” Reed said. “Claiming your enemy’s weapon as your own.”
“Yeah,” Eight said, but he clearly wanted to move on. “Anyway, the first new route goes into Cali and south. We’ll still bring it to you, and you’ll cross through Cali and about seventy miles or so south of the border to your exchange.”
Ben stared at Cooper. “You’re saying that the next run we make, and the runs after that, we’ll be crossing into Mexico and then riding an hour into the country? With a truckload of war toys?”
Yeah, Cooper hadn’t much liked the sound of that, either.
“You can say no,” Eight said, his steely gaze fixed on Ben. “Leave your kutte behind and opt out. But that’s the job, and it’s why we founded this charter.”
The hairs on the back of Cooper’s neck stood up. He didn’t like the implication behind Eight’s words. Nothing he’d said was wrong or untrue—theyhadfounded this charter so Bulls could hand off to Bulls on the route, because that was what Nikolai Volkov wanted—but the threat to ‘leave your kutte behind’ if they were to vote to opt out made it sound like Nevada wasn’t a full-fledged charter. Like they were a service charter, with no purpose but to run errands for Tulsa.
You’remypresident, Eight, Cooper had said at the beginning of this meeting, basically telling Eight Ball that Cooper was not a real president, and that he agreed Laughlin was nothing more than Tulsa’s errand boys.
Fuck.
“You founded this charter to run gunsnorth to Canada,” Kai said. “This is something completely different.”
Eight turned and gave Cooper a look. He knew exactly what that look meant—and this combined meeting was the wrong time to challenge him. So he turned to Kai and said a truth he didn’t need to challenge. “Outlaw work is outlaw work, Kai. It’s not a nine-to-five, not routine. It changes on the reg. Jobs that should be easy go off the rails and you end up burying a brother. Jobs that we expect trouble on go smooth as glass. Shit changes, and we deal with the shit as we come to it. We’ll vote this when we’re alone in our chapel, and we’ll figure it out then.”
