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“Fuck.” Gunner ran a hand through his hair, pushing it out of his face. It was his personal fuck you to the military for those in his platoon whose bodies never made it back. “How do we keep him from being elected, short of killing him?”
Before I’d seen him in action, I considered Gunner to be weak and overly sentimental. Unless one had a death wish, such things didn’t have a place in my world. They still didn’t, but he was the only one I’d ever known who had killed hundreds of men and still possessed a soul. Over time, I looked at him as my own Jiminy Cricket, because like Pinocchio, I didn’t possess a conscience. Unfortunately for Gunner, though, I was having trouble coming up with an alternative scenario for him that would pan out in our favor.
Marco’s lip tipped up at the corner as he jerked his thumb at Gunner. “Is this guy for real?”
Through my brief interactions with Valentina, I’d discovered we shared a similar background. Their childhood wasn’t quite as fucked-up, nor as gruesome as mine, yet we were all cut from the same cloth.
“In time, you’ll come to appreciate a man that doesn’t miss thinking twice before he pulls the trigger.”
Marco ran a hand over his dark goatee. He was the spitting image of his father, Miguel, except for the eyes. Marco’s didn’t have quite the same glint of cruelty lurking in their dark depths as his father’s had. Not that Marco couldn’t be every bit as dangerous.
He smiled at Gunner, his teeth a brilliant white against his tan skin. “It’s a good thing we’reamigosthen, no?”
“You’re aslocoas your sister,” Gunner said with an eye roll, his chuckle giving away that he was teasing.
“No one is as loco as Val.” He nodded his head at Ryder. “Except for maybe this pitiful bastard who fell for her.”
Marco leaned his elbows on the table, the smirk falling from his lips. “Unfortunately, there’s an even bigger threat out there than the good senator. His half brother, Jack Wembley, is an administrator for the DEA. The ink wasn’t even dried on Ryder and Val’s marriage certificate when Diego got word from his friends in the CIA that Wembley was planning to use Val to bring down the Devil’s.”
“I’m sorry, did you just say friends in the CIA?” Gunner asked, his eyes widening.
Marco chuckled. “Is it so impossible to believe one branch of your government would work against the other?”
“Not really, no,” Gunner huffed, and my lips twitched at his indignant tone. “But why is the CIA still in bed with the cartel?”
“You don’t actually think they stopped working with the cartels just because they were outed by the Iran-Contra affair?” Marco chuckled at Gunner’s frown. “Sorry to be the bearer of bad news mi amigo, but they’ve been working with our family for years.” He shrugged. “If they scratch our backs, we’ll scratch theirs.”
“Jesus,” Gunner muttered.
Ryder wrapped his knuckles against the wood. “Can we save the foreign policy discussion for later and please focus on the issue at hand?”
Gunner crossed his arms over his chest and nodded at Marco to continue.
“Diego thought the DEA was taken care of when he and our president came to an agreement. The president would keep them buried in red tape for us if I would handle a delicate personal matter for him. Then yesterday the president sent a messenger to the house because he no longer trusted his phone line was secure. Wembley has mysteriously called off the witch hunt.”
He stroked his goatee. “It didn’t seem likely to me that Wembley would give up right when Royce announced he’s running for president. I’d have expected him to double down on his efforts. Nobody seems to know what the DEA’s up to. Diego’s contact in the CIA said the file they have on the club now requires a high-level security clearance to access it.”
This additional information must be extremely valuable to the DEA if they weren’t willing to risk it being leaked. I had a sneaking suspicion whatever the DEA had on us was the same thing my brother had gotten his hands on.
The quickest way to test my theory would be to hack into the DEA’s database, but none of us had the skill set to pull that off. We didn’t have enough cash on hand to bribe a high-ranking DEA official, and while a hacker was doable, it might take them a week or more to gain access to the file. By then, the DEA could have already made their move. Ryder was against threatening the family member of a politician, and we weren’t at the eleventh hour yet, so he’d be against torturing anyone for information. That left only one option.
“Can Diego’s contact in the CIA get us an older version of the file?”
“Possibly.” His dark eyes lit with interest. “What are you thinking?”
“How we do business hasn’t changed since Pops founded this charter. They jumped on Valentina because she was a new variable to the equation. They didn’t drop her because your government was giving them the runaround, they did it because they found an easier way to achieve their goal. It’s possible they already had a section of the puzzle done and now they finally have a way to put the remaining pieces in place. We need to figure out what they have before they finish putting it all together or we’ll be wearing matching orange jumpsuits.”
Marco’s grin reminded me of how my sister Bea used to look right before she took the last cookie out of the jar. “I like where your head’s at, mi amigo. When we wrap up here, I’ll call Diego. It’s in everyone’s best interest for him to take the heat and let me remain a ghost. Once I’m on your government’s radar, I’ll no longer be able to do what I do best.”
Ryder nodded his agreement before looking over at his father. “Anything you want to add before we adjourn, Pops?”
Pops sat there stroking the bushy hair on his graying beard, a sure sign he had something on his mind. He was always very deliberate with what he said, his southern drawl unhurried. It seemed to bug Ryder, but I didn’t care. At least he never felt the need to fill the silence with useless chatter, even when we were sitting at the bar and having coffee in the middle of the night. By unspoken agreement, we were content to escape our demons, neither of us feeling the need to bring them out into light.
“Hunter’s brother is as crooked as a dog’s hind leg, and something tells me he’ll want to bury Hunter long before the two weeks are up. I don’t want us to be chasing a rabbit down one hole only to have a snake come up from another hole and bite us in the ass.”
His analysis of the situation was spot on. Despite my threat, Piotr was a ticking time bomb. I’d give it a week before he used whatever information he had at his disposal. It wouldn’t matter to him how he came into power as long as he sat on the throne. Maybe there was more of our father in him than I realized.
My brother closed in on one side, while the DEA came at us from the other, and I didn’t like the club’s odds for coming out of this unscathed. Call it intuition, sixth sense, or my ability to visualize different scenarios and their outcomes, but I couldn’t find a way to get the club clear without spilling a little blood along the way. If Piotr’s endless greed cost me one of my brothers, I would make sure he paid with pain. And for once, I would take great pleasure in being the grim reaper.
