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“Not surprised,” he said.
“Really? Why?”
“Because no one steps to a boss unless they got enough people to pull off a coup. I know I didn’t.”
“But why?”
“People are greedy,” he said. “If there’s one thing you can count on, it’s someone in your organization seeing what you got, and wanting it for themselves. Eventually. I got slack. Forgot to remind them who they’re fucking with. That’s over.”
“You don’t know who to trust, though.”
“No,” he agreed. “But I know one that I know I can’t trust. That’s a start. You’d be surprised how chatty people get when you apply enough pressure.”
“You realize that most government agencies agree that torture is not an effective interrogation technique.”
“Yeah? Then why they still doing it? And don’t be trying to tell me they ain’t. They are. They just keep that shit under wraps and redacted. Let me tell you, ma, in my line of work, you get creative enough, men start singing like canaries. What?” he asked, making me realize my distaste must have been on my face right then.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Nah. But your face is doing a lot of talking,” he said. “You got a problem with what I do?”
“I mean… you’re a drug dealer.”
“Yeah,” he agreed, and there was something harsh under that little word. “I’m a drug dealer,” he said, and it was there in his voice again. A coldness. A hardness. “You gonna get all high-and-mighty on me about it?” he asked.
“As a whole, there isn’t a whole lot of good anyone would say about drug dealers.”
“Nah. But you know who else people don’t like? Arms dealers. Like your old man. And your uncles. Half of your cousins. You gonna tell me that it’s different?
“From where I’m standing, we all got bodies on us,” he said. “’Cause, newsflash, darlin’, no one who’s buying guns from that biker club is buying ‘em to add to some collection. They’re using ‘em to put holes in people. But go on, tell me again how much better than me they are.”
With that, he got up off the bed, and made his way to the door.
At the sound of it closing, I realized I’d managed what had previously seemed impossible.
I’d pissed him off.
Genuinely pissed him off.
That walk off of his was the closest that man would get to storming away.
The thing was, if he’d stayed, I would have been forced to tell him that he was right. Again.
Whether I wanted to admit it or not, I’d absolutely been holding the whole ‘drug lord’ thing over his head.
Drug dealers and suppliers did a lot of harm.
But he wasn’t wrong.
All the guns my father, uncles, cousins, and friends sold did harm too. Because everyone who was buying black market weapons had bad intentions in mind.
That said, that father of mine, those uncles, cousins, and friends of mine? Those were good men. They were loyal and good. They protected women and children, and not just their own, all of them. They had a code. They gave to charities.
They were good men.
Who happened to run guns.
It had been pretty short-sighted of me to think that because Andres was a drug dealer that he couldn’t also be a good man.
I mean, bad men didn’t treat their dogs like children. They didn’t come running to your side when you were hurt. They didn’t put you up in some swanky hospital suite and cover all the fees themselves. They didn’t go to some all-night drug store and find you supplies to help with your concussion migraine because you couldn’t take any medication to help it.
And, I mean, I didn’t know his life.
I didn’t grow up in his house, his neighborhood.
I hadn’t struggled like he had.
Of course a kid in poverty with few options for upward mobility in a legit way would reach out to whatever hand was being extended with a wad of cash in it.
And once you were in, you were in.
To anyone who’d struggled with scarcity, the motivation never to feel it again kept you in whatever line of work gave you stability, even if it didn’t align with your morals.
A wasn’t a bad man, regardless of my thoughts on his profession.
And, clearly, I’d offended him.
I wouldn’t have thought it was possible if I hadn’t witnessed it myself.
I didn’t get much of a chance to muse on that, though, before the nurse was coming in to check on me, then the doctor. Who reiterated what A had said about staying another day or two.
Once they were gone, I took a steadying breath, then carefully swung my legs off of the bed.
“Damnit,” I grumbled as the pain in my side intensified as I got to my feet and reached for the IV pole, wheeling it along with me as I made my way to the bathroom.
There were signs of it being a part of a hospital.
