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Photos flashed.
“And this is Anna with her superior, and the next one is his boss. Crazy thing is, as far as the Feds go, this is a dead-end hunt. They were hot on the trail of the drugs, looking for the source, but once the women got involved, they went cold feet.”
“They stopped looking?” Ryder asked.
“Not exactly,” Gate answered. “More like chasing their tails to the point that no one knows what the fuck is going on.”
“Sabotaging their own investigation?” Nine questioned, his voice barely above a whisper.
“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Brick directed at Gate.
“Looks like,” Gate said. “Someone on the inside is compromised.”
“Got caught with their hand in the cookie jar,” Talon agreed.
“Or has some skin in the game,” Deuce added.
“Either one works,” Tank threw in.
“And we need to know which it is,” Talon agreed. “The women they took….” he trailed off.
“Are probably dead by now,” Brick finished for him.
Tex crossed his arms over his chest, “Might be better than the alternative.”
“According to the intel Anna added to ours, she found the pipeline of women into D.C. Others on her team found the drugs. But no one is biting on the parties. Anna’s bosses set up a hunt for the main supplier, but their intel is sketch, so the team is running in circles while the parties keep happening. And it seems like someone at the top wants them to.”
Brick leaned forward and asked the table at large, “Are we in this?”
“Fuck, yeah, we are,” Talon growled.
“We are,” Gate agreed. “But there’s more you need to know before we decide how it’s gonna go,” Gate said, nodding at Stash again.
Stash sat at the helm of a MacBook, and recent photos of the head of the Mancini family, an elderly gentleman with slicked back hair and a bespoke suit, jumped to life on the screen behind him.
Gate narrated, “This is Salvatore Mancini, the patriarch of the Mancini crime family in New York. He’s the head of their East Coast outfit, and pretty much everything that happens in the U.S. goes by him first. The only person he answers to still lives in Sicily.”
Another photo flashed, and indrawn breaths echoed.
“And this is Judge Hawthorne of the Chatham County circuit courtwithSalvatore Mancini.”
“They’re buds,” Stash added.
“I’ll say,” Tex muttered.
The photos ranged from black and whites of the two men on the golf course to wedding reception photos to grainy surveillance footage.
“They go way back,” Deuce observed.
“What’s that got to do with us?” Tank asked.
Gate went on, “The judge recently called a meeting and put in a request that we keep Freemont out of Savannah.”
“Does he know that Freemont and Mancini have beef?” Tex asked.
“Seems to get that, yeah,” Gate answered. “He said there was history between him and Mancini, which we can see here,” Gate said, gesturing to the screen, “and that Mancini is honor bound to the old ways.”
“In other words, he won’t fuck the town over,” Brick filled in.
