Shattered (Anderson Special Ops #4) - Melody Anne Page 0,75
place for the connection to begin. If only the man knew his love of football was what was going to bring him down, he’d have given up watching the sport long ago.
Smoke knew Tre wanted to be next to him because he saw business opportunities. It wasn’t a secret that most professional sports players kept in contact with other players. Tre desperately wanted contacts in the sports world, creating a different arm in his empire. There were more than a few stories of professional athletes dabbing into the realm of drugs, and they had a lot of money at their disposal.
Over the last few months Smoke had been steadily building up to a meeting where large sums of money were to be exchanged. Smoke had told the men he had zero interest in being a boss; he didn’t in any way want to step on Tre’s toes. He’d also let them know he was a business-savvy investor and, if the two of them could come to terms, Smoke would front cash to expand Tre’s reach for a return on investment over a set length of time.
This meeting, with Eyes and Sleep in attendance, was the bait. The cash was real, it had passed the test, and was certainly the attention getter. Another head of a horrendous snake would be cut off, but if a single thing went wrong people could, or would, get hurt or die.
It was also the last time Smoke could show his face in this underground world as a player for the bad guys. Those who went down in the raid would rat Smoke out, and the bounty put on his head would be enough to bring out a lot of nasty people. It was all part of the operation, and to the special ops guys, being on a hit list wasn’t anything new. Smoke, who’d grown up with constant gunfire in his neighborhood, had been on the wrong side of a barrel more than one time, so death wasn’t a fear he ran from. But for the team’s sake he couldn’t be a target. His face was too well known.
“Let’s see that green!” Tre cried out as he slapped his hands together.
“Sam, Sean, open them,” Smoke said to Eyes and Sleep while they walked to a large table.
“Seriously Smoke — their names are Sam and Sean? Where did you get them from? White man catalog number one?” Tre laughed at his own joke.
“I got them from Harvard and Princeton, and the catalog was: Make my rookie contract last a lifetime,” Smoke said.
“Hmm . . . Maybe I gotta get me some of those catalogs. I’ll never retire, but I want to have that Warren Buffet style portfolio,” exclaimed Tre.
“I’ll lease these two to you,” Smoke said as he laughed while slapping Tre on the back.
During the conversation between the drug dealing boss and Smoke, Eyes and Sleep opened the cases to reveal multiple stacks of cash — the color and smell, unmistakable.
“Hotttt . . . daaaammmnnn,” Tre bellowed. Smoke knew the man had seen cash before, maybe a million or so at a time here and there, but the majority of the underworld worked in the electronic era nowadays. It was shockingly easy to Venmo money for drugs.
Once the receipt confirmation went through that the money had been received, the seller dropped the drugs, and very little hard evidence was ever to be found. Numerous times charges against a dealer fell apart when the police caught the deal happening but couldn’t find an exchange of cash. It also didn’t help that phones were destroyed before an IT guy got a chance to hack in. Sure, everyone liked cash, and in general it was harder to track, but the ease of instant transfers was preferred by the up-and-coming generation of dealers.
“Let me hold this,” Tre said as he began dumping the bills from the cases.
“You need to count it?” Smoke asked, smiling as he said it.
“Count it? Hell no, I want to get a couple of my ladies together and roll around in it with them.” Tre laughed as he let the money sift through his fingers.
“I have something else for you to commemorate our business venture,” Smoke said, sliding his hand into his pocket and extracting a box approximately the size of a deck of cards.
Tre’s eyes had a difficult time looking away from the cash strewn about the table, but he pulled himself together and looked at the item in Smoke’s hand.