a laugh at me. “You sure you’re not gonna push to be Prez someday soon? You’re too smart to be a VP to a grease monkey.”
Someday there’s gonna be a reckoning because they all have Rue wrong, every last one of them has decided I’m the brains of this next generation.
Rue didn’t go to college because that woulda meant leaving Poe.
We talked about it. We planned that shit out together and made an agreement on how the hell we’d be moving forward long before either of us ever prospected and patched in. There’s never been a question in my mind about Rue’s presidency.
If they’re second guessing his smarts for this shit then… good. Better to be underestimated, for everyone else to underestimate us. It makes them sloppy and it’ll only help weed out the rats.
At my silence, Luis huffs and says, “There’s something you should know.”
I sigh and nod. “I was guessing this wasn’t a fucking circle jerk.”
He scoffs as he lights up a cigarette and offers me one. I have enough vices in my life so I wave him off and keep my eyes on the doors.
“The last shipment that came through. I usually don’t get a look at ‘em, I leave it to the boys and let them earn their cuts but shit went down and I decided to ride along.”
That gets my attention.
The shipments go from us to various drop off points around the country. Luis and his boys take care of Louisiana and we move a lotta goods that way. The last shipment had been overseen by Hellion, Rue, Vic, and I. It was stored in the warehouse for two days before we moved it along, everything had gone smoothly.
“What about it? Something missing?”
He takes a long drag and then pegs me with a look. “Nah. Something extra was in the container. Six dead bodies.”
I turn to face him completely, forgetting the fucking door. “What the hell do you mean, dead bodies? Demons? Or Unseen? I think I’d have noticed if six of our boys were missing.”
He drops the butt of his cigarette and lights up another, keen to just fucking chain-smoke this conversation through to the end. “Neither. They were kids. Six little girls, all dead and huddled together like they were being fucking smuggled.”
Jesus fucking Christ.
“Someone is pulling extra cash by smuggling little girls across the borders and we’re the ones doing the dirty work. Smells like the fucking rats to me.”
I spin away from him ready to stalk my ass up those stairs and start fucking swinging until I find the asshole doing it.
Smuggling fucking kids.
That’s never been our style, not something we’d ever get into, and the thought of some fucking gutless turncoat rat making cash off of some guy raping a kid that’s been moved by me and my fucking family? Nope. Not today and not on my fucking dime.
“You can’t just go in there and start shooting. We need to know who the fuck is doing it. We need to start mixing shit up around here, changing our paths and timetables. Only way to figure this out. You gotta lock it down tight. You think this ain’t killing me? I’ve got kids around the same age as the girls in that fucking box.”
Typical fucking dead-beat dad, he has four kids to four different bitches. Diego is the oldest and I’m fucking hoping he’s the worst of the lot because he’s definitely on the road to being fucking taken out.
He’s not exactly a fan of being lower on the food chain than anyone else and even being the future Prez of the Shreveport charter isn’t enough because it’s not the mother charter. He’ll never be an Original because he’s not a Callaghan and that’s something that eats him up inside.
I blow out a frustrated breath and give him a nod. “Leave it with me, I have eyes on that situation and I’ll find the fucking rat.”
First, I have a chapel to sweep.
Chapter Five
Angel
The truck is hot overnight. Too fucking hot to handle but short of finding a homeless shelter or spending some of my cash on a motel room I have no other options. I’m not at that extreme point of exhaustion yet so I just don’t want to spend the cash on a room yet.
I tell myself I’m only going to do that once a month at most, the rest of the money being spent sparingly on food and new outfits for the themed nights at the Boulevard.
All the remainder