come along, and then we all have to clean up the mess.”
“Terrance,” Richard said calmly, but Gerome could tell by the vein in his neck that he was ready to explode. “Would you not want Coby calling you Uncle Terry?” He was pulling out the big guns. Coby had all of them wrapped around his little finger, and he did it so easily. If Gerome was honest with himself, Joshie was well on his way to doing the same thing.
“Fuck you,” Terrance swore, without much heat. “Fine. Then you tell me what we’re going to do with a damned brick of their money in the closet and Garvic’s people in the area doing business. We could hand the money over to Elizabeth and let her deal with it from here. But you know Garvic Junior isn’t going to stop looking for us, and if anyone gets even a whiff that we’re here, they’ll descend on us like no tomorrow.” His expression softened. “It would rip everything apart for Richard and Daniel if we had to move again. They have lives here—we all do to a degree.”
Gerome had to agree. “But Garvic’s people would be here regardless of what I did for Tucker. Instead, we know about it now and can figure something out. Bobby Ramone is a low-level operative who is probably going to end up dead very soon. No one loses that much money and gets away with it.”
“And he has to know that,” Richard added, which only circled things right back to Tucker.
“So Ramone is going to be hunting Tucker even more intensely,” Gerome interjected. “Maybe we should arrange for the money to appear in his boat. He’ll have what he wants and maybe he’ll stop hunting for Tucker.”
Richard shook his head. “Nope. Money or not, they are going to work to cut any ties that anyone has to their activity. If they think Tucker could have any idea about what’s happening, they are never going to let him walk away from anything. As long as he can tell anyone what he knows—or might know—or even suspects….”
Gerome swore under his breath. “And all because I got to the bundle first and didn’t just leave it there.” The old truth that he simply shouldn’t get involved was most definitely kicking him in the ass right now. Tucker could have found the bundle, handed it over, been paid, and that could have been that. Of course, then Gerome never would have met Tucker, or Joshie and Cheryl. Gerome didn’t like that idea.
“Hey,” Richard snapped. “Going back over the shit that’s happened doesn’t help any of us. Right now we’re safe, and we need to figure out how to stay that way. And I think the best thing to do is put an end to the drug running that’s going on just off the coast. We’re going to have to watch the beach and report what we see. Harass them into moving on.”
“And how do we do that?” Terrance asked snidely.
Richard shrugged. “I think Gerome needs to make a call to Elizabeth, explain what he saw, and that we believe it’s continuing. Let her turn this all over to DEA, and they can clean up the mess. It’s what they’re supposed to do.”
“Yeah,” Gerome said. “Except I have nothing to go on except a bundle of cash that we’re not supposed to have and something I saw once. It may never happen again, and I have no idea when these guys will make their runs. It will be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Who knows if they’ll get anywhere?” He sighed. “I guess I’ll need to hang out on the beach some more and hope I see something.”
“Maybe take someone with you to make the time speed by,” Richard said quietly.
Terrance groaned but let the subject drop. “What are we going to do about him?”
“He doesn’t know anything,” Gerome said.
Terrance shook his head. “Don’t be so sure about that. Tucker isn’t dumb, and we can talk around our past all we want. He’s curious; I could see it in his eyes.” He gathered up the empty pizza boxes. “You gotta deal with this somehow.”
“I know, and I’ll figure it out,” Gerome said. He wasn’t sure what he was going to tell him. Terrance was right. He needed to develop a cover story.
“Just tell him something close to the truth. That you have a past that isn’t pretty and it’s hard to talk about. Everyone has a past that