Fracture (Blood & Roses #3-4) - Callie Hart Page 0,13

the fool here, me or him?

God knows what the old man has heard me talking about on that cell. It doesn’t even bear thinking about right now. The car engine screams as I gun it, charging in the direction of home.

I’ll do this one last thing for Charlie, but not to help him. I’ll do it to find out what’s going on with Rick. I’ll do it to find out what the hell is going on around here, and then I’m gonna start making some arrangements.

The deal goes down just as Charlie said it would: on the wharf, Rick—built like a tank, every square inch of skin below the neck tattooed and tagged—meeting with three bikers from a crew I don’t recognize. Their top rockers read Wreckers. I arrived early and set myself up on the second floor of the burned-out warehouse Charlie sometimes uses for meets like this, not really believing Rick would be dumb enough to use this place, but the guy shows up like clockwork. The bikers roar up ten minutes late, cursing and swearing about a police tail they had to shake. These Wreckers must be high-end fuckers to warrant that kind of heat. Rick hugs the first guy, a huge piece of work that would tower over me even, and bumps fists with the other two guys.

“What you sayin’, Caleb? How much longer?” Rick says, addressing the guy he hugged.

The massive guy leans back against his bike, hooking his thumbs into the pockets of his washed-out Wranglers. “Three, four days max. Our guy’s ready to move.”

“And you’ve got what we talked about?”

“Yeah, four. Although you could get six on the container. Don’t know why you wouldn’t wanna maximize your profit.”

Rick shakes his head. “You get greedy, you get caught. Four’s perfect. And they’re all virgins?”

Caleb nods his head. “So our doc says.”

“Good.”

“More than good, brother. You’re gonna wanna fuck this pussy yourself, believe me. They are some fine, grade-A ass.”

Rick grins, scratching at his jaw. “Yeah, well if I stick it to ’em then I get the feeling they won’t be worth quite as much after. And I get pussy just fine, anyway. Better to save these whores for Rebel. Guy has more money than fucking sense.”

Rebel.

I’m not even all that surprised. I haven’t heard the man’s name in a while, maybe not since that bent P.I. nearly sold Sloane to him two years ago. Seems around about time the fucker reared his ugly head. Rick’s right—he does have more money than sense…and a very nasty habit of buying pretty girls and using them up until there’s nothing really left.

“Okay, time to pay up, Holmes,” Caleb advises Rick. “And this time we need more than dates and times. We need something solid. Something that’ll make the old man happy.”

I make a mental note to find out who this old man is, presumably the MC’s president. I know every bike club there is to know in Seattle—they don’t like it, but they all pay homage to Charlie, be that in cold, hard cash or in muscle. The Wreckers are definitely trouble from out of town.

“One Twenty One South Street,” Rick tells him. “Cutting shop. Just getting started. ’Bout half a million bucks worth of coke gonna go through that place in the next month. Gonna get turned into two mil by the time they’ve bulked it up with talcum powder.”

“How many people working the joint?” one of Caleb’s associates asks. Caleb casts him a stern look over his shoulder; it’s clear the guys are there for backup and not much else. Certainly not allowed to speak. The guy clenches down on his jaw, exhaling sharply.

Rick responds anyway, choosing to ignore the silent chastisement taking place within the men’s group. “Four guys. Armed but pretty entry-level. Kids from the local gangs, mostly. Subcontractors. Charlie don’t want his regular guys anywhere near the stuff.”

I haven’t heard of this cutting shop. Charlie’s a dirty crook, sure, but he always proclaims to sell a pure product, guns that work, drugs that don’t fry a person’s insides. What fucking use is a dead customer to me? he always says. If I fucking kill ’em, then they ain’t gonna be around to give me more of their cash, are they, Zeth, my boy? Apparently his motto’s changed, though. To be quadrupling the weight of the product, some nasty shit must be getting thrown into the mix. With each and every new piece of information I learn about Charlie, the girls, the cell