“He’s on his way,” he confirmed a second later with a thumbs-up.
“Good. Now get outta here before I bean you in the skull with one of these blocks of money.”
Slick coiled in mock horror. “Don’t do that! Those things are so heavy they might kill me.”
“What a way to die that would be.”
He chuckled before disappearing down the hall.
Jay walked in a moment later. He stopped and leaned against the doorjamb to light a cigarette. Taking a long drag and then another, he swept his eyes over my loaded desktop and gave me a bemused grin. “You look downright giddy, Mr. President,” he said wryly.
“Jay,” I said magnanimously, spreading my arms wide like a king, “how could I be anything but? Are you not seeing what I’m seeing? This is like my birthday and Christmas and the day I lost my virginity, all wrapped up into one! I’m ecstatic!”
He strolled over to the seat in front of my desk and plopped down, spreading his legs wide. He looked thoroughly unimpressed.
“C’mon, Jay baby,” I joked, “just gimme a little smile. Just some Spark so I know you’re human underneath that tough guy act you love to put on so much.”
He took a long drag. “It’s a lot of money,” he said evenly.
I threw my hands into the air in exasperation and leaned back. Jay was who he was; there was no changing him. Then again, that was the reason he made such a damn good number two. He was as even keel as they came, with motherfucking glaciers in his veins. There’d been times when I’d seen him elbow deep in blood as he worked on extracting information from some poor sap from a rival club, and he had looked just as calm as a Hindu cow. All business, all the time. He just did what needed to be done. Money couldn’t buy a better man. Jay was truly one of a kind.
“All right,” I said, “let’s hear what you gotta say.” I lit up a cigarette of my own as he started talking.
“There were some mistakes made on the raid,” he said. “A couple of the new guys got a little sloppy.”
“Who?”
“Duncan and Spark.”
“What’d they do?”
“The usual shit they like to get up to. Toying around with the guard instead of just putting the bastard out of his misery real quick. They grabbed this from him.”
He tossed a gun onto my desk. It was a small pistol with a red knife logo emblazoned on the bottom of the butt. I recognized it as the insignia of the Wild Kings. I grunted and picked it up, hefting it in my hands as I thought about what to do.
Duncan and Spark were two of the guys who’d just recently patched in. We’d made them take some extra time in the prospecting process to try to iron out some of their kinks, but it looked like they’d gotten a little carried away in their first taste of action. “I’ll take the blame for that. I was the one who suggested they go with you.”
I’d been hoping that getting into an actual piece of work would be good for the two of them. They were still teenagers, not even twenty years old. Being the toughest kids in the high school was all well and good, but this was the big leagues now. I’d figured that maybe seeing some blood and bullets would’ve scared them into tightening their acts up a little bit. Looked like I was wrong, though.
There was no room for acting like a dumbass on jobs like the one we’d just managed to pull. The margin of error was always thin, but in this case, it was practically nonexistent. This wasn’t some upstart chump MC we were striking at; it was the Wild Kings, James Sanders’ club. Public enemy number one. Or, at least, my enemy number one.
Taking a huge gamble like this and failing would have obviously been a huge embarrassment. But even more so than that, it would have put us in an extremely dangerous position. James was a notoriously unstable son of a bitch, and I was adamant that this strike had to be clean and anonymous. No traces. No sign of our involvement, just in and out with the money. If it turned out Duncan and Spark had screwed up that critical part of the job and James had discovered who was responsible for stealing this stash, there’d be hell to pay.
“Think there’ll be any fallout from it?” I asked Jay.
He shrugged. “Hard to say. We didn’t stick around to canvas the security system. If they got footage, then, well, they might have our number. Only time will tell.”
“Those idiots. Send ’em on the next long-haul run. Maybe a cross-country babysitting job will teach them to stop being such morons when they’re on the clock.”