“You’re gonna have to figure out how we do this shit sooner or later anyway,” he’d said, shrugging. Though there was something strange in his eyes as he said it, something I didn’t know him well enough yet to understand.
It didn’t matter, though.
I was just really fucking thankful for the distraction, no matter his reasoning.
I figured that maybe getting out of town would help me clear my head, get me out of the goddamned funk I’d been in.
Ultimately, I knew the cause of it. But I refused even to acknowledge it in my own head, not wanting to give it any more weight than it already had.
I thought a new town with new places to see would shake things up.
Who didn’t like a trip to Vegas every once in a while?
Especially if the hotel cost was covered and you had a little change in your pocket, thanks to a new job that paid better than you were anticipating?
“How much cash am I carrying right now?” I asked Crow as we got in the elevators to go up to our floor, since Sway and Slash were on another.
“Ah, eight to ten. I don’t know which bag you grabbed.”
Eight to ten.
And there were five bags.
Low end, thirty-two grand.
High? Fifty.
For one drop.
And this was, apparently, their fourth one in the past month.
It was no wonder they were paying me well. They were making bank.
I’d worked for the mafia, sure, but I’d never been anywhere near the top of the organization. I had no idea what they were bringing in. Though, judging by the cars they drove and the suits and watches they wore, it was a lot.
I’d always been paid by the job before. And while that pay was good, it wasn’t always steady. So I’d never been poor, but I hadn’t ever been rolling in it either.
It was nice to have a steady paycheck. It was even better to know that when I’d earned my patch, I was going to make more.
“You get used to it,” Crow said, reading my thoughts. “Though our storage is empty right now. So we better get another shipment soon.”
“Shipment?”
“We have two more guys,” he told me, making me stop walking down the hall because that was news to me.
“What?”
“Yeah, don’t talk about them much because they aren’t around much,” he said, opening his door and ushering me inside since it wasn’t exactly the kind of conversation we were supposed to have in the hallway of a hotel where anyone could overhear.
“I thought the whole basis of a biker club was that everyone was always around?”
“Depends on the club. Our mother club in Navesink Bank and our sister club in Golden Glades…” he started, then at my blank look, clarified, “New Jersey and Florida. They are close to ports. They either have deals with the ports or are actively controlling them. They get their shipments in that way.”
“But we aren’t near a port,” I said, thinking that we were almost as far inland as you could get in the state of California.
“Exactly. And we tried to get something worked out with the mafia who controls the ports up and down our coast, but they have a deal with someone else right now. We’re keeping an eye on that to see if it changes.”
“But until then, you needed another way to get guns.”
“Exactly. And while everyone likes to think all the guns that are run in this country come from overseas somewhere, the fact of the matter is, most of our illegal guns are legally bought in the south and illegally moved and sold up north.”
“I’ve heard about the Georgia to New York City pipeline,” I admitted.
“Yeah, that one is strong. Making millions. Big organization. I think the mafia in the city gets a cut of that. We could have stayed somewhere bigger, closer to clubs and women and all that shit, but Slash decided he didn’t want to have to make any deals with any of the mafia families to be able to operate in their area.”
“Hence Shady Valley,” I said. Which was as close to “the middle of nowhere” as you could get. But still close enough to several big cities that made our job easier.
“Yep. So since we are doing everything in-house, we have a set of brothers—twins, actually—who do our running from the south and up to us.
“As such, we see ‘em every month or six weeks. They stay, they party for a day or two, and then they’re gone again. Hitting gun shows, buying things off of online ads. Don’t even need to have a permit or license in a lot of places.
“And the twins are from down that way, so they know all the shows and shit. They were perfect for the job.”
“Did they ever live up here?”
“Yeah, yeah. We were all friends before Slash got tapped on the shoulder to open up a new chapter. Did some other illegal type shit together back then. But when we came up with the plan, it made the most sense for them to do the buying and transporting to us. And then we would deliver to the buyers.”