“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 phone tap, now this, I become more and more unnerved. I wasn’t under the illusion that he told me everything, that’s for sure, but I thought I at least knew the lay of the land with him. And now it seems as though I didn’t know the lay of the land at all. I didn’t even know what fucking country we were in.

“So the fifteenth’s all set?” Caleb asks.

“Sure is,” Rick replies.

“Sweet. We’ll see you at the Coal House. Tell your old man Petey says hello, you hear?” Caleb draws Rick into a loose hug, slapping his back before swinging his leg over his bike and grabbing hold of his ape hangers. The snarl of bike engine fills the warehouse. With a deafening rumble the three men lap around Rick and then burn out of the building, leaving the lone man standing below.

This is where I’m supposed to make my presence known. This is where I’m supposed to make Rick hurt, and then kill the man. I don’t do that, though. I attempt to gather my thoughts as I watch him collect his leather jacket from where he’d slung it over a rusting handrail and put it on. Why the fuck do those guys want to know about Charlie’s business operations? Especially if they haven’t actually hit any of the places yet? It makes no sense, although they’re obviously planning on hitting this cutting shop at some point. They wouldn’t want to know how many men are patrolling the place otherwise. And why the fuck is Charlie hiring gangbangers?

There are a million questions swirling around my head as I let Rick walk outside. By the time I’ve decided I want to question the fucker he’s already reached his car, a flashy Mitsubishi Evo with blacked-out windows. His body is bent, half in, half out of the machine.

“What’s up, Rick?”

The guy shits his pants. His body jolts, his hand automatically reaching around his back: gun. He sees the Desert Eagle in my hand before he manages to clasp hold of his own weapon, though. I’m not pointing it at him, just holding it by my side, but he knows me. Knows I don’t play with my dick unless I intend to fuck with it. Our eyes lock. “Zeth, man! What you doing out here?” The question he’s posing is really a different one, though. How much did you see? How much did you hear?

“Oh, you know. Same as you, I guess. Just getting a breath of fresh air.” I heard enough, motherfucker.

Rick exhales, sitting down on the edge of the driver’s seat. He knows he’s fucked. “Charlie sent you along with a message, right?” he says, though by the tone of his voice he knows his fate from here on out. Charlie’s not a man to mess around—he likes to make an example, and he likes people to know about it. Rick’s heard about the other guys who were stupid enough to go behind Charlie’s back; he knows what comes next.