I stared at her. “Did you have this conversation with the cartel before or after they started distributing beyond the agreed borders?”
“I didn’t discuss this with the cartel,” she said with a defensive tone and took a moment. “I’ve been talking directly with Julièn.”
Manny knew she wasn’t authorized to make these kinds of dealings on her own. If it was for the benefit of the Coalition, she had to come to me first. If it was for her own benefit, she had no business being there in the first place.
There were three Mexican cartel families: the Munoz, the Vasquez, and the Castillos. All three were extremely explosive, to each other and to outsiders like us. Because of their volatility and their constant struggle for power within Mexico, we had never been able to get them into the Coalition. So we had come to a treaty with the families, allowing them each a section of the States to deal in, in exchange for keeping their drug war from spreading too far.
I crossed my arms. “You’re on a first-name basis with the Mexican president?”
She slit her eyes and smiled. “No one else would have ever been able to make that kind of a deal.”
This gibe had been against me. It had always been clear that Manny didn’t just have feelings for me; she had feelings for my power. She wanted both of us so badly she was willing to do anything.
“You’re walking a very thin line,” I warned her quietly. “While you were busy making backroom deals with the president, the cartel has been making themselves comfortable on our turf. You need to do your job and ensure that our treaty is being followed, without setting off a war.”
“This deal would make everything easier for us—”
“Nothing’s ever easy,” I hissed.
Manny’s jaw tightened. “You just wish you were the one who had been able to make this kind of deal.”
I took her aside and glanced around the room. “If the captains get wind of the fact that you’re making dealings on the side without authorization … you’re putting yourself in serious danger.”
Her lips thinned.
The rest of the captains filtered in.
She nodded and stepped away.
We sat around the table, and I started the meeting.
As we went through the day’s agenda, I kept Manny in my peripheral vision. She fidgeted in her seat and spun her pen between her fingers, feigning the slightest of interests in the conversation topics.
Kostya ended the agenda with our decision to sell our shares in Chappelle de Marseille and fund Advantis. Apart from the regular grunted response, this garnered very little interest from anyone around the table. Anyone but me.
I took a quick glance at the faces around the table and asked if anyone had anything else they wanted to add, as I always did. Then I waited, my peripheral vision still on Manny.
The leader of the Southern West Coast street gangs piped up, looking slightly uncomfortable. “Wasn’t sure when this was going to be addressed,” he said, and he had a paper sent around to me. It was a printout from the front page of the Callister City Standard. It was dated with today’s date, with a caption of “Vandals Put Damper on a Hero’s Welcome” and a picture of a red spider spray-painted on a white sedan—Shield’s sedan.
I passed the paper to Spider, who was sitting behind me. He glanced over the picture and placed the paper next to him, his expression stoic. All eyes were on Spider and me. Manny smirked.
“I meant to bring this to you before the meeting,” Viper said respectfully and eyed Manny. “But you were busy.”
Yes, I thought, Manny was busy distracting me so that this would have to be seen and heard by all the captains, before I could kill and bury it. Manny was working all angles today—first by trying to disrespect my authority, then trying to attack my most trusted man.
“Obviously, Spider didn’t do that,” I said, chuckling darkly at the picture of the pretty spray-painted spider. “He isn’t that artistic.”
“Still,” Viper said, “the coincidence of someone else painting a spider on Shield’s vehicle … is kind of crazy. Especially after the hot vote—at your demand—to dispose of Shield.”
I wished Viper would have had time to bring this to my attention so that I could think about the best way to deal with this. Even though Spider had had nothing to do with this, the coincidence was certainly uncanny. And it would be used as fuel to Shield’s assertions to the captains that Spider and I were planning to kill him (which of course I was), which were found to be groundless. Until now.
As far as I knew, Shield had painted this spider on his car himself in order to swing the captains’ vote his way, to show that I was brewing up a war that the captains had already declined.
I analyzed the faces at the table and made a quick decision.
“Well,” I sighed, “I think that for the time being, until we can determine the meaning of all this and how this so-called coincidence occurred, Spider will remain out of sight and away from all of our business. Agreed?”
Grunts of approval went around the room.
I did not hear a peep from Spider, but I knew he would be fuming by the time the meeting ended.
“Anything else?” I asked the table before we exited.
Some of the captains had already started gathering their things and mumbling with their neighbors.
Manny placed her pen on the table, leaned forward, and cleared her throat. “I have something to bring to the table,” she announced, her voice firm. A look of surprise flitted around the captains’ faces. With most of them having been in the Coalition from the very beginning, Manny was still fairly new to the table, and with the still-questionable demise of Manny’s father, this move came as unexpected.
She had their attention.
Manny went through the plans for manufacturing and distributing our own products. Dope. Weapons. Cutting the cost of the middleman. Ensuring that she dropped Julièn’s name as many times as possible. When she was done, she leaned back in her chair with a satisfied sneer on her face.
I watched as the old boys, the ones who had been with the Coalition from the beginning, eyed each other.
There was total silence around the table. But not for long.
The leader of the biker gangs was the first to break the silence with a bellow. His nickname was Slobber because of his lack of hair on top and his overgrown moustache, which fell at the corner of his mouth like he was drooling hair.
“Let me guess,” Slobber said, not even attempting to hide his smirk. “In exchange for this deal of a lifetime, the Mexican president wants his cut?”
Manny stared back at him, trying to keep her composure as the old boys quietly cackled. The only ones who remained stagnant were two of the newly inducted street-gang captains.
“Julièn’s at it again,” Kostya mumbled.
I let this go, just for a little while, before bringing order back. Then I gave Manny a condescending smile. “Julièn,” I explained, “has been trying to get in on the action for years, but the cartel wants nothing to do with him. He can’t even control the drug wars in his own country and wants to partner with us, making all these promises he’ll never be able to keep. Tell me, what does he want out of this deal? Because, we all know, nothing comes without a price.”
Silence from Manny.
“Exclusivity? Am I right? He wants us to single-source through Mexico?” I looked Manny in the eye. “We haven’t worked a long time just to build up reputable sources. If we drop all of them, they will find another way to bring the merchandise in. Not only would we be doing business with Julièn—someone who can’t deliver on his promises—but we’d be at war with our partners.”
Manny looked blankly ahead.
“Anything else?” I asked one more time at the table.
Some of the captains were chuckling among themselves as they pushed their chairs back.
“Manny, a word,” I called as the rest of the captains filtered out. I passed some of the remaining paperwork back to Spider and waited for him
to close the door behind him.
Manny stood erect behind her chair and watched me move around the table.
I grabbed her by the hips and brought my lips close to her ear. “If you ever disrespect me, try to upstage me like that again, I will have your throat slit.”
She placed her hands on top of mine, pushing them deeper into her hips. She closed her eyes, leaned in, and kissed me hard on the lips. A rattlesnake’s venomous bite.
When Manny and I walked out of the meeting room, Spider and Carly were already gone.
One of the guards took me back to our place in Houston. We had an apartment in a high-rise. From the outside, the building looked like a roach motel. Inside, it was worse.
The smell of cigarettes and sweat and mixed spices hit my nostrils as soon as I walked into the atrium. There were fliers and muddy floors over by the area designated for the post boxes, though most of these were being held shut by wires or other contraptions. There was miscellaneous garbage piled next to perfectly empty bins.
Five elevators would take residents anywhere between the building’s twenty-eight floors—though only two of them were actually working. An old lady dragged herself onto the same elevator, wheeling her grocery cart of various junk and empty, stolen garbage bags behind her. This explained why all the garbage cans were sitting empty.
A kid had attempted to spray-paint a gang sign on one of the elevator walls. This made me chuckle, given that I had just sat at a table with the captain who led this street gang … as well as the other two rival street gangs in this state. Kids needed to feel like they were fighting for something, feel like they belonged somewhere. Too bad they were fighting each other to make money for the same organization. Ours.
“This place is going to hell,” the old lady mumbled to me, or to herself.
Little did she know that we—or rather, our company—owned the whole building and that we were the slumlords of this hellhole. It made for a great cover. There was no such thing as a nosy neighbor in these types of places.
The old lady got off on the second floor, and I went all the way to the top. The hallway to our apartment looked exactly like all the other hallways in this building. It was dimly lit, with a dozen brown doors on each side of the elevator and a carpet that might have once been of a purple shade. The smell was the only thing that was slightly better.
But once I unlocked the door, gone was the decrepit. Our apartment took up the whole top floor. It was clean and bright, draped in a lavishness that the people living in our building would never know in their lifetimes.
Carly was sitting on the arm of the couch, and Spider was leaning against the back of it. They were waiting for me, ignoring each other. The weird thing about Spider and Carly was that, even when they were fighting (or whatever this was), they couldn’t stand to be more than a few feet apart.
When I saw Carly’s face, I realized that she was waiting for me more as a warning than a welcome.
I barely had time to shut the door behind me before Spider exploded.
“That was your answer!” Spider shouted. “To kick me out of the business because some idiot painted a spider on a car? We both know only Shield would be stupid enough to do something like that.”
“I agree,” I said, slumping into an armchair. “But until we can prove that, I have to show the captains that their business is safe, that the Coalition is safe. This spider painting could push the feds to start looking for someone who calls himself spider. Who knows what that could lead to?”
Carly found a seat on a couch cushion. I waved my hand at Spider so that he would do the same. A quiet, rational caucus was better than wherever he was heading. Spider sat on the edge of the coffee table not too far from Carly.
“And what exactly am I supposed to do in the meantime?”
“For the time being, for the good of the business,” I said, “I need you to work from a remote location.”
“How remote?”
I arched my eyebrows.
“Nowhere near you or any of the captains,” he answered himself. “You know this puts you in a dangerous spot. You can’t just go out on your own.”
When it came to business, Spider was never without me, and I was never without Spider. We had each other’s back, always. At least, we used to. Our work together had been slowly dwindling as I had been going after Shield and his men.
“I’ll have guards with me,” I said.
Spider eyed me. “You know that’s not enough. You need someone who’s on the inside with you. Someone who’s your eyes and ears while you make money.”
“That’s all we can do right now. You’ll have to do what you can without actually being there.”
“I’ll go with you,” Carly volunteered. Her tone suggested that she was actually serious.
Spider looked at her in horror. I tried to not start laughing, because I imagined that Spider’s insides had just detonated.
“Pardon?” Spider asked her.
“I can be your number two, Cameron,” she said to me.
Carly was tough and smart. She could handle pretty much anything. She had seen more in her childhood than most men would ever see in their lifetime. But doing what Spider did would take years of creating relationships and building a sixth sense, being able to sniff out trouble.
Even on her best day, Carly wouldn’t be able to simply waltz into meetings with me because people were too paranoid for that. And I had to admit that Carly hadn’t been at her best since the miscarriage.
Carly kept her eyes on me. I had seen that look a lot lately; it was wild, like a madness that was growing inside of her. What she had lost in the miscarriage was being filled by this blackness.
“I know you can do it, Carly,” I started, and Spider shot up like a rocket.
“Absolutely not!”
Carly shot up too and faced Spider. “It’s not up to you, Spider! You can’t make that decision for me. I’m just as capable as any of you.”
“But,” I added, raising my voice to interrupt them before they got too deep into another shouting match, “this may not be the best time for you to take on that kind of role.”
I had garnered the attention of both of them.
“Not the right time?” Carly questioned, her arms crossed over her chest.
I knew I was treading on unsteady waters, so I took my time trying to explain myself. “Well, with everything that’s been going on, with the Coalition … and with you and Spider, I just don’t think that it would be a good time for you to take on something new like this.”
Spider’s eyes were round. He was standing behind Carly, shaking his head at me. Begging me to stop.
“What do you mean?”
I was going to no-man’s-land. “I’m just saying that with your emotional state—”
“My emotional state?” she barked.
Spider winced. I had always wondered how Carly, a five-foot-nothing girl, could all of a sudden look monstrous enough to spit fire. She stared me down with all her emotions.
In the end, I had managed to alienate both Spider and Carly.
At least they stormed off together.
I hoped that they would use the time to figure things out.
Of course, Manny was the real instigator of their departure. Viper’s performance at the table had been laughable at best. He was new to the Coalition, easily tagged by Manny’s beautiful venom. Manny had been trying to find a way to get Carly and Spider out so that she would have direct access to me. What she didn’t know was that she had done me a favor. I had also been trying to find a way to get them away from me, albeit for different reasons.
The Coalition was fractured. I had felt cracks forming for some time, even before Emmy got swept into the underworld, causing such a stir. I noticed the small things at first, like Johnny, captain for the Italian Mafia, and Dorio, captain for the Asian triad, sitting next to each other at the table. A long history of violence, of family members getting sent back in pieces, would have made these two leaders und
ying enemies. Bringing them into the Coalition and having them in the same room without killing each other had been one of Bill’s greatest feats. And now they were rubbing elbows. My suspicions were further raised when, together, they had convinced the captains that Ignazio and Seetoo, their counterparts in Canada, be brought forward as candidates for underworld leadership in Canada. They wouldn’t have been my first or my second choice. One was too flamboyant, the other too sadistic. But all the captains had agreed that they were the only two in the running, and I hadn’t insisted because I wanted to test out my theory.
Johnny and Ignazio were second cousins; their great-grandfather had a town named after him in Sicily. The American captains were not in Canada and didn’t know what had gone down until I told them after the fact. One would have expected that when I advised them that I had killed Ignazio in favor of Seetoo, Johnny would have at least put up a fuss.
He barely blinked at the news.
Apparently, as long as either of their kinfolk was at the Canadian helm, they wouldn’t bat an eye. Though I was pretty sure that Ignazio and Seetoo didn’t know that their American brethren had had big plans for them. Not yet, anyway.
As far as I knew, they were the only two who were colluding. But it would be enough to overthrow the Coalition, and I knew who was behind it.
Shield had the so-called real world wrapped around his dirty little finger, but that wasn’t enough for him. He wanted both worlds to himself. If his power were allowed to grow, if he were allowed to rule the underworld, I shuddered to think what that would mean for the rest of the world. War. Chaos. Destruction. Shield wouldn’t stop until he was king of all, and he would kill anyone who stepped on his highway to total domination. The real world, the world where my Emmy lived and breathed, would become one with the underworld.
But I wouldn’t be there to see it. I would be dead before I ever let that happen. Emmy’s world would remain beautiful and safe for as long as possible, for as long as I was alive.
What Manny didn’t realize was, in entertaining discussions with the Mexican president and estranging the three families of the Mexican cartel, she had set off an earthquake the size of the San Andreas Fault. One that would eventually divide the Coalition. The minute Manny had told me of her discussions with the Mexican president, I knew that the stage for change had been set.
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