If something’s found there, it’s yours.
Ifyou can get out alive.
But the Murphy family is too big, and we have too many delicately aligned relationships to be messing around in that shithole. If we were caught there, it’d look like we were trying to claim the territory. Which, to everyone else, would mean war.
It’s a lucrative patch of land. Police generally keep away, so it’s easy to do slow or fast business there.
But those who do are always small.
Fucking unwritten rules.
New York is bound by them.
Cinco... Obviously I’ve heard of them, but they weren’t who stiffed me. I went through an intermediary who I thought had ties to a cartel operating in Columbia, but not here.
“O’Shay?” I ask. “Are you fucking with me?”
“I don’t know,” O’Shay says. The music begins fading a bit as he clearly moves somewhere quieter. “The intel I got you was good, Dec. I’m loyal to the Murphys.”
Possibly, although he’s still not a regular on our payroll. We only use him on a freelance basis. But we… I… always considered him a Murphy by proxy.
And maybe he is.
I know better than most how easy it is to screw up, and I also know how plans change. Or maybe whoever wanted the drugs knew about the conflict going down at the truckyard and switched the time of the exchange to later. I don’t let O’Shay off the hook, though, because something is still not clicking.
“What’s your contact’s name?” I ask.
He hesitates a split second. “Mario.”
Not a very cartel-sounding name.
The Marcello family truck jumps to mind. But the truck doesn’t mean shit.It could have just ended up there when it died.
He blabbers on about how Mario heard I was out a shipment of pure white snow, one he’d ‘stumbled over’, but I just hang up without another word. I know where to find O’Shay when I need him.
I tuck the name Mario away, alongside the Cinco Cartel. The dead cop and Marlowe I leave out because I’m not sure where they fit into this puzzle yet.
If it was a sting, there wouldn’t be just one cop at the truckyard. That cop had to beacting alone.
And Marlowe...?
The fuck if I know. I listened to her story, I just didn’t buy it.
Gritting my teeth, I call Cal.
“Where the fuck are you, Dec?” he asks, a baby crying somewhere faintly in the background. A door slams and I hear the click of a lighter. “We have a family meeting.”
“Clawzilla’s my proxy.”
“That fucking cat’s sleeping on top of Arnold,” Torin says.
I grin. “One of the others, then. Bruiser?”
“Running around the halls with Raff,” Seamus says about the world’s prettiest dalmatian cat. Well, she only has five black spots on her, but that makes Bruiser a dalmatian cat in my books.
“And before you ask,” Torin adds, “the fucking dog’s doing wheelies with them.”
I fist bump the air. Petal’s wheels make her a speed demon, and honestly, he might just be two, but Raff’s a little chubby and can use the workout.
