I ignored him, letting Cracker know it’d take a fucking army to stop me. Or at least Saint, who wasn’t here and probably wouldn’t stop me anyway.
“Cam. Stop.”
Nope. Not yet. I wasn’t letting this douche go until he passed the fuck out.
Which happened a split second later.
Cracker slumped forwards, body slack as his eyes rolled shut. I released him, letting him crumple to the floor and walked away without looking back.
Mateo found me sometime later, working out my frustrations in the rudimentary boxing gym we kept round the back. It was an outdoor space, sheltered only by an old tarpaulin tacked to a couple of fence posts and lit by some solar-powered fairy lights Orla had hung as a joke, thinking it would piss me off.
It didn’t. They’d been there two years and I had no intention of taking them down, even if their sparkle made Mateo look scarier than he usually did.
He didn’t scare me. I kept pummelling the bag that hung from the frame cemented into the ground and barely spared him a glance. “What have you got for me?”
Mateo folded his arms, dried blood flaking from his skin. “I took a couple of hangers-on from the street. Made them sing.”
“And?” I’d expected nothing less. At this point, I didn’t care what he’d done to get me what I needed. “Anything useful?”
“Yes and no. You were right about the Crows being in bed with a bigger crew, but they didn’t know who it was, and they reckon the Crows themselves don’t know who’s lining their pockets either.”
I caught the bag, sweat dripping from me as my chest heaved with stress-busting exhaustion. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Nope. Way they told it, some blokes just showed up one day and pulled Crow cuts on, and they’ve been calling the shots ever since.”
“They’ve been infiltrated?”
“In plain sight. We’re the ones who ain’t supposed to know it.”
I digested that, gathering more threads of a picture that still didn’t quite come together. “What else?” I asked, sensing Mateo was holding something back.
His expression darkened, the scar on his face deepening with his mood. “They said whoever it is, they’re coming for you and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. And that maybe your old man should’ve thought twice before he shut the trafficking routes down and made everyone starve.”
I tilted my head sideways. “That’s pretty fucking specific for a couple of hang-arounds. We’ve got officers don’t know that much.”
Mateo grinned a little, knowing he was one of them and not giving a flying fuck. “I promise you, boss, they were telling the truth as they knew it, but I can’t vouch for the validity of it. Maybe the Crows were counting on us picking their strays up and fed them some bullshit to tell us?”
It was possible, but then, at this point, so were a million other things, and I had two options: retreat and fulfil the bridge contracts, taking the fall if something went wrong. Or carry on, pull back from construction sites and cancel the shipments of materials we’d agreed to before I’d come to my damn senses. “When’s your delivery?”
“Sunday.”
“That’s four days away, right?”
“Five.”
“Fuck, I’m losing track of time today.” I unwrapped my hands and flexed my fingers, ignoring the pain in my ribs that had ratcheted up since I’d begun my ill-advised workout. “How long will it take to bank?”
Mateo shrugged. “Depends. It ain’t like moving blow. Weed players are flakier. What do you need from it?”
“Fifty grand.”
“What for?”
“To return the down payment on the dodgy cement order we took a few months back. We’re cancelling it.”
Mateo whistled. “That’s gonna light a fire underneath us.”
“I know, but we’re already burning, man. We got no choice if we don’t want to back down.”
