And it needed to be handled.
But as soon as it was, she and I were finding a bed, a shower, a couch, a nice patch of grass to occupy, and fuck until we were both too dehydrated to go on.
“When I got the call from Zayn about a possible shipment of guns sitting in a camper but unable to get across the border, I immediately went into research mode,” Noa started. “The United States is the biggest gun exporter byfar, so it was suspicious to have that kind of shipment coming from Mexico which ranked, what, thirty-sixth in arms exports?”
“Yeah, had the same thoughts myself,” Huck agreed. “It wasn’t adding up.”
“Except, when I looked into it, it was legit. In just a purely twist of fate kind of way. This wasn’t an actual arms trade operation. This was a group of buddies who’d been on vacation in Mexico and happened upon the stash.”
“How the fuck does someone happen upon millions worth of guns?” Huck asked, dubious.
“That was my next question. The best any of us can guess is they stumbled into an old cartel headquarters. There’s no telling if it was abandoned, or if the people who ran it simply weren’t around at the time. But the guys… they decided to take the opportunity and load up their camper.”
“With goods stolen from a cartel,” Velle said, brows lifted.
“I said they were opportunistic. I never said they were smart.”
“Okay. So they got to the border. And that’s where you ran into a problem.”
“I have a lot of contacts. Almost all of them are in the States, not at the borders. That’s not really my area of expertise.”
“That’s where we came in handy,” Huck said.
We didn’t have a lot of assets on the border either.
What we did have was a sister chapter in Texas who had their own contacts and were willing to use them to help us for a cut.
“Yeah. So, your friends got them over the border. They somehow managed to make it here.”
“Two weeks late,” Huck mumbled.
“Yeah, well, it’s hard to drive when you’re as stoned as they always are. But they did make it. I had the warehouse by then. We unloaded the goods. And everything was supposed to go to plan. And then you needed an extra few days.”
“Careful, that’s starting to sound like an accusation.”
“Careful, that’s starting to sound like a threat,” she shot back, cold as ice. And it got a lip twitch out of Huck. “Look, whatever the reason, it threw a wrench in things. If we’d been meeting up the next morning, the guns would be in your hands.”
“Instead, someone else got their hands on a million-dollar payload.”
“Um, no,” Noa said, casting a quick glance at me before she looked back at Huck.
“How no?”
“This wasn’t some third party. This was them. The guys.”
“The stoners? They stole back the guns?”
“Yep. That’s what got me out of bed. I got an alert on my phone about motion detected on one of my security cameras. When I checked it, I saw them. No masks. No nothing. Just breaking in and taking the shipment back.”
“Isn’t that a good thing, then?” Dixon asked. “It’s not like they’re a threat.”
“They aren’t, no,” Noa agreed.
“But if they decided to sell to someone else,theyare a threat,” Huck explained. “And, clearly, someone dangerous is involved if there was a shooting and a car chase.”
“And these guys aren’t capable of that?” Velle asked.
Noa looked over at him. “Absolutely not. They’re actually really sweet guys. But sweet can mean easy to manipulate.”
