“Get into the fucking water, it’s beautiful!” Dan screamed as he ran, fully clothed, into the open ocean.
After Mercedes had left them to return to her husband-to-be, Adam had spent the afternoon at the old lot making up for lost time with his three best friends in the world. They reminisced on the harebrained schemes they cooked up back in the day, drank hard liquor, and shot their empty bottles off the hood of his car.
When night fell, they ventured down to the beach across from Adam’s hotel, the safe part of the city, where Dorian Blake would never find them.
With Dan’s excitement, it was clear he was still coming down off the coke he insisted on having. “Did you hear me? The water!” Dan dipped his head fully under, shaking off his curls and dancing freely into the ocean.
Adam, Paul, and Carlos laughed from their spot on the beach, beer bottles in their hands.
“We’re alright here, bud,” Paul called back to him.
Ignoring his free-spirited friend dancing off into the ocean, Carlos smiled to Adam. “You know what I miss?” He pushed a cigarette into his mouth and flicked it alight before offering the pack to Paul. “Doing bad shit just for the fun of it.”
“I feel like my life used to be so much bigger than it is now.” Paul lit a cigarette over his own mouth and blew out a large puff of smoke.
“Back in the day, you know, whenever we would carry out a hit or finish a run it was just fucking fun. It used to give me this rush,” Carlos said. “Fuck, man. I felt so high after any of those jobs.”
Adam remembered the feeling fondly, hoping it was one he would find again someday. “Higher than I could ever get from drugs.”
Adam and Carlos clinked their bottles.
“I don’t get it,” Carlos said. “It’s exactly the same shit I used to do but it just... isn’t the same. There’s no conflict. No fire.”
“That’s our fault.” Paul extinguished his cigarette in the sand.
“Yeah? How?” Adam asked, leaning his elbows back into the sand.
“You know about the Cortez Cartel?” Paul said. Adam nodded. He knew it well, just after he’d skipped town, the Cortez Cartel had all but disappeared. The gang that was once a bitter rival to the Blake Family…gone. Where there used to be a choice between Cortez or Blake, each empire as terrifying as the other, there was now only one. So just like the Cortez Cartel, the thrill was gone.
“None left anymore. On the surface, at least,” said Carlos.
“Exactly. After you left, after we’d lost it all, the Cortez’s basically had nothing left, either. We’d stolen it all,” Paul said.
“We hit the Cortez’s just as hard as we hit the Blake’s, maybe harder, accidentally.” Carlos made little rings in the air with his exhaled smoke.
“So it was all there for Blake to take,” Adam sighed as he realized. “Fuck. We put the Blake Family in prime position to wipe out their last remaining rival in town.”
A yelp from the ocean caught Adam’s attention. A large wave had surprised Dan, and he bowled over, going under for long enough that Adam frowned in concern. Thankfully, he was quickly back up, shaking the water from his curls. “Fuck you, waves!”
The bastard was lucky he didn’t drown.
“Alright,” said Carlos, wiping the sand from his shorts. “I’m gonna go get this dickhead before he drowns himself.” Carlos put out his cigarette in the sand and headed for the water.
Adam turned back to Paul and the topic at hand. “So Blake rounded up everyone in the Cortez Cartel, and what? Fucking killed them all?”
“Most of them. The big wigs all got executed. Some surely are in hiding. Others were converted to work for Blake. Same as us,” said Paul.
Adam brushed his chin. “He’s not worried about having all these angry people working for him?”
“Oh, he’s not afraid of us,” Paul laughed. “Carlos, Dan, me, we’re all walking reminders of what happens when you try to fuck over Dorian Blake.”
“But you stuck together.”
“Of course, we fucking did. In for life, remember?” Paul clutched at the tattoo on his arm, cursive writing with the words written on it, and Adam wondered if Paul had meant to do that consciously. “Truthfully, we wouldn’t have stuck together if Mercedes didn’t make us. She made us stick together even when we wanted to run.”
“Like I did?” Adam recoiled at the cheap shot, audibly gulping. He knew he fucked up by leaving them. He knew he shouldn’t have waited as long as he had to come back. He also knew friends like his, who welcomed him back like family, were rarer than money or gems.
“I never blamed you for running.”
