Resonance (Marauders #4) (18 page)

I wasn’t about to ask her what all that meant, but I was certainly getting a crash course in club life. Maybe not the kind Tommy wanted me to get, but still nothing that was about to scare me off.

Kathleen and Anna showed up at the same time, and we sat down in the calmest area we could find. There were apparently perks to being in the clubhouse with Brick’s wife because she calmly asked the people who were on the couch to give us space, and they took off. ‘These heels are not designed for standing up,’ was Mel’s only comment when Kathleen laughed about it.

Soon, Kathleen was asking me questions, and being a top reporter, she quickly lured me into a conversation about warfare and my dad, but I was fine with it. I didn’t mind talking about it at all. There were a lot of more uncomfortable conversations we could’ve had. It also made me forget where I was.

“I think you get a different perspective when you’re in the middle of it,” I said.

“How?”

“You don’t see the big picture, and you don’t even try.” I’d never seen actual combat, but I’d heard both Dad and Zach talking about it. “It’s about short-term things, like still being alive the next hour.”

“So I guess he hates the anti-war people.”

“No. He’s anti-war, too, in a way. He has a problem with the anti-war people who go after the guys on active duty, though. And I agree with him. Separate the politicians’ politics and the people doing their duty.”

Kathleen smiled. “He hated my guts, didn’t he?”

“Yes,” I admitted with a laugh. “But more when you were a political reporter. He liked your
Rape in Warfare
thing. I think he wanted people to know what actual dirty warfare was.”

“Yeah, that was dirty. What did you do in the Navy?”

“I was on flight deck. Directing planes.”

“Oh!” Anna said. “The one that does that going down on his knee and the…” She pointed sharply with her hand to the side. “Sending off the plane thing.”

“No. That’s the shooter, or catapult officer. I was… You know the people in yellow clothes who wave around?” I started laughing myself at what that sounded like. “We were actually called Yellow Shirts. I guess you could say I was the person who got the plane up to the shooter.”

“So you know all those hand signals?” Mel asked while waving around with her hands, kind of like people did when they imitated people on flight deck.

“Yes. Everyone on the flight deck knows all of them. There are a lot of hand signals going on in the Navy in general. Dad used to teach us when we were kids.”

“It’s almost like a dance,” Anna said.

“I guess it could look like that,” I laughed.

“Did you like it?” Mel asked.

“I loved it. It was my kind of thing. It looks like chaos, but it’s not. Everyone has a job and… I don’t know. When I joined the Navy, I wasn’t sure what I wanted, but after my first look at a flight deck I knew that’s where I wanted to be.”

“Show us,” Kathleen said and stood up. “I’m curious.”

“Show you signals?”

“Yeah.” Mel got up too. “Sometimes body language is the only goddamn language men understand. Might give me some ideas. You know, for ‘if you leave your fucking greasy shit in my kitchen again, this is what I’ll do’ signals.”

I laughed, but got up next to them. “I guess we’ll start with ‘back up.’”

“Good sign,” Kathleen said.

There was a lot more laughing than signaling, but it made me completely forget where I was. Anna soon gave up, since her cane kept bumping into things, so she was back on the couch, and she was laughing more than any of us.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Brick said when he saw us.

“She’s teaching them flight deck hand signals,” Tommy answered with a laugh. “Never seen those done by a person wearing high heels. Very impressive, Mel.”

“You have no idea of the things I can do in heels,” she said to Tommy and put her arm around Brick’s waist before giving him a kiss. “Wanna get drunk with me and my friend Shooter over there?”

“Shooter?” he asked.

“I wasn’t actually a shooter. I was a yellow shirt.”

“Shooter sounds better,” Mel said. “Want another beer?”

“Yes,” I answered.

When Mel left, Brick sat down in the armchair, and I took the couch.

“She’s right,” he said. “Shooter sounds better.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

It’s Brewing

~oOo~

“WE WENT TO MEXICO on a tourist visa, then they snuck us in over the border,” Eagle explained. “So the sum of the cardamom is that we’re not officially here.”

Tommy stared at Eagle and tried to figure out what the fuck spices had to do with anything. Eagle was Swedish, and he loved using directly translated idioms, like ‘take a shit in the blue cupboard,’ but it was mostly confusing to the rest of them.

Brick sighed. “The sum of the cardamom?”

“The long and short if it,” Eagle said with a big smile, and shoved some more snuff under his lip before nodding towards the president of the Amsterdam’s Smiling Ghoul charter, Daan. “Especially not Daan, since he’s not allowed to enter the country.”

“So do you have a timetable for what’s going to happen?” Brick asked.

“We’re not in a hurry,” Daan answered. “As you know, part of the reason we have a good relationship with the people we deal with is that we always deliver. I know the cartel has the same policy. There are a few things that’s… slightly disturbing.”

“Fuck,” Brick sighed again. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

“I’m guessing you know more about cartels than I do, so when I tell you there are seven big players on the Mexico arena right now, I’m sure you know what that means.”

Even Tommy knew what that meant.

In some ways, society could be seen as just another ecosystem. Things needed to be balanced to work. And if society was an ecosystem, the criminal elements were predators. An ecosystem could only sustain a certain number of predators, and when there were too many of them, some needed to be weeded out. Something that was usually done by themselves, especially in a society such as Mexico, and it was done with warfare.

Seven big players didn’t mean seven cartels or seven players in total in the drug trade. In Juarez alone, there were somewhere between five to nine hundred gangs, but most of the drug trade boiled down to a number of groups run by one or a few cartels. They worked together as conglomerates, each group in control of a certain area, and sometimes they almost had a franchise thing going.

The more the law pressured them, the less they worked together, split up into more groups, and the groups still needed to split the cake between them—so, the more players, the closer they came to a cartel war. Which was something really fucking bad for everyone involved.

The cartel the Marauders were working with was one of the really big players, there were basically just two others of the same size, so Tommy wasn’t particularly worried they’d disappear, but they could be weakened. Not even mentioning that the war could spread over the border, since almost all the bigger cartels ran operations in the US as well. Which in turn meant that the Marauders could be in big trouble, just like any other organizations that worked with a player involved in the war.

The war against drugs—which everyone pretty much knew was already lost—was fought in Mexico by both the police and the military. The problem was that the desertion rate in the Mexican military was extremely high. Tommy remembered having read that over one hundred thousand soldiers had deserted in less than ten years, and an overwhelming number of those had switched sides and gone into the drug trade. Which meant that a war wasn’t fought between street kids who didn’t even know how to properly hold a gun, but between trained soldiers.

To fill out the ranks with pawns, they had an almost limitless supply of young kids. The US, and other western countries, had filled Mexico with sweatshops. Places where people earned somewhere around forty to ninety dollars a week, and school was only free until ninth grade, so kids ended up in the drug trade—and by extension, the cartels—at an early age to stay out of the sweatshops. All of it in a country where an automatic weapon cost about as much as a pack of smokes.

The other potential problem was that if Mexico became too unstable, people could start avoiding it until the storm blew over, and instead move the drugs through other, safer territories. Like the Caribbean, which had been a big trafficking zone for drugs until the US started putting pressure on them during the Seventies.

That wasn’t very likely, though. The cartels would come to some agreement before that, but it could become really fucking bloody until they did.

“If the cartel goes to war, that would slow down your timetable, wouldn’t it?” Bear asked.

“Or hurry it up,” Daan answered. “If our US brothers realize what we’re up to, they could get involved simply to get new friends. How does it look for you, I understand you’ve got five prospecting charters?”

“So far, it’s all good, and we’ve patched over four of them,” Brick answered. “We picked them carefully.”

“I have no doubt. There’s a reason we picked you, and it’s not just the wares you’re offering,” Daan said. “We might have to do things differently than planned, though. The last drug war lasted for a decade.”

“Think it’s still ongoing,” Brick said. “This would more be an escalation than a new war, but that’s problematic enough.”

“Aren’t the wars usually about the coke?” Sisco asked. “We hardly ever deal with that.”

On rare occasions, their pot deliveries also contained some coke, but the cartel had other dealers for that, and lately, Tommy’d heard rumors they had started to move the majority of their coke directly to Europe, since the price they got there was much higher, making it worth the transport cost.

“It doesn’t matter what we deal with,” Bear answered. “If we somehow make them money, we’re a target.”

“Are the US Ghouls working with any other cartels than the ones you’re working with?” Brick asked Daan.

Tommy wasn’t sure if Daan would answer that question, or if he still felt some sense of loyalty to members that were supposedly still his brothers, but that wasn’t the case.

“Yes, but those cartels are in alliance with yours. Although that might shift when the war starts.” He looked at Brick and corrected himself. “Or escalates.”

“Could that be a problem for you, since you set up the deal?”

“It could. That’s why how our timetable changes is completely depending on what happens in Mexico. It might come to us having to show where our allegiance lies, which might not be the same as where our US brothers put theirs.”

“I gotta point out,” Mitch said, “that when you say ‘move the timetable,’ it doesn’t mean shit to us, since we’re not really aware of exactly what the timetable was. So what we really want to know is more in the line of
when
. Are we talking months or years, to begin with?”

“If our US members get a sense of what we’re doing, it starts immediately. If they don’t, and their cartel and your cartel continues their alliance, I’d say we’re looking at a minimum of two or three years until we make a move. If the war never starts—or doesn’t worsen,” he sad with a smile in Brick’s direction, “we’re looking at about a year. Either way, with the uncertainty on the other side of the border, we might need to do this in a different way than we had originally planned.”

“We won’t become Smiling Ghouls,” Brick said with a determination impossible to miss. “That’s not going to happen, no matter what happens in Mexico.”

“I know. And we won’t become Marauders, and that was never the plan. We want a clean break from the US with only business partners on this side.”

“Okay. Just wanted to make that clear. So how do you want to do it differently?”

“I want to leave Eagle here for a while, and possibly send Pico here, too. Not necessarily here, in Greenville, but on this side of the Atlantic, and preferably stationed in New York, but they’ll move around.”

“I’ll call Veetor, our president up there. I’m sure he can sort them out.”

“Thank you,” Dan said. “If the cartel goes to war, they’ll end up in radio silence, and I need people here who I trust—no offense.”

“None taken,” Brick said.

“Their main focus will be the weapons,” Daan continued. “I’m sure you’re aware that we’re selling weapons to the cartel, and any smart general knows that the first thing you need to do is cut off the supplies. I think we can all agree it’s in our best interest that they keep getting their weapons.”

“Definitely,” Bear muttered.

“We’re gonna move around the weapons trade slightly… To make them harder to track…” Daan looked uncomfortable.

“I don’t need details about that,” Brick said and shook his head. “It’s none of my business. How close would you say that it is?”

“Not close,” Daan answered. “This is just planning ahead. It’s brewing, but it’s not close to boiling over. At least I don’t think so, but that’s always hard to predict.”

Tommy sighed in relief. It would really fucking suck if it was close, because he could be out of commission for the next three months if he was unlucky as fuck. He still didn’t like where they were heading. A cartel war, and him with a kid and a woman in the middle of it, that was bad.

Besides keeping his club safe, his main interest was to keep Billie and Felix outside whatever was coming, and he also wondered how the fuck he warned Clyde about a cartel war. Even if Clyde’d had a hunch that the Marauders were involved in illegal activities, there was still quite a leap to being involved with a cartel.

After the meeting was over, he stayed at the bar for a couple of hours to talk to the Dutch. Felix was already in bed, and Billie was working, but he was planning to go by and see her when she came home.

~oOo~

IT WAS MY LAST shift at work before the surgery. Since I’d realized that Felix would need a new kidney, I had never been able to see beyond the surgery. That was how it had been until it had been clear that Tommy could donate. Since then my life had been firmly divided into ‘before’ and ‘after’ the surgery. The last week, the countdown had been things I had done for the last time before Felix had a new kidney.

So, this was my last night at work before the surgery.

Somehow, that felt like a huge thing, and the people I worked with enhanced the feeling by having bought Felix presents and me good luck flowers. I’d taken a month off from work. I’d been fully prepared to simply hand in my notice if my boss wouldn’t grant me the time off, but Helen had agreed without hesitation, and I’d told her I would try to be back sooner than four weeks. I just wanted to have the option in case anything went wrong.

“Then I expect you back in three weeks,” she’d said with a big smile. “Because nothing will go wrong.”

So on my last day, she sat down behind the reception desk with me before leaving for the day.

“How are you doing?” she asked.

“I think… I have a hard time believing it’ll be over. At least the worst parts, there’s still some issues, but generally, he’ll be like any other child.” I had a hard time finding the right words. “I’ve never had a ‘normal’ kid. I’m not sure how to do that.”

“If you can handle having a child as sick as Felix has been, I’m sure you can handle having a healthy kid. How are you getting along with his father?”

“Oh… um. Really well.” I realized I was blushing, and Helen laughed. “Yeah… Really well.”

“Penis in vagina well?”

“That would be one way of describing it,” I admitted. “He’s been great. Not just because he’s giving Felix his kidney, but he’s been really great with Felix. A great dad.”

“I would assume he’s forgiven you, then,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “And I’ve told him the sob story.”

“Good. Not that I think it’s something a woman is obligated to do, but in this case I think it’s good. It probably helped him understand.”

“Maybe. We were on pretty friendly terms by the time I told him.”

Tommy hadn’t changed since he found out, and that was a big relief. In no way had he changed how he acted towards me, and it had most definitely not meant that he’d been more careful when we had sex. He understood that it was a big deal, but that I didn’t want him to act like it was. There was a subtle, but important difference between those two things.

“Let us know how it goes,” Helen said with a smile. “I’ll keep my fingers crossed. We all will.”

“Thank you.”

When I came home, Felix was in the kitchen, and he gave me a big smile when he saw me. He was supposed to have been in bed hours earlier, but lately Mom had really slipped on the bedtime thing. He still kept smiling, and even if he had moments when he was scared or worried, he was, more than anything, eager. He knew it would hurt, he knew almost every risk that was included with the surgery, but he was looking forward to it anyway. Maybe it was that he knew he
had to
do it, or maybe he was just a small kid who was looking forward to not being sick anymore. Whatever the reason, I was relieved that he had never asked me to not have to do it. I’m not sure how I would’ve reacted if he did, and I had certainly thought about it.

We kept reading
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
He didn’t want to stop, and I’d tried to point out there were other books for older kids we could try, but he didn’t want to. Sometimes we read it from beginning to end, but also just his favorite parts of it. The part currently his favorite was when Dorothy and her friends arrive at the Emerald City and had to wear glasses, because he liked the pictures of them all wearing them. I’d told him that my favorite part was The Tin Man’s story. How the woodchopper had been in love with the Munchkin girl who’d promised to marry him when he could afford to buy her a house. But the lazy old woman she lived with didn’t want to lose her serving girl, so she got help from the Wicked Witch of the East, who enchanted the woodchopper’s axe. Limb by limb on the woodchopper was cut off and replaced by tin until all of him was made out of tin. He’d lost his heart and thus his love for the beautiful Munching girl.