Total pages in book: 77
Estimated words: 74554 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 373(@200wpm)___ 298(@250wpm)___ 249(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 74554 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 373(@200wpm)___ 298(@250wpm)___ 249(@300wpm)
They were just being overly cautious.
If I did my part for a few days—no matter how scummy it made me feel—then maybe the part where everyone was suspicious of Rue would be over.
A flash of light had me looking up to see Rue already making her way out.
I guess this kind of shrink wasn’t the kind to sit and talk about your feelings; just whip out the prescription pad and give you what you needed to feel better.
I slid down low but was still able to watch Rue as she exhaled hard and looked helplessly out at the sky, her dark blue eyes sad enough to make me want to say Fuck it to the rules, hop out of the car, and pull her into my arms.
Before I could, her head ducked, and she got in her car, drove to the pharmacy, got a bag of chips, and ate the whole thing in her car as she waited for her meds to get filled.
Only after all that was done did she make her way to Vital Greens, where Traeger had clearly been holding down the fort while she took care of her appointments.
As she climbed out, she looked long and hard toward the ground behind the parking lot where two big grooves were worn into the grass.
Like from a truck pulling there over and over.
And I knew.
I knew down to my fucking bone marrow and the stem cells that made it up that this was something Rue was tangled up in, not something she orchestrated.
There was one good way to tell.
I had to be there for the next delivery of plants.
Judging by the time passed already and Rue’s mounting anxiety, it had to be soon. I just had to keep tailing her until then. Once I cleared her of involvement, well, that was when things got sticky, wasn’t it?
Because she wasn’t going to be able to just keep being in the dark.
Huck was going to want to talk to her, question her about the crew that was using her. Sure, we had our crew on it. And we had a local hacker digging up anything else that we couldn’t. But Rue had insider knowledge. She could tell us not only the hierarchy, but how they all interacted, if there were weak spots we could exploit, where exactly the supply was coming from, how much product there was, and what time the shipment hit the port, which port. All the shit we would need to know to either cut their supply off at the knees, forcing them to either move or take up a new trade, or, yeah, in the extreme… take them out.
The call belonged to Huck and the OG members. They’d been around the block a lot more times than the rest of us.
From what I could tell, things had been rocky the first few years, but they kind of found a safe stride after linking up with our sister chapter in California. They had guys who were willing to hit up all of the gun shows in the South, load up on untraceable shit, and bring the bulk back to us (for a cut). Then, on their way back to California, they’d hit some more shows and sellers to have a supply to sell there.
We, in turn, sold what we had to Zayn—an international arms dealer. It allowed us to stop running around to try to find buyers, potentially getting ourselves into tricky situations during supply drops to them. It also afforded us a fuckton of free time.
Hence my boredom.
Objectively, it wasn’t that big of a deal for there to be a crew who was running small amounts of guns to other local organizations. Or even if they had buyers further north. Most gun trade was done in the South because of lower regulations and the ports. From there, people ran guns up and through the country.
It didn’t seem like Huck was overly concerned if that was the case, if these guys just wanted to use the port for ease of access then take their actual business to other states.
The issue was if they were trying to destabilize the local trade, since we did still deal with some of the crews in the area—just at a smaller scale than Huck and his original crew did back in the day.
Or, of course, if they thought they were going to take over with Zayn for us.
That shit was not going to stand, that was for sure.
At this point, though, we had more questions than answers.
I could practically hear Huck’s voice in my head: Rue could get us answers.
The only thing worse than just questioning her would be trying to actually use her, force her to get more information than she already had.
There was one thing I knew. And that was the bait always ended up dead.