Page 13 of The Triangle

We got an operation out west. About thirty-five up-and-comers do the dirty, put them on a train, ship them to another city down south, and then we have ’em picked up and spread out to about two dozen different shops to be chopped. We sell that shit online through a website hosted in Mexico.

Like me he learned to keep his distance from the product the hard way. Like me he’s got a business and like mine, it’s not a front. I make custom bikes because I love the work, and he breeds and sells racehorses because he likes the smell of premium alfalfa hay and the sound of that bugle on race day.

He told me that. I’m not just talking out my ass.

But it feels like we’re at the tail-end of closing up shop. Ready to retire. At least I am. I’ve got money socked away in various offshore accounts. When I told Christine I got money I wasn’t lying. When I said I sold a bike, I did, and that’s how I got it. I don’t touch the dirty money. Not one fuckin’ cent. Everything I spend comes from bikes. All that other green is locked up tight in faraway banks.

But if she needed piles of money I’d get it for her. If she wanted it, I’d hand it all over.

I owe her.

Brasil has even more security than I do. He’s one paranoid motherfucker. But we’re partners so I got a special biometrically-coded app to open his garage door, which lets me pull the Jeep right onto a lift that will take me up to his personal parking spaces. When I get up there I ease the Jeep out, take a reserved spot next to his Escalade, and make my way to the door where his security pats me down (no one gets past this door without a pat-down), finds my gun, takes the magazine out, empties the chamber, and then hands it back with nothing more than a nod.

No one gets past this door locked and loaded either.

“Be careful,” the door-thug warns me.

“Why?”

“He’s pissed off today.”

“Noted.”

Brasil isn’t one of those Zen guys. He throws a fit about pretty much everything. But the second I open the solid-steel door I can hear him yelling. It’s his I’m-about-to-off-one-of-you-stupid-motherfuckers yell.

When I walk the hallway leading into the vast, open loft space I see a line of men—tough men—standing up against the wall like they’re about to get hit by a firing squad. My age. Hard men. Experienced men. You get the point. They’re not fresh-faced babies.

And Brasil is pacing in front of them, screaming, his face red with anger, his yelling so loud it makes my throat hurt. I can practically see the vein throbbing in the side of his neck as he points to the guy with the gun.

It really might be a firing squad.

“What the fuck?” I ask.

Brasil stops mid-stride to stare at me. It takes a lot of self-control and a few seconds to halt the threats he was about to hurl at me, but he does it.

“We have a fucking problem.”

“OK,” I breathe out.

“Get the fuck out of here. And you do not come back until you know who the fuck is responsible for this.”

The line of men scatters instantly. They don’t look back. They don’t make faces or throw each other sidelong glances as if to say, What the fuck is up his ass?

They just leave.

Brasil pours himself a whiskey, downs it in one gulp, and then slams the glass down on the concrete kitchen counter so hard it shatters.

“I… am going to assume something went horribly wrong with that last order.”

“You assume correctly.” He’s calm now. Like that whiskey was the golden ticket to peace. And he walks over to the office section of the loft, takes a seat in the absurdly large leather chair, and leans back with a creak. “Our last shipment is gone.”

“Gone? Like never got here? Or someone got to the freight cars before our guys did?”

“What’s the difference?”

I shrug. “Well, if it never arrived then you don’t need to yell at our men. It’s not their fault. But if they fucked up and let it get away, then yeah, we got a problem because that means we got a rat.”

“We got a rat,” he says, his Irish accent thick. He was born in the U.S., but he’s spent a lot of time in Ireland over the course of his lifetime. Just got back a week ago and the accent is always thicker when he comes home than it was when he left. “And we’ve got competition.”