Page 22 of The Grief We Hold

Clutch has a series of packages in front of him. “We brought this hoping you can sell it along.”

“What is it?” I ask.

“It’s meth,” Clutch says. “Broke it up into smaller packages to spread across the eight of us in case we got pulled over on the way here.”

Smart move. That way if anyone got caught, the amount they were carrying wouldn’t have been as severe.

I would have suggested the same.

“How did you come by it?” Smoke asks.

“From a raid we did the day of King’s wedding,” Niro replies.

Butcher looks to King. “You got married too?”

King lifts up his hand to show a black wedding ring. “Bit that bullet willingly.”

“Fuck me,” Butcher complains. “You don’t need to marry a woman for her to become an old lady.”

“Seeing as she’s my sister, yeah, he did,” Saint says.

Halo looks at Saint. “Love how you’re rewriting history here. You weren’t all that happy about him being with her back then. Seem to recall you threatened to kill him.”

Saint flips the road captain the bird, but everyone else chuckles.

“What do you want for it, King?” Butcher asks.

“A favor.” The man taps the table twice before looking up. “Sometime in the future, we might need you. I don’t want to put an end date on it. Just that if we call, you come.”

“How much is there?” Smoke asks.

“A bit over a kilo,” Vex replies. “About quarter of a million dollars.”

Butcher looks at King. “Why don’t you sell it?”

“We stick to what we know, and it isn’t meth.” King pushes his hair back from his forehead. “We don’t have a pipeline for it.”

Atom leans forward. “That’s a lot of money. Why give it to us?”

Clutch nudges the packages forward. “We had a really good fucking year. Call this sharing the love.”

Butcher nods, and Catfish takes it. “We’ll move it through L.A.”

“Safer than Denver, right now,” Atom says.

“Why’s that?” Halo asks.

“The Russians, possibly Bratva,” I say. “They’re growing. Filling the void in Denver. Disrupting our flow of goods through the airport.”

King rubs his palms together. “What kind of disruption?”

Catfish leans back in his chair. “We have a handler on the inside who manages to get shit out for us, bypassing certain channels, so we’ve been bringing shit in through the Denver airport from Mexico City. Guess we got too lax in our routine. We were collecting the first Saturday every month. The airport is usually rammed and understaffed. Makes it easier for things to be overlooked. They have their own sources at the airport, so they stole our last shipment.”

“Fuckers,” Vex grumbles.

“Lesson learned,” Atom says. “We’ll mix up the routine now, but plan to be at the airport the first Saturday in May to catch them waiting for us.”

King looks to me. “What have you done to get the delivery back?”

---