Resonance (Marauders #4)

by Lina Andersson

  “Why Portland, Oregon?” Mace asked. “Isn’t New York is bigger?”

  “That’s where they have their contacts,” Bear answered. “And I think they’re very interested in Asia. It’s a big market, which makes the Port of Portland attractive. Something else that I suspect, but they haven’t confirmed, is that it’s also an airport. I think they want to make use of that.”

  “But if they want stuff to Holland, that’s a really fucking stupid place to ship it from,” Sisco said.

  “That’s not our problem,” Brick said. “They want it there, that’s where we’ll deliver it to. What happens with it once we’ve delivered isn’t my problem. But,” he added with a smile, and the others started laughing.

  “He keeps saying that, doesn’t he?” Mitch laughed. “That it’s not his problem, but he still thinks about it.”

  “I like to keep my ass covered,” Brick agreed. “I think they’re more interested in what they can smuggle into the US that way, and that’s why they’ve established contacts there. I’m pretty sure they’ll set up something on the East Coast, too. Whatever they want to Europe would have to go that way.”

  In all honesty, Tommy wasn’t too bothered with the ‘whys.’ He understood that Brick had to think about it, but it didn’t matter to him. That didn’t mean some things didn’t strike him, though.

  “Think you can ask them to set shit up in Miami or something?” Dawg muttered. “Shorter runs means less risk.”

  “I’ll try to suggest it,” Brick answered with a smirk.

  “Don’t you think it’s more that they want us where the Ghouls have been? There might be other reasons than just a pipeline up to a fucking port,” Tommy said, and the others stared at him. “Just a thought. That’s kind of basic warfare, taking over the areas where the enemy have been and keeping an eye on them even after you’ve invaded. To make sure they stay put.”

  “Probably,” Brick agreed. “Gotta admit, if shit goes down the way they want it to, I’d be pretty fucking happy to have eyes in those areas, too.”

  oOo

  TOMMY HAD ASSURED ME that Mel, Anna, and Kathleen would be at the clubhouse. I didn’t know Kathleen very well—I didn’t know the others that well either, but better than I knew Kathleen—but I knew who she was. Dad was a Republican, and he’d had a celebratory glass of whiskey when she was fired from a Washington newspaper. I’d read a few of the articles she’d written since then, and I thought they were good. I’d avoided mentioning them to Dad initially, but by then Dad didn’t care about her much. He’d liked her articles about rape in warfare, though.

  When I walked into the clubhouse, I dearly hoped one of the other women were there, because I didn’t see anyone else I recognized. There were a lot of lightly dressed women with too much makeup and guys who were blatantly checking me out. It definitely didn’t have the family-feel it had been the first time I’d been at the clubhouse. Just when I was about to turn around and walk out and wait in my car, a woman came up to me.

  “Hi, my name is Sandra. Can I help you?”

  She had dark, long hair, a very short skirt, a see-through top, and a nice smile. The see-though top was a bit… odd on her, despite the environment, since she had a girl-next-door thing going. Really pretty, really innocent, but with a see-through top. The nice smile made me decide that she might not ask me in a mocking way, and possibly would help me.

  “I’m looking for Mel,” I said.

  “I had a feeling you were Billie,” she said. “Mel’s in the back room. I think she’s arguing with Eliza on the phone, but don’t tell her I said that.”

  “I won’t,” I agreed.

  “She told me to look after you and make sure none of these guys get any ideas.”

  “Thank you. They are…”

  “Horny, mostly, but sometimes the horniness knocks out the sense and they don’t use their eyes. I mean, just looking at you would tell them you’re no sweetbutt.”

  “Sweetbutt?”

  “Nickname for the girls who’re hanging out here for a good time.”

  I didn’t think I needed any clarification of what ‘a good time’ meant, and if I’d been unsure, all I had to do was look around in the room.

  “Okay,” I said instead. I’d obviously noticed those girls before, but there were a lot more of them than last time, and they were more aggressively sexy this time around. “So you’re…?”

  “Unofficial head sweetbutt,” Sandra answered. “I’m also club mama at the strip club.”

  I didn’t know what that was either, but I thought I’d made my ignorance blatant enough for one night, and just shut up. But she must’ve noticed because she continued.

  “I sort of take care of the girls. We don’t really have a club mama at the moment, so I’ve taken up some of the responsibilities, but I still dance, too.”

  “Of course,” I said, and then I shook my head. “I’m sorry if I come off as… judgmental.”

  “Don’t worry.” She waved with her hand dismissively. “You haven’t even called me whore of Satan yet, and that’s what my dad would call me if we were still talking, so we’re fine. What’s your poison?”

  “Beer. A beer would be great.”

  She put a hand on her hip and looked at me. “Should I just get you two so you can down the first and sip the second?”

  “If I were a man, I would’ve kissed you for that.”

  I talked to Sandra for a while, and she seemed pretty okay—once I got over being able to see her nipples at all times. Mel came about a ten minutes later, and by then I was starting to relax. The downed beer probably helped.

  “Thank you, Sandra,” she said. Once Sandra had left she turned to me. “Don’t let her behavior fool you. She’s okay, but most of the sweetbutts are cunts, and the only reason they don’t claw your eyes out with their long fake nails is that they know what our old men would do to them.”

  “Oookay.”

  “Crazy bitches, the lot of them. But all that said, no one in here would dare to lay a hand on you. If for no other reason that Tommy can beat any one of them into a pulp in the ring.”

  I was kind of grateful that I actually had some understand of what ‘the ring’ was. We had similar set-ups in the Navy. Not for beating people into a pulp, but some differences were better settled with fists than with words. It was for practice, too.

  “Think I’ll try to stay away from them even so.”

  “Sandra is okay. Sometimes I think she’s still hoping to become an old lady, but she keeps betting on the wrong horse. Other times I have no idea what she’s doing here. She’s… too smart and… I don’t know. Not really interesting, I guess.” She smiled. “But in general, I’d say you can trust her to tell the truth.”

  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, t
oo, 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 re
ason 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?”