"I can ask," I told him, though I doubted it.
He was right. I probably had more ties to the streets than the rest of them, but not so much anymore. Every month or two when you were out of the game, players changed. It got harder and harder to be let back in.
Besides, I was starting to age out of that scene.
And sometimes, you had to know when to let it go.
"Good. And Seeley will ask around too. Young and hungry wouldn't be a bad thing with the possible action we will have coming over the next few years. If we could get us another eight to ten men, we have a chance of not having to worry about the organized crime syndicates in the area. Barring no complications, we will do an open house before the baby comes, so we can all vet the options."
He'd said it.
Barring no complications.
And God laughed his ass off.
Because not a minute later, the doorbell rang.
"Someone left the fucking gate open again," Huck grumbled, going toward the door, likely expecting the window replacement people or the driveway guys, all ready and willing to give us a quote for work that needed to be done.
"What?" he asked to whomever he found on the other side.
"Is Che here?" a female voice said, making me suddenly stiffen.
"Who's asking?" Huck asked.
"His wife."
Chapter Two
Saskia
I closed my eyes tight for a long second before opening them wide, desperately trying to clear the weariness from my vision, stay awake just a while longer.
I'd been driving for eight hours straight in a car that had a busted air conditioner. My clothes were sticking to me under my arms and down my back, and I had a somewhat constant drip of sweat trailing down between my boobs to soak my bra. Because that article of clothing needed to be any more uncomfortable than it already was.
The cold air would have kept me awake.
So would a radio to blast.
But beggars couldn't be choosers when they were lifting cars.
I didn't, as a rule, steal cars. It was a shitty thing to do. People needed to get places. But just this once, I had a feeling I might have been doing the poor soul a favor. The insurance money would likely get him a less junky junker.
He could even put his signature Axe body spray all over it and the fine layer of fast food grease and salt.
I took personal offense to people who kept their cars in this kind of condition. I could understand not having the money to fix the things that were broken. Lord knew I had been there more than a time or two in my life. But sweeping food crumbs off of the seats was free. As was removing what looked like three years' worth of coffee cups from the backseat.
I was nitpicking.
I was not someone who handled sleeplessness well.
I needed a solid seven hours.
Anything less, and I was moody and short-tempered.
I hadn't gotten a full night of sleep in four days. And unless I could find a solution to my problem, it wasn't looking like I was going to get any in the near future either.
I just needed to think.
The problem was, I'd been thinking nonstop for four days. I'd zoomed through every possible solution at a breakneck pace. But I had gotten nowhere.
The first three solid plans I'd tried had blown up in my face.
The fourth, much more iffy one, had ended up with a bullet grazing my ass. The same ass I'd been planted on for eight straight hours in a car with shitty suspension and low tire pressure which meant anytime I happened down a street in need of paving, I was feeling it.
The pain was an alarm clock of sorts, though.
I'd never thought I'd be thankful for a bullet slicing off a piece of my ass, but here we were. I mean, with an ass like mine, I wouldn't miss a little chunk of unnecessary fat, but that would be an interesting story to tell to men in the future when they got me naked.
Not that there'd been much naked fun with men as of late, but when you were trying to make a better life for yourself, sometimes you had to make some cuts to unhealthy parts of your life. Much like kicking my borderline addiction to Diet Coke, trying to kick my 'hot but ultimately fucked beyond measure' habit when it came to men had its ups and downs with willpower.
I had a Diet Coke in the sticky cupholder beside me, sweating in the humid air.
But I hadn't had a sweaty, tattooed, good-for-nothing-but-machine-gun-fucking guy on top of me in months.
You win some, you lose some.
"Come on, think," I growled, banging my forehead off the cracked leather steering wheel while stopped at a red light.
See now, this was the reason it was important to have friends. You could turn to them in a pinch. They could help you get out of Dodge.
It wasn't like I'd set out to be an antisocial person with a serious bitch-face problem, but sometimes you just stumbled into your calling. This was mine.
Which meant I had no one but myself to lean on when the shit hit the fan.
"Oh, keep your panties on," I grumbled as the car behind me laid on their horn point-five seconds after the light turned green.
I needed to pull off somewhere, get my head together, but I couldn't risk stopping for longer than it took to fuel up the piece of crap car that guzzled gas at an alarming rate.
The idea came out of absolutely nowhere about forty-minutes later as I started to nod off at a two-second stop sign.
And in those two seconds of unconsciousness, an image of him crossed my mind.
Why? I couldn't tell you.
God, the man was a time-soaked memory, an image left out in the sun too long, bleaching away the edges, muddying the ink.
But he was an option, wasn't he?
If I could find him.
If he was still the halfway decent human being he'd once been.
The kind who was willing to honor a marker owed even this many years later.
And if he wasn't that kind of man anymore, I guess I could stoop to using the only card I had left to play.
The blackmail card.
I wanted to think I was above that kind of petty thing, but the fact of the matter was, I had no other choices. I had nowhere else to turn. And I was way out of my depths. He might be able to give me advice I so desperately needed.
If nothing else, he might be able to get me somewhere safe until I could figure out a way to get myself out of this clusterfuck I was in.
Decision made, I turned the car south again, even though every instinct told me that going toward the very area I had been trying to escape from was an epic, stupid mistake.
It was either that or keep driving and hope the car didn't break down, leaving me stranded on the side of the room, easily picked up or picked off, depending on what kind of orders they were all currently working under.
It was another nine hours back down to Golden Glades.
That was a funny thing about him.
He'd never relocated.
Me? I'd been all over the place in the past few years, taking jobs, setting up shop in areas I thought I might like, only to uproot quickly after.
But Che?
Che was still in the same area of Florida we'd originally met in years before. Back when I was a little headstrong eighteen-year-old, dead-set on proving she could run with the big boys.
Oh, but to have all the arrogance of youth but with some time-earned wisdom.
I guess it worked out for me that Che had been a creature of habit. It meant that while I hadn't so much as laid eyes on him in years, I'd still heard his name mentioned in the circles we used to run in.