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“You and I know better than that.” His voice deepened. “I’ve been watching you, boy. I have eyes everywhere, and what they’ve been telling me is you’ve been after her for a long time. Snake didn’t know it. I thought about telling him, but it seemed he had her under control, so I wasn’t worried she’d turn. He knows how to keep a bitch in line.” His voice darkened, just as it had when he talked about my mother trying to leave, and I felt that all too familiar anger beginning to boil inside me. The anger that made me unpredictable and think less clearly. I pushed it down and waited for him to continue. He was giving me the information I needed, so I just had to ignore the bullshit. “But then she turned. That couldn’t stand, boy, you know that.”
“You the one to tell Snake where to find her?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“You mean at the wedding of the cop she was fucking?” He chuckled darkly. “It wasn’t all that hard to guess.”
I felt the pain like a knife slicing through me. I knew she wasn’t involved with Luke, and she sure as shit wasn’t fucking him, but just the idea of her and Luke destroyed my common sense, and I allowed jealousy to fill me. Her words from last night were burned in my brain, ‘I don’t feel the same way about you that I do him.’ I’d heard them over and over through the night, wondering what the hell I was doing or thought I would gain from keeping this up with Maggie. She was all but telling me that she didn’t have feelings for me. Hell, she even called me her friend.
But I couldn’t let her go.
And I would take her any way I could get her.
I was done with this conversation. He was baiting me; I knew it, and I needed to end it before he actually succeeded.
“Do we have a deal?” I repeated.
There was a moment of silence, and I knew he was trying to decide if he should move on or continue baiting me. I was surprised when he spoke, knowing how much he wanted me to hurt and having guessed she was the way to cause it. “It’s not that easy.”
I sighed to myself and ran my hand over my head. It never was. “Just tell me what the fuck you want?”
“I want to be sure I’ll have the only copy.”
“You have my word.”
He laughed. “Your word stopped meaning anything about the time you recorded my private conversations.”
“Don’t you think if I wanted to shut you down for good, I already would’ve?”
“No,” he answered. “I think you know when you hand that over to the cops, you’re a dead man walking. See, I figure you’ve already given your cop friends a copy so if anything happens to you after we make our deal, they can take me out. It’s the same fucking thing I’d do if I was holding the card you are, and you’ve proved you ain’t that different than me. Bribery, extortion, yeah, you’re not any different from the rest of us, except you’re only loyal to yourself.” He paused, and I waited, refusing to ask him again what he wanted. I wasn’t surprised when he spoke. “I want some leverage.”
“What leverage?”
“Maggie.”
Bile rose up my throat, thinking of Maggie anywhere near him. “No.”
“That’s the only way this deal stands. I’ll send Snake back, tell him it’s safe for him to return, and you can have him. In return, I get the bitch and the recording. I’ll hang on to her for a while, make sure you’re gonna honor our deal. I may even try out this bitch, see what’s got all you boys chasing her.”
I took a few deep breaths to calm myself, forcing my thoughts away from him anywhere near Maggie before I played along. “How do I know you’ll give her back?”
He laughed coldly. “Guess you’ll have to trust me, like I had to trust you all these years.”
“You set up a chapter club in my fucking backyard to keep an eye on me. They’ve been coming at us for years, playing your little mind games. That’s not trust.”
“Had to make sure the competition isn’t stealing my business. That’s all that was,” he answered flippantly.
“Why the fuck didn’t you just take me out when you had the chance?” I asked, knowing I had covered my bases, but honestly surprised he didn’t just take the risk of ending me.
I’d thought more than once over the years that my father might actually be afraid of someone and that someone was who he made his deal with all those years ago. I’d heard the stories of what the cartel did to their enemies and I had no doubt my father never told his business partner the shit I was holding because both my father and I would have been killed.
And it wouldn’t have been quickly. It would have been slow and painful; probably shit I couldn’t even imagine. My father was saving his ass and inadvertently saving mine at the same time. If something happened to me, and those recordings were turned over, my father would suffer in ways I couldn’t imagine and he knew it. If he was lucky enough to get to prison without being taken out, he’d never survive inside because the cartel had contacts everywhere.
I came out of my thoughts when I heard his voice. “I’ll admit this game you set up between us has been fun to play. Seeing who could come out on top, who will be left as the champion. Didn’t have any reason to end it. Until now.”
That was a lie, but I’d let him have it. He would’ve never played this game if he could’ve ended it. “You’re not getting her.”
“Oh, I’ll get her. It would’ve been much simpler this way, but in the end, I will win. You don’t have the balls to do what needs to be done. Don’t like to get your hands dirty. I’ve let you run the game for a while now, but that’s over. I’ll give you Snake to do with as you please. You’ll give me the recordings and the girl.”
“No deal.”