Jade War

Four of Reams’s coats waited for the shipment along with him. The twins, Coop and Bairn Breuer, stood next to the car that had been pulled up to the pier. Pats Rudy and Carson Sunter kept watch, hands resting on the butts of their pistols. It was not the first time Reams and his men had taken possession of a contraband shipment ferried up the river. The Camres was one of the longest and busiest commercial waterways in the world; for centuries it had been called the Silver Run, but it was also less flatteringly referred to as the Vice Canal, on account of the quantity of drugs and guns that made their way into the city of Port Massy from further upstream. This sort of event was routine for Reams, but he was uneasy tonight because of the nature of the goods. Willum Reams was a smart and ruthless foreman, well respected in the Port Massy underworld, but he was cautious by nature. Unlike his Boss, he didn’t live lavishly and draw attention to himself; he dressed conservatively and drove a perfectly ordinary and reliable Brock sedan. He was a rich man, but he kept his money carefully stashed away and he ran all his jobs with a clear eye for the numbers. Boss Kromner valued him because he never forgot the first and most important job of a foreman, which was to make money for the Crew.

Reams disagreed with his Boss about getting into the jade business. There was money to be made, no question: The Southside Crew already had buyers lined up for the jade that the kecks were selling to them. Rich collectors, other Crews, private militia, mercenaries, and security contractors, even that cult in the north led by that religious nut claiming to be the reincarnation of the Seer—it seemed everyone wanted to get their hands on the green rocks. The stuff had been around for thousands of years, but people were acting as if it were newly discovered. Reams didn’t trust in the wisdom of the crowd. Most people were stupid, and in his opinion, jade was too risky. It would bring down too much heat; the government thought of gambling and drugs as moral failings that destroyed the user but weren’t a threat to the real power in the country, which were the Trade Societies. Jade, however, could strengthen armed and dangerous organizations that would pose a real threat to law enforcement and those in authority. Because you couldn’t have jade without shine, there was bound to be a crackdown on the drug trade as well, which would jeopardize the Crew’s most traditionally lucrative business.

The biggest problem, though, in Skinny Reams’s book, was that dealing in jade meant dealing with the kecks. Reams could do business with the wesps and the ’guts, even the shotties and the tunks if he had to, but there was something about the kecks that he especially didn’t like. They were unnatural, and he didn’t trust them at all.

He could tell that his men were edgy as well; Pats came over and said, “Seer’s balls, Skinny, how much longer we got to stand out here freezing our asses off? They weren’t this late before. Something’s wrong.” Reams could understand his coat’s suspicion; to reduce the risk of interception by the authorities, the entire quantity of jade had been split up into four shipments, transported into the harbor three to six weeks apart, passed under the noses of port inspection with the help of the dockworkers in the Wormingwood Crew, and delivered to Reams at different points along the river. The first shipments had gone smoothly, so there was no reason to believe that this one would not proceed in the same way, except that if the kecks wanted to screw them over, this would be their final opportunity.

At that moment, the sound of a motorboat engine quieted Pats. The boat’s headlights emerged from beneath the gloom of the bridge and swung around the edge of the dock, pulling up to the pier where Reams and his men stood. A short man with a severely pronounced limp got off the boat. He appeared Kekonese, but Reams thought the two dark-skinned men with him were not. Perhaps they were from one of those tropical islands in the East Amaric, but it was hard to get a good look at them. They worked together to lift a heavy metal box onshore. The limping keck opened the lid of the box and shone a flashlight down to show Reams what was inside: unpolished rocks of varying size, cut open to reveal the gleam of the green gemstone within. “Twenty-five kilos,” he said. “You want to weigh?” Reams shook his head; neither of the prior three shipments had been under weight; in fact, both had been over thirty kilos. When Reams had brought this up, the boatman had shrugged and said, “We give more, for the man in the middle to take his share.”