Jade War

The man in the middle. That was him, the foreman. The one who did the work and who took the risks, while the fat Bosses like Kromner stayed safe and warm indoors sipping brandy and smoking cigars on nights like this. Reams remembered the stranger who sat beside Dauk in the meeting, the young clan representative from Kekon who’d questioned Reams specifically before agreeing to the deal. The kecks weren’t so uncivilized after all, if they recognized that the competence of the foreman on the ground was the key to a successful operation and threw in a little extra to make sure he was compensated for pulling everything off smoothly. So notwithstanding his skepticism of the jade trade as a whole, Reams took roughly five kilos of jade from each of the shipments and stored them away as a savings fund that he and his closest coats could move quietly on their own later without anyone knowing, not even the rest of the Crew. Insurance in case things took a bad turn for Kromner. The rest of the jade was taken to an industrial warehouse where another of Kromner’s foremen, Moth Duke, and his men supervised migrants wearing lead-lined gloves who cut and polished the jade to be packed and delivered to final customers.

Reams closed up the boxes and said to Pats, “Go get the money.” The coat went to the truck, returning a few minutes later with a suitcase that he set on top of the lid of the closed box and opened to reveal bundled stacks of hundred thalir bills. “You want to count it?” he asked the boatman, sneering a little.

The man shook his head. “I trust Espenians to count money.” He closed up the suitcase, took it, and walked back toward the boat without another word. Reams motioned for Coop and Bairn to load the metal box into the car. They were halfway to the vehicle when two sets of headlights pulled up in front and eight men piled out of two black cars. The Breuer twins had their weapons out in an instant; Reams pulled his Ankev pistol, but then he heard Moth Duke’s voice call out, with concern, “Skinny, that you over there?”

“Yeah, it’s me, Moth. Tell your boys to point their Fully guns somewhere else, for fuck’s sake.” Duke’s coats were carrying Fullerton submachine guns and aiming them all over the pier. Coop and Bairn started to lower their weapons, but Reams kept his own gun raised. “What’s this about, Moth? Why the fuck are you here instead of at the warehouse waiting for us?”

“We heard there was going to be heat, Skinny, that it was a setup.” Duke’s large frame came striding ahead. He stood in front of his men, silhouetted by the glare of the headlights. Reams had always thought the man looked like an ape in a suit. “So we came to make sure you were all right, to back you up if the kecks pulled something. Did you get the rocks?”

“Yeah, we got them,” Reams said.

“All of them?” Duke asked, and in those three words, in the particular tone of greed with which they were spoken, Reams understood in an instant that he’d been betrayed. He turned and ran for the pier. Moth Duke’s coats opened fire, chopping Coop and Bairn apart with bullets. The motorboat’s engine roared as it took off in a panic; lead peppered its hull and Reams got a glimpse of the keck boatman toppling backward, the suitcase in his hand tumbling through the air and overboard.

Reams flung himself into the black water. It swallowed him up with a shock of cold so painful that for a moment he thought he’d been shot dead after all. Then he felt himself sinking into the Camres, imagined his body coming to rest on the bottom of the polluted river alongside the bones of the men he’d put there over the years, and the furious instinct for survival snapped his mind back into place. Reams struggled free of the shoes and wool coat that dragged him down, then dove and swam, unable to see a thing and not knowing if and where he would emerge, not knowing if Pats and Carson or any of his other coats were still alive, but certain of one thing.

Moth Duke wouldn’t dare turn on a fellow foreman without tacit approval. Which meant Boss Kromner—the man Skinny had served well and for many years—wanted him dead.

CHAPTER 45 A Promise in the Park