Total pages in book: 206
Estimated words: 192184 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 961(@200wpm)___ 769(@250wpm)___ 641(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 192184 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 961(@200wpm)___ 769(@250wpm)___ 641(@300wpm)
It seemed like he’d been on his way here, probably to help or warn me, when things went screwy. If that’s what he intended, it didn’t happen because he’d been shot instead. Dare and I planned to talk to our sister and we hoped it’d bring her a little bit of peace that her husband had been loyal, too loyal. Fucking Pop.
She wouldn’t be best pleased with Pop for putting her husband in that position, getting him killed. None of us were pleased with him after the things we’d found out.
Pop was in deeper with illicit drugs than we’d imagined. And it was that depth that had created the whole rift with Juan Carlos Castillo in the first place. Many lives had been unnecessarily lost as a result of Pop moving in on Castillo’s territory. But Romero didn’t have the clout alone needed to take Pop out so at first, he participated in recruiting Earl and they tried to use Tia as a bargaining chip. Not only did Pop refuse to back off but as a result, I’d killed Castillo and worked with Castillo’s arch nemesis to wipe out the Castillo cartel.
This had, of course, trickled back home with Jesse Romero getting desperate to hang onto his business but without the strength of his uncle he had started trying to expand his team, to swell his ranks, bringing in new guys, careless and / or inexperienced guys, making alliances. The whole thing had been a gaggle fuck. Stuff we’d agreed to with Castillo down south had less to do with what we thought we were working toward and more to do with Pop’s drug deals. Now Romero and most of his crew were gone. Castillo was gone. And Pop was in a hospital bed showing signs of improvement. Big moves almost always result in a trickle effect, and I wanted to do some serious damage control.
Pop had plans to move to the islands, yeah, but retirement wasn’t looking like it’d factor into those plans. My PI dug up evidence that he had plans to have me and Dare look after business here while he expanded some seedy business to do with women, drugs, and guns into Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. Pop didn’t want to retire; he wanted more power, more control, and it was out of hand. One of his enemies was doing well in that part of the world and Pop wanted to take it all away from the guy.
Clearly it was out of hand if he had this secret life. Here it was about construction, the bookie business, loans, and that trickled down into a few other areas, like stolen goods, sex, a little weed. And yeah, some was illegal but where he’d sunk to seemed to me and to my brother to be worse than that, much worse than that. We knew sometimes we had to dabble in those areas, but Pop wasn’t dabbling, he was deep sea diving in the cesspool.
What I now had to decide was, how was I getting out without making an enemy of my father? I called Dex to check on things at home and the fuckin’ guy was talking with his mouth full.
“Can’t understand what you’re saying man. What are you doing? Blowing someone? Spit or swallow, man.”
“Sorry, Tommy. Your girl put dinner out for everyone. Everything’s cool here. No problems at all.”
I hung up, shaking my head. Then I got a text from Tia that instead of crashing early it looked like Tessa’s boys were being dropped off at our place for a few hours.
Tessa was overwhelmed and her mother-in-law couldn’t watch the kids tonight. Luc was at the hospital with a bit of spotting so Sarah was with her. I shook my head. Feeding my men, babysitting my nephews? My heart swelled for her. I needed to give her a good life. I needed to keep myself in the right headspace to be good for her. And for that, I needed out of this life.
I’d gotten the call as I was falling asleep and I told Sarah I’d happily keep the boys overnight if she wanted me to but she said Tessa didn’t want that. They knew Tommy’s house was extra secured so they wanted them here but it was just for a few hours. She had Bianca’s Aunt Joanne drop them off on her way to work (she was a nurse at a hospital on the nightshift) and was going to have Sarah pick them up in a bit. I put movies on and built Lego structures with them.
I let Antonio, the older of the two, play on Tommy’s laptop on a kids’ game website and Lucas was content in my lap with a pop-up book. The time went by quickly and I gave them a bubble bath and put them in their PJs and around 11:00 Sarah got there to pick them up. They were quiet and subdued, not like the typical active baby and toddler. They must’ve sensed something was amiss. They didn’t really know me, and it was probably way past their usual bedtimes, too.