Jade War

CHAPTER 44 The Man in the Middle

Willum “Skinny” Reams stood on a private boat dock under the shadow of the Iron Eye Bridge. It was a cloudy, starless spring night and the dark was almost absolute, save for the lights that illuminated the six-lane freeway that ran overhead, carrying a constant stream of traffic across the Camres River, the rush of the tires above louder than the steady lapping of the water below.

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.”

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.