Beware The Water

Spilled Coffee

Shorter hadn't been able to sleep for days. This innocent little thing he had going on with Lux turned out to be one of the most stressful things he's had to deal with in a while. Sad thing was that she didn't even know she was the cause of this. Not that Shorter was blaming Lux but wanting to keep this girl close was the issue. He didn't know how to let go. If he was going to have to do that sooner rather than later then he wanted to spend as much time as possible with Lux before cutting himself off.

The distraction of his gang was what took up almost all of his time. And unfortunately for Shorter, he had a responsibility to himself and his men. His personal time with Lux wasn't a priority and would have to come second. "What do you got for me, Lao?"

Shorter's main men all sat around a table that was located in a private back room of Chang Dai to discuss further deals and intel. The main group consisted of 6 guys. Shorter, the boss. Lao, the right hand.

Sunshine, who was the best getaway driver they had. He was mainly in charge of managing the gangs money and keeping track of their drug shipments.

Then there was Smiley. A muscular loud mouth who took pleasure in being strung along to carry out torture if necessary and executions. Weirdly enough he and Sunshine worked as a duo. Sunshine would figure out the coordinates of the enemy and Smiley would do the messy work. Shorter always brought them along to clean up whatever bloody mess was left behind. The two were great at covering their tracks.

There was also Viper. He had his own band of spies that he liked to call his "serpents" all over the streets of New York. There was nothing illegal going on that he didn't know about. What made him feared was that he was powerful enough to have a crew of his own but wanted to work under Shorter, making the Chinese Mafia even more dangerous.

Lastly, there was Hook. He was in charge of checking in on the stash houses run by Viper's serpents, where their drugs were being cut and packaged to sell. He was definitely the most immature and hot headed of the group but his loyalty to the mafia ran deep.

"Arthur's been pressing to have us as his main coke supplier. Said he's also willing to share Golzine's trafficking pipeline for faster transport." Lao explained, "It's a lot of money on the table, boss."

"Turn it down." Shorter gave it no thought. There was no way in hell he was doing business with that blood sucking parasite.

"What!?" Lao shouted, "Boss this is a huge deal. We can't just turn it down because you have a close relationship with Ash." He argued.

"My words final."

"You can't be serious?" Lao looked around the table to see if his crew agreed with their bosses decision. Each of them had a stone cold expression plastered on their faces. "Are you guys okay with this too?"

Viper put out his cigarette on the ash tray in front of him. He leaned back in his chair and interlaced his fingers together. "Do you know how many of my Serpents Arthur's crew has tortured for intel? A lot. 6 in the last two months. Left their tongues at the location of one of the pits (Serpents have a separate main base and hideouts away from Shorter's gang) . I'm not doing business with that fucker no matter how much money he throws our way."

"I'd like to be done with this conversation." Shorter stared down Lao, hating the fact that his right hand even considered working with the enemy. All the boys gave a nod showing that they agreed with their bosses decision. All except Lao who wore a scowl. "Next, heard from the grapevine that Sheriff Sheng is back on the streets and he's got it out for us over that incident from last year."

The boys all side eyed each other. The shootout lead to them loosing a few members. One including Hook's 17 year old cousin. Shot in the head by Officer Wydell. Only good thing to come out of all that was Sheriff Sheng being out of the picture for a year. It was a lot easier to get away with stuff when he didn't have his officers on patrol. They all wished he would have died that night.