I glance over at him to find him looking at me. “I see you do your research.”
“Always,” he says. “And I find it interesting that you walked away from that success to fight your brother for the company.”
“To save my family name,” I amend.
He faces me, his one elbow staying on the railing, and I do the same with him. “I had a brother.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“Of course you are, because you, like myself, are always prepared and strategic in all you do.”
“Like you showing up at my door was strategic.”
“Indeed,” he agrees, but he leaves it at that, circling back in the direction he was headed moments before. “My brother and I were pitted against each other for the family crown as well. And my brother thought the way to do that was to be a bigger, bolder, more careless version of my father. Like Derek seems to be doing with your father.”
“With you at the helm,” I point out.
“And yet I’m here talking to you now.”
“Why?” I ask. And then, thinking of my earlier conversations, I add, “Spare me the chitchat and get to your endgame.”
“Direct,” he says. “I like that, and I will get to the endgame. I’m here because you and I have something in common. We see a better way for our family businesses. A new way. I believe we can help each other reach our common goal.”
“The only way you can help me reach my goal is for you to get the fuck out of my business and my family. I’ll give you the trucking company. Then you can move your drugs.”
“I don’t need another trucking company,” he says. “It’s too convenient a choice, and therefore too obvious a place, for the Feds to look for trouble I don’t intend for them to find.”
“I can create a shell company for the ownership.”
“And if they ever look into that company, they’ll look into you. That doesn’t work for either of us.” He pushes off the railing and folds his arms in front of his chest. “Being as direct as you have been. Brandon Enterprises is about a bigger distribution picture. A smarter one.”
“The Feds are looking into our operation. That makes us a bad choice, not a smarter one. You have to know that.”
He holds up a finger. “That’s where you’re wrong. The magical part of having them look at you and find nothing is that the red tape and bureaucracy of the United States government will force them to move on. Especially with a brilliant attorney like yourself ready to sue them.”
My jaw clenches. “In other words, my brother was right. You have no intention of getting out.”
“Your brother?” He laughs without humor. “I assure you, your brother has no insight into my mind or my intentions. He’s a liability I’ll tolerate to do business with you.” He lowers his voice, a sharpness to his eyes that reminds me there is a lethal quality to it, one I remember from the restaurant, right before he shoved a knife in my brother’s hand. “I’ve always been after you, Shane,” he adds. “I just needed a way to motivate you to get involved.”
“You used him to get to me,” I state, resisting the urge to drop my hands and give him the reaction he wants, let alone do what I really want to do and punch the bastard.
“He used my sister to get to me, and the only reason I let him live was to get to you. Seems a slightly unfair trade, considering how much I hate that little fuck, but I’m hoping you’ll prove otherwise.”
“I don’t deny my brother’s an opportunist,” I say, going into damage-control mode in order to keep Derek alive. “He saw his new woman’s brother as a business opportunity that frankly I would have seen as trouble.”
“And then I assume my sister wouldn’t have been worthy of you?”
“I don’t know what you’re trying to discover about me by baiting me, but it will get you nowhere,” I say, unfazed and unamused by the obvious attempt. “I know nothing about your sister that isn’t on a piece of paper. For all I know, it’s you who’s not worthy of her.”
His eyes darken, harden, silence ticking by in heavy beats, before he sighs. “She’s a different breed than I am.”
“You mean she’s not a manipulative prick?”
“Manipulative prick,” he says, and laughs. “This from one of the top attorneys in the country? I find that entertaining. But for the record. Yes. I’m a prick. And yes. I’ve been working on that, but to be honest, it’s not gone well. I want what I want, and I go for it. And what I want is the same thing you want.”
“We want nothing that’s the same,” I say, though I have a begrudging appreciation for the skilled manipulation that got him here tonight.
“But we do,” he says. “We both want to turn the dirty money generated by our families into legitimate investments.”
Now I laugh. “You want me to believe you’re looking for legitimate investments when you’re the one who brought Sub-Zero into the one legitimate operation my family had? That doesn’t support an effort to legitimize your business. Just delegitimizes mine.”
“On the contrary. Your company gives Sub-Zero distribution, and I believe we should explore legalizing it.”
“Legalizing it? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
“I’m really lacking a sense of humor,” he states dryly. “It’s another flaw I’m working on.”
“You can’t market a drug that gets people high.”
“You must have confused Sub-Zero with a prescription pain pill. This drug doesn’t get anyone high at all. It improves mental clarity. And the many ways that it could be used in relation to real medical problems is astounding.”
“A man, a professional athlete I knew and respected, died in a car accident high on that drug. He hadn’t slept in days.”
“Yes, well, we don’t advise people to pop Sub-Zero like candy. It’s a drug. It can be abused, and as we know from recent high-profile celebrity deaths, that’s a problem that reaches beyond the streets to prescription drugs.”
“The Feds know about the drug,” I say, knowing that any decision I influence him to make on his own is one less I have to make later, with potentially bloody results. “The minute I was foolish enough to introduce it to market,” I add, “they’d connect the dots. The minute your name is attached, we’re screwed.”
“We both know you’re smart enough to repackage it, rename it, and disconnect it from the street-drug version. And I assure you that I operate within a consortium of legitimate, deep-pocketed investors with an impressive and quite legal portfolio of investments.”
“And they want to go into the drug business with the son of a drug lord, who is a drug lord in his own right?”
“They, unlike you, know me as a fellow investor who makes smart financial decisions,” he says. “And we, as a group, are not coming to you with a hope and a dream. We are coming to you with it as close to market ready as it gets.”
“Define close to market ready,” I say, skeptical about his claim but intrigued in spite of myself.