CHAPTER 7: THE BOSS WANTS A WORD
[Stacey Boss's Office, South Seattle — Early April 2015, 11:00 AM]
The address on the text wasn't a restaurant or a warehouse or any of the predictable locations where crime lords conducted business in television shows. It was a dental office. South Lake Family Dentistry, second floor of a strip mall between a nail salon and a Subway, with a parking lot that faced the wrong direction for police surveillance and a back entrance accessible through a shared corridor that connected to a laundromat's service door.
Frank Goss's security brain catalogued all of this before I was out of the car. Two exits. Limited sightlines from the street. Interior blind spots wherever the reception counter blocked the windows. If I had to leave in a hurry, the laundromat corridor was the move — through the back, out the service door, into the alley behind the Subway.
I wouldn't have to leave in a hurry. Probably. The text had come from a number I didn't recognize, but the message was pure Boss: Mr. DeBeers. 11 AM. We should talk. No question mark. No request. A coordinate and an expectation.
The waiting room had the standard dental-office atmosphere — upholstered chairs, dog-eared magazines, a mounted TV playing daytime television on mute. Three men sat in the chairs. None of them were waiting for dental work. One read a Sports Illustrated that he held upside down. The other two tracked me from the door to the reception desk with the flat, disinterested attention of people who were paid to watch doorways.
"I'm here for my eleven o'clock," I told the receptionist, a woman in green scrubs whose name tag read Donna and whose expression read don't ask me anything.
"Down the hall. Last door."
The hallway smelled like fluoride and industrial cleaner. The last door was open. Inside: a converted exam room, the dental chair replaced with a desk, the X-ray lightbox still mounted on the wall, a man sitting behind the desk with his hands folded on a legal pad.
Stacey Boss was smaller than the show had made him look. Five-six, maybe five-seven, compact build, a gray suit that fit like it had been tailored by someone who understood the difference between intimidating and ostentatious. He wore no watch, no jewelry, no visible markers of wealth. His hair was neat. His nails were trimmed. Everything about him communicated a man who had eliminated every unnecessary signal from his presentation.
"Mr. DeBeers." He gestured to the chair opposite the desk. "Please."
I sat. The chair was a standard office chair, nothing special, but it was positioned four inches lower than Boss's — a negotiation trick older than furniture. The accountant's brain flagged it. The security brain flagged it. I left it alone.
"Thank you for coming." Boss uncapped a pen. Wrote nothing. Set the pen down parallel to the legal pad's edge. "I'll be direct. Your butcher shop has been operating in my territory for fourteen months. During that time, you've maintained a business that I've chosen not to examine closely, because the revenue was modest and the product was — let's say niche."
His voice was the flattest instrument I'd ever heard used on a human sentence. No inflection. No emphasis. Every word delivered at the same volume, the same pace, the same temperature. A man who'd discovered that monotone was more terrifying than shouting and had committed to the principle.
"Something has changed," he continued. "Your delivery patterns shifted three weeks ago. New suppliers. New routes. A van from Rainier Beach making regular stops at your loading bay." He looked at me the way a man looks at a spreadsheet. "I don't mind change, Mr. DeBeers. I mind change I don't understand."
The security brain ran assessments. His posture: relaxed but centered, weight distributed, no tells. His hands: still, visible, not reaching for anything. The pen on the desk was a prop. The legal pad was empty. He already knew everything he was going to say before I walked in.
"I'm upgrading my supply chain," I said. "The old model was unsustainable. Bad sourcing, high risk, operational exposure. I pivoted to institutional suppliers — funeral homes, medical surplus. Cleaner, cheaper, lower profile."
Boss picked up the pen. Put it down again. The same gesture, performed identically. "Cheaper for you. But the question isn't what you pay your suppliers. The question is what my territory costs."
"I wasn't aware there was a fee."
"There's always a fee, Mr. DeBeers. You've been receiving a courtesy discount." The faintest movement at the corners of his mouth — not a smile, exactly. More like the memory of a smile from a previous conversation. "The discount has expired."
I leaned back. Let the silence sit for three full seconds — Arthur Pollack's negotiation instincts said silence was worth more than the first counteroffer.
"What are you proposing?"
"Forty percent of your gross on all product sourced through institutional channels. In exchange, I provide access to my medical contacts. Specifically, a hospital orderly named Tomas Herrera who works at Harborview. He handles biohazard disposal for their pathology department. He can route specific materials to you with less paperwork than your funeral home."
Hospital access. Harborview Medical Center, level-one trauma center, the biggest morgue in the city. The kind of volume that could feed every zombie in my client list twice over.
The cost was staggering. Forty percent on gross meant forty percent before expenses — if I spent seven thousand per brain from Watkins and charged clients ten thousand, Boss got four thousand off the top. My margin would collapse to less than a thousand per unit, barely enough to keep the lights on.
But the access. A hospital connection meant surgical-quality brains, younger demographics, professional backgrounds I couldn't get from the county's unclaimed dead. It meant volume. It meant I could stop rationing.
And it meant Stacey Boss's hand around my financial throat for as long as the arrangement lasted.
"Everything has a price," Boss said. "Yours is reasonable. I've charged more for less."
The undefined more hung in the air like a second clause in a contract that hadn't been drafted yet. The thing about Boss — the thing the show had gotten exactly right — was that the arrangement was never just the arrangement. It was a door. And once you walked through it, you discovered more doors behind it, each with its own lock and its own price.
"I'll need to meet Tomas first," I said. "Verify the channel. If it works, I'll have your forty percent weekly."
"Cash. Not product."
"Cash."
Boss wrote something on the legal pad. A phone number, I assumed, though the angle prevented me from reading it. He tore the page off and slid it across the desk.
"Tomas expects your call before five today. He works nights."
I pocketed the number. Stood. Boss didn't.
"Mr. DeBeers." His voice stopped me at the door. "I appreciate initiative. What I don't appreciate is surprise. If your operation changes again, I hear about it first."
"Understood."
"I know."
[Meat Cute Charcuterie — Early April 2015, 1:30 PM]
The drive back was fifteen minutes of I-5 with the windows down and the Black Keys playing loud enough to feel in my chest. "Lonely Boy." The bassline rattled the dashboard. My hands gripped the steering wheel at ten and two, steady, no tremor, and I didn't know if that was the security brain's composure or genuine calm but either way — I'd just sat across from Seattle's top drug lord in a dental office and walked out with a hospital supply channel.
My hands weren't shaking. That was worth noticing.
Don E met me at the back entrance with a sandwich and an expression that said he'd been saving both for the right moment.
"How'd it go?"
"We have a new supplier. Hospital contact named Tomas Herrera. I need to call him by five." I took the sandwich. Turkey and swiss on sourdough — Don E had started getting the bread from the bakery on Jackson instead of the pre-sliced stuff, another small initiative that nobody had asked for and everybody benefited from. "Forty percent goes to Boss."
Don E whistled. Low and long, the kind of whistle that meant math he didn't enjoy. "That's — that's a lot, boss."
"It's access. Access has a price."
"Yeah, but forty—"
"Don E." I stopped eating. "We were four days from insolvency. Watkins can do four, maybe five brains a week if the county cooperates. We need ten. The hospital can cover the gap."
He processed this. The math landed. "So we're working for Boss now?"
"We're paying Boss. There's a difference." I didn't add I hope because the difference between paying a crime lord and working for one was measured in months, not principles, and we both knew it.
He went back to the front counter. I sat in the office with the door closed, eating the sandwich with one hand and reviewing the Meat Cute ledger with the other. Arthur Pollack's accounting brain had already restructured the books twice; now it ran the new numbers. Hospital brains at variable cost, Boss's forty percent cut, client fees restructured into tiers. If Tomas could deliver five to six brains per week at wholesale cost — no Watkins premium for selectivity — the operation broke even in three weeks.
If. The word carried the weight of every assumption I'd stacked on top of it.
I was reaching for the phone to call Tomas when Don E knocked.
"Hey. Weird thing." He leaned against the door frame, arms crossed. "Remember that town car? Black, no plates?"
"I remember."
"Saw another car today while you were out. Different vehicle — gray SUV, tinted windows. But this one had plates. And the guy driving it?" Don E pulled out his phone, thumbed through photos. "I grabbed a picture when he parked across the street. Check it out."
The photo was grainy — taken from inside the shop through the front window. But the SUV was clear enough, and the man behind the wheel was visible in profile. Short hair, rigid posture, the kind of physical discipline that came from repetitive physical training, not a gym membership.
"That's not one of Boss's guys," Don E said. "Boss's guys slouch. This dude's sitting like he's got a board up his—"
"Military bearing."
"Yeah. That."
I zoomed into the plates. Took a screenshot. Sent it to myself. "When was this?"
"About an hour ago. He sat there for maybe twenty minutes, then drove off south."
South. Away from Boss's territory in South Seattle. Away from the police precincts downtown. South toward the industrial corridor, the dockyards, the kind of sprawl where warehouses outnumbered residents and lease terms didn't ask questions.
"You did good," I said. "Keep watching. Different car, same pattern — take a photo every time."
Don E grinned. "Spy stuff. I'm into it."
He left. I stared at the plates on my phone screen and ran them through a mental index — not mine, but Frank Goss's. The security brain knew vehicle identification the way the chef knew mise en place: instinctive, automatic, categorized. The plates were Washington commercial fleet registration. The format indicated a corporate lease, not personal. And the man's bearing...
Someone else was watching Meat Cute. Someone who wasn't Stacey Boss, wasn't the police, and sat like they'd been trained by an organization with uniforms and ranks.
I saved the screenshot. Filed it under a folder I created on the spot: UNKNOWN.
Then I called Tomas.
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