I imagined getting their crew cut down to almost nothing several years back also helped each man get a larger cut.
So they would be just fine if they lost the guns. Even if they lost the client because they lost the guns. There were plenty of other collectors or organizations to reach out to.
They had their hands just about everywhere.
But so did I.
So did we.
Because for me and mine, we didn't have generations of contacts to pull from, solid reputations to stand on.
We just had us, the three of us, who no one had known about more than six or so years ago, at least not in the arms-dealing capacity.
Camden had a past.
Though since he didn't speak, I could never learn it.
I had one too, but never as a boss.
So we needed to claw our way up.
We scooped up the scraps none of the bigger arms dealers - like The Henchmen - wanted to touch. The small-time guys. The scared wives who wanted a gun to protect them from their estranged husbands. The wannabe gangster who had dreams of creating the next big street gang. Hell, even the damn preppers. Those paranoid freaks who thought the government wanted to take their guns away, so they wanted to stockpile them somewhere, have them be untraceable, so if the real, registered ones got taken, they would still have ones to defend their double-wides with.
We catered to them all.
If they had the money, we had the guns.
Of course, this meant we had to bust ass harder than anyone else in the industry.
But after a few hard years, we had managed to stockpile a nice little arsenal to pull from so we didn't have to work as much as often.
Kicking back and enjoying life, that was what we liked to be able to do every few months.
Except when people like Manuel wanted some rare ass, impossible to find gun, sending us on a wild goose chase.
We'd been on the road for nearly a month, sleeping in the car in shifts while someone else drove and the third person alternated between sleeping and researching. On the rare occasion we got to grab a hotel room, it was never for long enough to feel like we had gotten a break.
It was going to be good to be home. Back in the city. Back in our loft. Back to our own beds that wouldn't cause cricks in necks, shoulders, backs, and hips, back where the noises - while varied and loud - were predictable, back where we could get takeaway at two a.m. when we were all on vampire schedules for unknown reasons, our internal clocks going all haywire of their own volition.
None of us were from the city, but had learned to make our home there, create a makeshift little family there, something desperately needed by three orphans with no family to speak of.
Except in Astrid's case.
But that bitch didn't even count as family. Just blood. Just a mix of DNA they shared. Nothing more.
"I need to put the tree up," I added, used to carrying the conversation. Before Astrid came along, Cam was all I had. It had been awkward at first to talk what seemed like at myself, but after a while, once I learned to interpret his non-verbal responses, it became natural, felt like a conversation instead of like I was speaking to a houseplant just to give it some carbon dioxide to convert. "Astrid was already talking about it on Halloween. And we still haven't gotten around to it."
In a lot of ways, Astrid was like our kid sister even though she was only a few years younger than me. As for Camden, well, his age was one of the many things I might never know. I guessed he was a few years older than me, putting him in his mid-to-late thirties. As for me, I was thirty-one. And Astrid, our little kid sister, was pushing twenty-five.
Six years, from her perspective, seemed like nothing. To me, yeah, she seemed so young still.
I wondered if Cam felt that way about me.
"Are you going to handle the lights?" I asked, watching for his nod.
It was our arrangement. I'd handle all the decorating, all the cooking and baking, but he had to do the goddamn lights.
Actually, he had struck the deal, physically ripping a strand out of my hands with a look of near disgust on his face when he jerked his head to the tree.
And, yeah, so maybe I half-assed it a bit, just laying the lights in uneven rows.
Camden was not a half-asser.
He always used his whole ass.
Which meant that, when it came to the Christmas tree, he wrapped every single freaking branch in solids. And then when that wasn't good enough, he went back in to pepper in slow blinkers until the tree looked alive, magical, making me stand back and realize that at some point in his life, he had to have a family that loved him, he had to have had someone to teach him traditions like trimming the tree properly.