Total pages in book: 59
Estimated words: 57216 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 286(@200wpm)___ 229(@250wpm)___ 191(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 57216 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 286(@200wpm)___ 229(@250wpm)___ 191(@300wpm)
Which meant importing my coffee from a very small operation in Colombia. A place I’d once visited when I’d been traveling after dropping out of college. It wasn’t until I’d had a cup of their coffee that I finally realized what I needed to do with my life.
Open a coffee shop.
Serve the best coffee available.
Be my own boss.
Bring some joy to the town in doing so.
Create, over time, a community sort of center in my shop.
All had been going to plan.
Until my second shipment came in.
That was when all hell broke loose.
Because it wasn’t just my coffee in those tins.
Oh, no.
It was brick after brick of cocaine.
And let’s just say I was under strict orders about what to do with said cocaine. With that, you know, ‘or else’ hanging over my head.
I wouldn’t pretend to be any sort of criminal expert.
But I knew that there was one thing you didn’t fuck with.
And that was the cocaine cartels.
“Says here you picked it up this morning,” the clerk said, and I swear my stomach fell to my feet.
“What?” I asked, voice a harsh whisper.
“Got a signature right here,” he said, passing a form over to me.
Sure enough, that was my name on that line. But it wasn’t my signature. How could it be? I’d been at work at the time.
“That’s not my signature,” I said, a cold sweat breaking out down my back. “I didn’t pick this up. There’s some kind of mistake.”
“Maybe someone at your shop picked it up,” he said, shrugging, and tucking away the paperwork like it was a done deal.
“No. I’m the only person there. And I didn’t pick it up. Someone here screwed up.”
“Gonna have to take that up with the boss in the morning,” he said, not sounding the least bit apologetic. “Nothing I can do about it.”
“But—“
“Told you I can’t do shit about it. Come back in the morning,” he barked, then slid the glass closed.
I walked on numb legs back to my car, sliding into the driver’s seat, and locking my doors.
I couldn’t tell you how long I sat there, my heart hammering, my throat tightening.
It wasn’t a shipment of coffee that had gone missing. Annoying, but fixable. I didn’t go through all the coffee I was ordering. I didn’t have enough business to drink it all. But I wasn’t allowed to change my order.
Bricks of freaking cocaine were missing.
The order each month was twenty tins of coffee.
Each had one brick of cocaine in it.
An internet search told me that each kilo went for something like twenty grand on the street.
That meant that almost half a million dollars of cocaine were now missing.
And my ass was on the line for it.
I didn’t remember even turning the car over, or most of the drive home. I didn’t even realize I never shut the trunk until I climbed out in my apartment parking lot.
I got into my apartment, tossed my purse down on the chair, and walked in a daze through my apartment, right into my bathroom.
And threw up.
Because women who lose nearly half a million dollars of product didn’t get a slap on the wrist and a stern ‘Bad girl.’
No.
Women who lost nearly half a million dollars of cartel cocaine got strung up, tortured, and murdered.
The question was when that was going to come to pass.
If I couldn’t find a way to fix this first…
CHAPTER TWO
Junior
I couldn’t fucking stand when a client made me go out of town for work. Like I wasn’t more well-equipped to do the work from the comfort of my own home, where I had all the shit I needed to get the job done.
Besides, from a legal standpoint, being face-to-face created a much bigger chance of getting caught.
Doing what I did, I liked as little contact with the clients as possible. Everyone chatted on an encrypted server that trashed the conversation as soon as it ended. Then I got paid via untraceable crypto.
I wasn’t surprised when I met up with him, that he was an old school Italian mobster who didn’t have a cell phone, let alone any idea how to get in touch with me beyond the inbox where my messages were routed on the dark web.
I would have turned him away right then and there—since I had nothing to fear retribution-wise, since no one had any idea who I actually was—if it weren’t for the money on the line.
I wasn’t hurting and I likely never would be. Good hackers were a dime a dozen. Ones like me? Second-generation hackers who’d been trained on this shit since fucking elementary school? We were almost nonexistent. Therefore, I was in high demand. I turned away more jobs than I could possibly take.
But every once in a while a job came along that was offering five times my usual fee, and I found it really hard to turn that shit down. That right there was a retirement plan.