“So what do we do about this shipment?” Jake brought the conversation back to the present problem. “We don’t want Emilio to lose his trucks. That would cripple him beyond recovery. If he loses the weapons, he’ll lose a lot of money. He’s already in a bit of trouble. I took apart three of his most lucrative companies and that’s hurt him.”

“No cops, he’d lose his trucks and end up facing a trial. The cops would love to nail Emilio to the wall,” Elijah said.

“So we take the weapons when the trucks are heading down the highway in the early morning hours. He’ll send them out around two or three A.M. We’ll hit them hard, put the drivers on the ground and hope the guards aren’t stupid. There’s a strip of access road we can use, right off the freeway. Flatten a tire or two and they’ll pull off. We transfer the furniture to smaller vans and get out of there,” Alonzo said.

“Why there?” Joshua asked.

“No homes in that area. No lights. It’s rural and dark,” Alonzo pointed out. “I scouted that area a long time ago. It was a place I worried Arnotto would get hit.”

“Sounds like you’ve done this before,” Joshua said.

Alonzo knew that challenge was all about Evangeline and nothing to do with the hit on the weapons. Joshua didn’t like his cousin anywhere near the business and Alonzo couldn’t blame him. He didn’t like her near it either. Evangeline was the one woman his leopard would accept. She could soothe that brutal need for bloodshed in both man and beast. More importantly, he was already gone on her. Completely. No half measures. There was no going back from his decision, no matter how tough it got for the both of them.

“Yeah,” he conceded. “I have.”

No one touched that and it was just as well. He wasn’t about to explain himself. They didn’t like it, he could walk. They all knew it too. They knew he wouldn’t mind pushing them in that direction.

“Okay, once we have the weapons, where do we want to stash them?”

“We aren’t stashing them,” Drake said. “I’ll take them with Joshua back to the bayou and they’ll disappear into the sea.”

“It’s too far. The risk is too great,” Jake objected.