"Like you say, it was one of your men who gave me the intel. The one that goes by Kale. Cain. Not important."

"I see..." Jhonny let out another smoke ring. "What did you offer him?"

"Freedom."

"Please. I mightn't by the next sucesor of the Mafia here, but I can manage to pull out my men out of prison."

"Oh, I didn't mean prison. I was going to let them locked up for some time. Though I suspect you already got them out of there. With your human tracker and all."

"You suspect right" Johnny took a sip at his Back Daniels. He was none to speak, but cold beer after a long day of work tasted way better. Only his opinion, though.

"So, illegal merchandise transportation is your business."

"Funny. People usually call it smuggling."

"I'm not people. I have the delicacy to know that some don't like such rough name for their business" Lawrence knew only from the thousand villain novels he had read, but Johnny didn't have to know. He took a sip of his glass as well.

"A man of culture. I like that."

"Then, back to the point. Some time ago, around four months now, these men contacted you. Men whose line of work was a tad darker than yours. These men wanted to use some of your routes to transport drugs. And you don't like to handle drugs, am I wrong?"

"Exactly. Did Caleb tell you that too?"

"No, that was my own intuition." Lawrence couldn't help but feeling like they were getting farther away from the man's name. "Then you did a little research. You couldn't find anything too suspicious about them. No powerful political figure backing them, no criminal factions on the work. So you decided that turning them off would be the smartest option..."

"And it was" Johnny said. "At least that's what I thought by that time."

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"Then things started to get rough for business. Some boats would disappear into thin air. People got out, too scared to work with you any longer. To even talk of what they were scared about. Merchandise shortage. Routes becoming unusable. All sort of suspicious stuff."

"Which, as you'd understand, was just too much to be a coincidence."

"So you looked some more. Dug deeper. And then you found the cause of all the trouble. Which happened to be those very same people trying to persuade you into drug dealing. And a branch of one of the biggest criminal organizations in the country. Which one, you can't tell. All you know is that they are dangerous. Am I right?"

"Right as my right hand." Johnny pushed his cigarette in a neat ash tray, in the center of the table. Put it off. Gulped all the expensive alcohol at once.

Alright. He was getting desperate. Lawrence couldn't usually tell, but Silver Tongue apparently did not only help him putting offers the best way possible, but also reading peoples' expressions to some point as well.

Amazing.

"So the income started to go down. Each month, less coins. Slowly, but surely, all your empire started to sink. So you had to do something. Something desperate to keep it from falling down..."

"And then it came to me. 'Of course, you idiot. You have the construction work! Exodus is, to the eyes of the public, just a build and repair business. Why not earning some decent money with it?'"

"And then you sent your Bomberman to blow off a chunk of the city." Lawrence was glad he had his Facade skill, otherwise that tinge of anger and displeasure would leak out and make this conversation more difficult.

"Taking the necessary precautions so tha nobody would end up dead or seriously injured." Johnny sounded like he was getting defensive.

"Of course you did. And I'm sure as hell not going to judge you for it. I'm the one who planned to keep three men locked up at an abandoned house for undefined time. However, there were other options. Smarter options you could take."

"Your point being?"

"You lack something, Johnny. You have almost everything a man needs to call himself a leader. You have the guts. You have the charisma. The intuition. But you lack something."

"Please enlighten me, great master." Look who was playing ironic now.

"You lack a proper strategist's brains. You can look at the big picture. You can extract information out of everything you are given. But once you had that information on hand, you have a hard time figuring out what to do with it."

Johnny's grip tightened just a little on his glass. Lawrence nailed it.

"And the worst part is, you can't discuss it with your men. Showing a sign of weakness is just something you can't afford to do. Not when you have such s big empire on your shoulders..."

"Why are you telling me what I already know?"

Lawrence smiled. Or rather, grinned. It was time to act.

"I'm telling you because I can solve that. At least for this time."

"What do you mean?"

"I have a deal offer for you, Mr. Chase. That's why I came here."

"'Came here' he says. You forgot that I brought you here already?"

"Please, I don't suffer any cases of temporary amnesia. You might have ordered to bring us to your fancy Exodus, Mr. Chase, but the fact that me and my minion are here is simply because out goals were aligned with that." He was throwing some big lies into the air, but nobody had to notice.

"And we could leave anytime we wanted" he said, snapping his fingers. Instantly after, Mika jumped from her chair to Johnny's back.

"As you can see, my minion can transport things from one place to the other, herself and I included."

Johnny closed his eyes, not even bothering to react at Mika's little trick. He probably already heard his subordinate's reports.

"Very well, let's hear your deal."

"Like we were saying before, you have a little problem with a rival organization. I can get rid of that problem."

"Assuming you could, which I highly doubt. What's there for you to win?"

Lawrence's smile only grew wider at that question.

"That the topic for after I'm done with our current problem." he said, extending his hand.

"It'll be a pleasure to work with you, Mr. Chase."