Realpolitik!
He thought it was a good point; but Jimmy shook his head. “With respect, boss, I didn’t mean them. I meant Hershey. The Consortium. They’re running a con on us.”
“Jimmy,” said Bad Jack, maybe a little too heavily, “We’re the Consortium now. We made a deal, remember? We joined their Outfit, and they made sure we could keep what we grabbed and grab some more besides. And it’s worked out pretty good so far.”
“So far? Maybe, boss. But when you made that deal, it was because Unholy Fucking Toledo sniffing around. Toledo ain’t breathing down our necks any more. Hell, these days it ain’t breathing at all.”
Bad Jack knew where Jimmy was coming from with that. He’d had the thought himself. But Jimmy wasn’t thinking big enough. Toledo was gone. But New Zaneville was still there, and those Mansfield assholes (who just joined the Consortium, now that Toledo was belly-up), and Hershey was building up Canton and Erie. When Bad Jack signed the crew on with the Consortium, they were sort of on the frontier. Now the frontier was somewhere west of Dayton.
He hadn’t thought about it himself. Still might not have, except the weekly executive summaries had a lot of maps in them now. It was hard to not to see how far west the border was now. And past it… “There’s them,” Bad Jack said. “You know. Those mage assholes in Iowa.” And Michigan, and Indiana, and a lot of places west of there, too…