Chapter 21
Buckshot heard Pruitt before he saw him.
Through the wall—through the drywall and the stud framing and the thin layer of insulation between the office and room one—he heard the crew cab's engine die in the lot, heard doors opening and boots in the gravel, heard men moving with the flat, unhurried confidence of people who believed they were walking into a business transaction.
He heard the office door open. Heard Tamsin's chair creak as she shifted her weight. Heard a man's voice—the same flat voice from the phone, the voice that had offered cash and one chance to sign—say, "Miss Foley. Thank you for being reasonable."
Buckshot pressed his back against the wall and held the sawed-off against his chest and waited.
Through the drywall, he could hear everything.
"Sit down," Tamsin said. Her voice was steady. Calm. The voice of a woman sitting behind her own desk with papers in front of her and a shotgun in her lap and seven patched men in the walls around her.
A chair scraped. Pruitt sat.
"I've got the deed transfer here," Tamsin said. "And the keys. Eighteen rooms. You'll want to check the inventory—rooms nine and eleven need work."
"I'm aware of the condition." Pruitt's voice was patient, controlled—the voice of a man who'd been dispatching freight and hiding people for years and saw this as another route being closed. "My people will handle the renovation. You sign, you take the check, you walk away."
"And go where?"
"Wherever you want, Miss Foley. That's the beauty of cash."
Two men with Pruitt. Buckshot could hear them—one near the door, one by the window, the same positioning Sharp had used the night this started.
And outside, in the vehicles, more men. How many, he couldn't tell.
Didn't matter. The brothers were in the rooms and Cottonmouth was on the ridge and the geometry was set.
"Before I sign," Tamsin said, "I want to know something."
"You're not in a position to negotiate."
"It's not a negotiation. It's a question. Was it always going to end like this? With paper instead of a gun?"
Pruitt was quiet for a moment. "I'm a businessman, Miss Foley. Guns are expensive. Paper is cheap. And paper is permanent—it doesn't leave bodies that need explaining."
"Your paper left plenty of bodies."
"Those were personnel issues. Easily replaced." A pause. "Shall we proceed?"
Through the wall, Buckshot heard movement. One of Pruitt's men shifting. Moving toward the connecting door between the office and room one—the door Buckshot was standing behind.
The handle turned.
Everything happened at once.
The doors of rooms three, seven, and fourteen blew open and brothers poured into the lot.
Cottonmouth's rifle cracked from the ridge—once, twice—and the men at the vehicles went down before they could turn.
The lot erupted into the same close, ugly chaos Buckshot had lived through twice before in this parking lot, gunfire and shouting and men scrambling between trucks and room doors with nowhere to go.
Buckshot didn't go through the connecting door. He went through the wall.
The sawed-off punched a hole through the drywall at chest height and he followed it—shoulder first, tearing through the stud framing, through the insulation, through the plaster on the office side—because the man at the connecting door was between him and Tamsin and a wall was faster than a handle.
He came through in a shower of dust and drywall fragments and put the sawed-off into the man at the door at four feet. The blast threw the man backward into the frame and he went down and didn't move.
The second man—the one by the window—spun with a pistol. Buckshot racked and fired wide, the spread taking out the window and the man's arm and sending him through the shattered frame into the lot, screaming.
Pruitt.
The man who'd never stood on his own ground was on his feet behind the desk.
He had Tamsin's arm—had grabbed her when the wall came apart—and he was pulling her up out of the chair, using her as a shield, dragging her toward the office door with one hand on her arm and the other reaching for the pistol on his belt.
Buckshot leveled the sawed-off and couldn't fire. Tamsin was between them. Pruitt had her pulled against his chest, her back to his front, and the man was moving for the door with the mechanical efficiency of a dispatcher solving a routing problem—obstacle identified, path adjusted, exit located.
Tamsin solved it.
She brought the stock of the short shotgun up from her lap and drove it into Pruitt's jaw. The impact snapped his head sideways and his grip broke, and she rolled out from behind the desk—low, fast, hitting the floor and clearing the lane in one motion.
Buckshot filled the lane.
He walked forward. The sawed-off up, the dust from the wall still hanging in the air, the office destroyed around him—the desk overturned, the deed papers scattered, the window gone.
Pruitt stumbled backward, his hand on his jaw, blood on his teeth, and Buckshot kept walking, driving him back the way he drove everything—wide, relentless, filling the space.
Pruitt hit the window frame. Buckshot put the barrel against his chest and pushed, and the man went backward through the shattered frame and out onto the gravel.
The lot was over. The brothers had Pruitt's men down—the vehicles shot to pieces, the hired muscle scattered across the gravel in the positions they'd died in.
Cottonmouth's rifle was silent on the ridge.
The only sound was the tick of cooling engines and the distant roll of the last echo fading into the hills.
Pruitt scrambled backward in the gravel.
Forty-five years old, thick in the middle, the soft hands of a man who'd spent his career behind a desk dispatching other men to do the work.
He'd never been shot at. He'd never been in a fight.
He'd never stood on ground that was being contested because he'd always had men to stand on it for him, and now those men were dead and the ground was gravel and the man walking toward him had a shotgun and the kind of patience that came from deciding once, a long time ago, that falling was a choice.
"Wait," Pruitt said. He held up his hands.
Blood from his jaw running down his chin, staining the collar of a shirt that probably cost more than Tamsin's monthly note.
"We can work this out. The property—I'll tear up the papers.
Walk away. You keep the motel, keep the highway, I'll pull my operation out of Missouri entirely. There's no need—"
"You put a sniper on her window."
Pruitt's mouth opened. Closed.
"You sent a man to study her schedule and sit in her tree line with a rifle zeroed on the place she works. You bought her debt to take the one thing she built with her own hands. And you're going to tell me we can work this out."
Buckshot walked Pruitt backward across the lot. Past the trucks. Past the room doors. Past the gravel stained dark from fights that had happened in this same lot, on this same ground, because this same man had decided a woman's motel was something he could use without consequence.
Pruitt reached the edge of the property. The drainage ditch along the highway. The same ditch line where Wendell Sharp had died running, the same weeds, the same slope down to the road.
"Please," Pruitt said.
Buckshot looked at him. A dispatcher. A route planner.
A man who'd built a four-state network by never standing on his own ground and sending other men to die on it.
He'd sent Sharp with threats. He'd sent Tillman with a convoy.
He'd sent Vance with a rifle and a map. And now he was on his knees in a ditch on an Ozark highway, begging for the kind of mercy he'd never once extended to the woman behind the desk.
Buckshot pulled the trigger.
The spread caught Pruitt center mass and put him into the ditch grass, and the echo rolled out across the hollow—the same hollow that had carried every other shot fired in this lot, the same hills, the same sky—and faded into the Ozarks and didn't come back.
Silence.
Morning birds starting up. The smell of cordite drifting across the lot. The tick of engines. The sound of the highway, empty in both directions, carrying nothing and no one.
Buckshot stood at the edge of the ditch and looked down at Donnie Pruitt—the man who'd never stood on his own ground, lying in a ditch on a highway he'd tried to own—and felt the weight of it settle into his chest and stay.
Not guilt. Not satisfaction. Completion.
The heavy, permanent sense of a thing finished.
He turned and walked back across the lot.
Tamsin was standing in the office doorway.
The short shotgun in one hand, the deed papers crumpled in the other.
Dust in her hair from the wall he'd come through.
A red mark on her arm where Pruitt had grabbed her.
And those gray eyes—steady, direct, holding his from across the gravel the way they'd held his since the night he'd walked into her office and found her pinned against a desk by a man with a knife.
She dropped the deed papers. Let them scatter in the gravel, the pages catching the breeze and drifting across the lot like nothing. Because they were nothing. The paper that was supposed to take her motel, carried away by Ozark wind.
Buckshot walked to her. Took the shotgun out of her hand. Set it against the wall. Put both his hands on her face—thumbs on her cheekbones, fingers in her dusty hair—and pressed his forehead to hers.
"It's done," he said.
She put her hands over his. Held them against her face. Closed her eyes.
"Ask me," she said.
Behind them, the brothers were already moving.
Still giving quiet orders. Spillway's crew handling the vehicles.
Cottonmouth coming down off the ridge with his rifle over his shoulder and the cold satisfaction of a man whose last warning had been the only warning needed.
The club cleaning up the way it always cleaned up—efficiently, completely, leaving nothing behind but gravel and silence.
The Pines stood in the morning light. Eighteen rooms. A boarded window where room nine was being rebuilt. A new office window that would need replacing again. A vending machine humming in the alcove. A lot full of brothers and a woman in the doorway and a man with his hands on her face.
Nothing burning. Nothing lost. Four states' worth of network ending in one lot, on one Ozark highway, because a woman wrote things down and a man came through a wall to get to her.
The club pulled out in formation. Bikes rumbling down the highway, chrome catching the morning sun, the sound of V-twins filling the hollow and fading into the hills.
Buckshot rode at the back with Tamsin's truck behind him, and in the rearview mirror The Pines got smaller and smaller but didn't disappear.
It would be there when they got back.
It would always be there.