Chapter 22 #3
“Man, you don’t get to talk about that!” Sean shouted back in his face. “She’s the most important thing in my world, and she was in danger! So, I made a deal that was gonna save us all! I don’t regret it. Not for a minute.”
“The old man would never have—” Vin started to say before Sean cut him off.
“The old man is dead, Vin!” he roared, motioning to the area around them. “And all his talk about good people and kindness was always a load of hogwash, and you know it. We both do. We always have. And Deb has gotta be starting to believe it, now that she’s seen humanity at its absolute worst.”
Vin shook his head. He wanted to disagree with Sean, to fight back against his assertions. But he really couldn’t. Nothing he was saying was wrong, per se. But handing over the ranch to a crime lord, letting him use it for his nefarious plans, was too much for Vin’s mind to handle.
“Deb is gonna be horrified that her ranch is being used for shit like this,” Vin said, trying to dissuade Sean from going through with this promise.
“She doesn’t know it yet,” Sean said, his voice falling low and sad, “but he’s been using the ranch for almost eight months now.” Vin’s breath caught in his throat for a moment.
“What the fuck do you mean?” he asked, his voice slow and accusatory. “What have you done, Sean?”
“I’ve been letting him use the outskirts of the ranch for a while now,” Sean said. “He uses it for dead drops. Hiding drugs or drug money for his people to pick up.”
“What?” Vin exclaimed, placing a hand on his temple to get his equilibrium back. “You’re using Deb’s ranch for drug running?”
“Times are tough,” Sean said, shaking his head and glaring at Vin. “I made the choices I needed to make to keep the lights on and provide for this family.”
“You made the wrong choice, Sean,” Vin said, turning his back on his old friend in disgust and looking up into the sky as though there were some magical answer up there in the clouds.
He knew Sean had promised Chainz something terrible in order to get his cooperation, but this was above and beyond even Vin’s worst fears.
Chainz was going to set foot on Deb’s ranch. That man was the antithesis of everything her father had believed and stood for. His stain had already corrupted the space, using it to move items that killed people, caused horrible addictions, tore families apart, and ruined lives.
Sean had betrayed Deb. He had betrayed the old man’s memory. This was unforgivable. He had made a deal with the devil himself, and it was time to pay up.
Vin couldn’t let this happen. He couldn’t allow Sean to hand over everything Deb had worked her whole life to inherit. He couldn’t allow Jimmy to grow up surrounded by the influence of Chainz and his gang of criminal lowlifes. He just couldn’t.
Then, as the world stopped spinning around him, as his head still reeled from this monumental revelation, a dark thought filled his mind. That was only one promise. “Sean,” Vin said slowly. “What was the second thing you promised Chainz?”
Vin turned back toward Sean to see his old friend and partner had his gun drawn and trained on Vin.
Without a word between them, Sean pulled the trigger at near point-blank range.
Vin felt the horrifying thumb of a bullet tearing into his chest, shattering his ribs as it buried itself within his body.
The force of it threw him back, and Vin landed on the ground, looking up at the desert sky, his eyes wide with shock.
Sean soon filled his field of vision as he stepped into Vin’s eye line. “When we went to ask Chainz to help with the camp, he had a condition,” Sean said. “When he pulled me into his office, he told me that when this was all over, I had to put you down for good.”
Vin couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
His breath was washing out in horrified, frenzied gasps as he pressed his palms into his chest, trying to stop the morbid flow of hot sticky blood from oozing out.
He gritted his teeth around his pained and panicked exhalations, causing a hissing sound that sprayed desperate bursts of saliva and blood.
“This isn’t personal at all,” Sean said. “I didn’t wanna do this, and it has nothing to do with you and Deb or any of that crap. It’s just a promise I had to make to ensure we could get Deb and Jimmy back safe. If you think about it for a moment, I’m sure you’ll understand why this had to be done.”
Vin shook his head defiantly. He wasn’t about to let Sean justify his heinous actions. Vin loved Deb and Jimmy as well, but he wasn’t willing to burn their entire world to achieve his ends. Sean wasn’t justified, no matter how much he tried to convince himself.
And Vin knew what Sean was doing. He might have been talking to Vin, but in reality, he was talking to himself. He wanted so desperately to see in Vin’s face some sign of understanding, some acknowledgment that he was doing the right thing. He wanted justification, and he wasn’t going to get it.
“Just know that they’ll be safe with me, always,” Sean said.
“They might not always agree with my methods. They might resist them. But they’ll live on.
They’ll be happy eventually. They’ll understand that I know what’s best for this family and that I make the hard decisions so that they won’t have to. ”
Vin’s blood was pouring through his fingers now, and he wished desperately for the power to get up, to fight back, to will himself to survive so that he could protect his family from the man he thought was going to protect them.
He had believed Sean would be a provider, a person who could safeguard the futures of his loved ones in a way that Vin never could.
How he could plainly see how wrong he was, only he was seeing it far too late.
“Don’t worry,” Sean said down to him, still holding his pistol in one hand, “I’ll tell them you died like a hero, helping me save Jimmy from the remnant.
I’ll make sure they remember you well and honor your memory forever.
And I’ll make sure Jimmy knows all about you when he’s older. I owe you that much.”
Vin glared defiantly up at Sean, opening his mouth and trying to respond.
But he didn’t have the strength to talk back or vocalize anything save for a strangled gurgle of blood.
No matter how he tried to justify his actions, what Sean was doing was wrong on every level.
He was everything they had fought against.
Criminal, drug pusher, betrayer, liar. He said a silent prayer, begging for the energy to rise up, to knock his gun away, to choke the life out of this threat to the security of the ones he loved.
But that strength was not going to magically materialize.
All he could do was lay there, writhing in pain, silently cursing this Judas, this wolf in sheep’s clothing.
“I’m sorry, Vin,” Sean said. “But I’m sure that deep down you understand.”
He didn’t. He never could. Vin understood the world and how it worked. He understood shades of gray and having to work on the darker side here and there to achieve goals. But this? Sean had started by skirting with the gray, but he had fallen completely into the darkness.
He was too far gone now, and Vin could see in his eyes that the decision to do all of this was etched into his heart like an engraved message in stone.
He wanted to say something, anything that could pull him back, but that was impossible on many levels. He moved his mouth, trying to talk, summoning up the last of his strength to push a few final words out of his throat.
“F,” he said, and Sean raised an eyebrow in interest.
He leaned in as if desperate to hear Vin’s last statement. And Vin realized that he was hoping with every fiber of his being that Vin would tell him that what he was doing was all right.
“Fuck you…Sean,” Vin spat, a mixture of blood and saliva flying from his lips.
Sean straightened up as though he had been slapped. He glared down at Vin, his face a twisted wall of contempt. But through the rage, Vin could see that his reaction had stirred something in Sean. A lone tear fell from his eye, vanishing in the scraggly mess that was his beard.
Sean’s gun shot up, and three shots rang out. Vin felt all three bullets slam into his torso as darkness overtook him.