Chapter Three
Trent
“Mike?” My voice rose three octaves.
Preacher didn’t blink at the squeak. He just tilted his head a fraction, studying me the way a man might study a card he hadn’t decided whether to play yet.
“Mike,” he confirmed.
“What about him?” My fingers found the edge of the order pad and started worrying the corner. “He’s an idiot, but I’m guessing you already figured that out.”
“Figured it out about a minute after your friend Hammer opened his mouth yesterday.” Preacher’s voice stayed low, pitched just for me, though I had no doubt Crowbar was catching every word from his stool three feet away. “Your brother owes a man named Royce eight grand.”
The order pad slipped out of my fingers and hit the table.
“Eight—” I closed my mouth. Opened it. Closed it again. My jaw protested every movement. “Eight thousand?”
“Mmm.”
“He doesn’t even have eight dollars.” Unless he was lifting it out of my wallet.
Mike picked up construction gigs when he felt like it, but that didn’t stop him from claiming poverty every time bills came due.
Maria could walk past me in the hallway without so much as a glance, but her third always appeared in my sock drawer like clockwork.
“I’m aware.”
That stopped me. The way he said it, flat and certain, indicated he’d done his homework on Mike’s bank account before walking through the door. Maybe he had. I wouldn’t have put it past him to know what brand of cereal was in our cupboard.
I leaned forward without meaning to and lowered my voice. “How do you know about Royce?”
Mike had brought him to the house once or twice, saying he was a work buddy.
That should’ve clued me in right away. My brother didn’t have friends.
I’d known he was a screwup. I’d known he was selfish in the casual way some people were selfish, the way a guy might eat the last slice of pizza and not think about it for a second.
But this was different. This was the kind of selfish that came with funeral arrangements.
Preacher’s eyes did that slow thing again, sliding from my mouth back up to meet mine. “Royce is the reason your brother gave Hammer your name. Mike owed the debt. Working for Hammer was a way to make the eight grand disappear. Run a few errands, move a little product, debt cleared.”
Great. My brother had become a drug dealer.
“Except Hammer’s product went missing.”
“Except that.” I sat back, the vinyl creaking under me. Somewhere behind the counter, Lamar was clattering plates loud enough to remind me he was within shouting distance, and I had never been so grateful for the man in my life. I wanted to run back there and hide for the next thirty or so years.
“So what does this have to do with you?” My voice didn’t betray the earthquake happening inside of me. “Hammer’s not your problem. Mike’s definitely not your problem. And I’m—” I gestured at myself. “I’m sure as hell not your problem.”
Preacher didn’t answer right away. He reached into his cut, and my soul left my body until I noticed it was just a pack of cigarettes he was tapping against the table. Not lighting, just tapping, a slow rhythm against the laminate.
“Hammer’s dealing in my town,” he said finally.
“That makes him my problem. Royce loaned money to a guy who couldn’t pay it back and then pointed him at a dealer to settle up. That makes Royce my problem. And your brother”—the tapping stopped—“used your name as currency. That makes him a piece of shit. But it doesn’t make him my problem.”
“Okay.” I still had no idea where this was going. “So…”
“You are my problem.”
His words knocked the air right out of me. He’d let me go, only to reel me back in. I knew he would change his mind. I just didn’t know which method of torture he was going to use. Hopefully a bullet. Clean and efficient. Any other method would make me drop in five seconds, just like that punch had.
Preacher set the cigarettes down and folded his hands again. The rings caught the light, and I made the mistake of looking at them. His hands were enormous, scarred across the knuckles, and the longer I stared, the harder it was to remember what we were talking about.
“You walked onto my property yesterday with a gun to your head and a lie in your mouth,” he said. “You did that to keep yourself breathing. Smart play. Stupid target, but smart play.”
“Thanks?”
“Hammer’s not going to forget you lied to him.”
I gripped the edge of the table. “He’s still alive?” I whispered, looking around like cops might be recording our conversation.
That almost-smile again, just a flicker at the corner of his mouth.
I needed my nonexistent therapist. “He’s having a long conversation with some friends of mine. Whether he walks out of that conversation depends on how the next few hours go. But let’s say, for the sake of moving this along, that he does.”
“Right.” My voice had gone thin. “Sake of moving this along. Sure.”
“He’s going to come looking for you. So is Royce, once he figures out his collection method just blew up in his face. And your brother”—Preacher’s jaw tightened, almost imperceptibly—“is going to keep handing you over like a credit card, because that’s the kind of man he is.”
I wanted to argue. I really did. The words were right there, lined up on my tongue—he’s not that bad, he didn’t mean it, he’s family—but every single one of them died before it reached air.
I’d looked at him scratching his stomach in our kitchen this morning, and I’d known, with the same bone-deep certainty that tells you not to stick your hand in fire, that he’d do it again.
“So.” I cleared my throat, the bruise pulsing in time with my heartbeat. “What exactly are you saying?”
Preacher leaned forward, just enough that I could smell tobacco and engine grease and something cleaner under it, like soap and cold air. “I’m saying you’re done being everyone’s fall guy.”
A laugh tried to climb out of my throat as I glanced away. “I wasn’t exactly volunteering.”
“Trent.” The way he said my name landed different the second time. Quieter. “Look at me.”
I looked. I’d been looking. I couldn’t seem to do anything else.
“I’m not asking you to do anything,” he said.
“I’m telling you how it’s going to be. Your shift ends at four. Crowbar’ll be parked across the street at three forty-five.”
He slid out of the booth in one smooth motion, dropped a folded bill onto the table that was way too big for a coffee he hadn’t ordered.
“You walk out that door, you walk to his truck. Not home. Not anywhere else.”
Crowbar shifted on his stool at the counter, not turning, just adjusting, like a tuning fork picking up a frequency.
“You can’t just hijack me!” I scrambled out of the booth, glaring up at six-something of him, and briefly forgot there was a whole room of people watching.
He didn’t repeat himself. Preacher Deluca, I was already learning, didn’t seem like the kind of man who repeated himself. He just looked at me like he’d said something perfectly reasonable and was waiting for me to catch up.
My eyes narrowed. The order felt like a trap with the spring already triggered. “You planned this.”
“I planned part of it.” Preacher gave a single nod, and god help me, I became lost in those amber eyes. Something was definitely wrong with me.
“Which part?”
“The part where you stop being other people’s problem,” he said, “and start being mine.”
Preacher paused, and the diner suddenly felt smaller, like the walls had taken a step in. He looked down at me, and my pulse was a complete mess.
“Eat something,” he said quietly. “You’re pale and trembling.”
Then he was gone, Crowbar right behind him. I sat back down, forcing myself to breathe. This could not be happening. For a split second, I considered ignoring Preacher’s demands, but knew I would get into Crowbar’s truck. Because a part of me knew home was no longer safe.
Lamar appeared in the seat across from me before the door had finished swinging shut.
“Trent.”
“I know.”
“That was Preacher Deluca.”
“I know, Lamar.” Worse, Preacher had felt like the only solid thing right now.
He picked up the money, looked at it, then set it back down. “He didn’t order anything.”
“I think it’s a tip.” For sitting across from me and rearranging my entire life.
“I think it’s a down payment.” He folded his arms on the table, and for the first time since I’d started working for him, I saw something like fear move across his face. Not for himself. For me. Which was somehow worse. “What does he want with you, son?”
I opened my mouth to tell him I didn’t know.
It would’ve been a lie, and we both would’ve heard it.
“My brother screwed up.” The words ran like a current all the way down my body. “And I think I’m the one who has to pay for it.”
Lamar was quiet for a long time. Then he reached across the table, took the hundred, and pressed it into my palm.
“Couch pulls out,” he said. “Shotgun’s loaded. You remember that.”
I nodded, because my throat had closed up again, and folded the bill into my pocket before getting back to work.
* * * *
Crowbar was sitting in a black pickup exactly where Preacher said he would be. The truck was parked across the street under the sagging awning of the closed-down dry cleaner, engine idling, exhaust curling up into the late afternoon air like a thin gray ribbon.
I stood on the sidewalk outside Lamar’s and tried to gather the courage to walk over there. The bruise on my jaw throbbed in time with the bass thumping faintly through the truck’s closed windows. Some slow and growling rock song.
Behind me, the bell over Lamar’s door jingled, and I didn’t have to turn around to know he’d come out onto the stoop to watch me go.
I could feel his eyes on the back of my neck like a hand pressed flat between my shoulder blades.
His offer rattled around in my skull, and for one stupid, weightless second, I considered turning around and taking him up on it.
Letting Lamar’s living room swallow me whole.
Letting somebody else’s furniture be the thing that kept me alive for a night.