Chapter 7
Seven
C iaran eased his truck to a stop at the end of the formerly gravel, but now mostly mud, driveway of the Barnes’s house.
House was probably pushing it. The ramshackle trailers, all cobbled together, looked more like something out of a Mad Max movie than like something that would be sitting in the middle of bourbon country.
Picking up the file from the seat beside him, he skimmed the documents and photos inside.
Yes, he was helping out Quentin to appease Mia, but he was also helping out his soon-to-be brother-in-law, Matt Crawford.
It seemed that during his recent stint at Blackburn, Joey had shared a cell with a talkative Russian fellow by the name of Sergei.
And since Sergei was no longer talking to anyone, Joey Barnes might be their best shot for getting more intel on the original source of the drugs Sergei and his associates had been peddling.
Getting out of the truck, he walked casually up the driveway, as if he had every right to be there.
Sneaking up on paranoid-ass drug dealers was worse than doing a night drop in a war zone.
A large dog chained in the yard growled and barked as he made his way onto the porch.
Boards shifted beneath his weight, and he wondered how the whole thing didn’t just fall through.
Ciaran knocked on the door and waited. Then he knocked again. From inside, he could hear the shuffling of trash, bottles being knocked over. They might have had a party, or they might just live that way. He didn’t know, and he honestly didn’t care.
Through the closed door he heard someone shout. “Answer the fucking door, bitch!”
Ciaran clenched his fists at his side. He’d never spoken to a woman that way in his life, and it pissed him off to hear it from someone else.
When the door did finally open, it wasn’t some strung-out young girl like he’d expected.
The woman was probably middle-aged, and yet she could have been a hundred.
Rail thin, her gray hair tied back in a messy knot and dressed in clothes so old and threadbare it was a wonder they didn’t simply disintegrate on the spot—she was probably the saddest creature he’d ever laid eyes on.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
Her voice was rough from chain-smoking for years, but still timid and weak. She ducked her head and wouldn’t make eye contact with him, but it allowed the bruise on her cheekbone to stand out in stark relief.
“I’m looking for Joey…I need to talk to him,” Ciaran replied evenly, the whole time wondering if Joey was responsible for that bruise.
“He’s not here,” she replied and started to close the door.
Ciaran caught it with his palm, keeping her from closing it in his face. “Where can I find him?”
“I don’t know. He’s a grown man and doesn’t have to tell me where he goes or when he’ll be home.”
“But he will be home?” Ciaran demanded.
She sighed again, heavy and broken. “Maybe. I don’t know. He’s been running wild ever since he got out…it was better when he was still locked up. Least then I knew where he was.”
“Don’t say another damn word!”
The man, if he could be called that, who’d been yelling and cursing inside was making his way to the door.
It wasn’t her husband, Ciaran realized. It was another of her worthless sons.
The wifebeater, which was ironic, the dirty jeans, gauged ears, neck tattoos, and sideways hat were pretty indicative that he didn’t have any sort of legitimate employment.
But the brand-new truck parked in the yard clearly said he had money .
“What the fuck do you want with my brother?” he demanded.
“I want to ask him why he shot up Harlow Tate’s bar,” Ciaran said. “And then I want to ask him, politely, to not do it again.”
The little punk laughed. “That’s between him and his old lady…ain’t nothing to you.”
Ciaran smiled. “Since they are divorced, you can’t really call her his old lady. And it’s very much something to me as she’s now dating my brother.”
“I don’t give two shits who she’s dating…she belongs to Joey.”
“Kyle, don’t cause trouble!” the mother warned.
“He’s the one causin’ trouble,” Kyle replied. “Walking up to my door and telling me what me and mine can and can’t do. That shit don’t play.”
Ciaran, already disgusted by the way the little shit had talked to his mother, reached out and grabbed him by the throat.
His fingers pressed the carotid artery on one side and his thumb on the other, with just enough force to leave him weak and disoriented.
If he pressed harder, he could knock him out cold in under ten seconds, or he could kill him.
“I asked you a very polite question. You can give me a very polite answer, or I can snap your neck like a goddamn twig.”
Ciaran kept his eyes on the mother. It didn’t matter that her son was an asshole, he was still her son. Beaten down, abused, she would still defend him with her dying breath.
“Now, Mrs. Barnes, tell me where to find Joey. I only want to talk to him.”
“Don’t hurt him,” she said. “They’re good boys! They just got their daddy’s temper is all!”
“I will do my best to avoid it,” he replied. They both knew that wouldn’t be possible, but he made the offer regardless.
“He’s in Lexington…staying with his cousin down off Fourth Street.”
“The cousin’s name?”
“Tommy. Tommy Barnes,” she replied.
Ciaran released Kyle who stumbled backward and sank to the ground looking dazed. “You should leave them. Every one of them. They don’t appreciate you, and they’re only going to treat you worse the longer you stay.”
She folded her arms over her chest. “They’re my kids. And they don’t hit me.”
“Just your husband, then? ”
She didn’t say anything more. Ciaran shook his head as he walked away.
You couldn’t save someone who didn’t want to be saved, he reminded himself.
They had bigger problems to deal with at any rate.
Tracking down Joey Barnes, finding out what information he had on the Russians, and making it perfectly clear that even if the law didn’t stop him from targeting Lowey Tate, someone would.
The drive back to Ash Grove Farm was quiet.
Lowey wasn’t saying much, and Quentin felt like he’d talked more in the last two days than he had in his whole damn life.
At the very least, he’d said more meaningful things than he had in his whole damn life.
Evasion. Misdirection. Distraction. Those were the tactics he normally preferred.
Laying it all out on the line was much more Clayton’s style than it was his.
But the last year had changed things for them both.
Clayton had decided to become more like Samuel in order to bring him down.
As for himself, he’d looked in the mirror one day and saw a hell of a lot more of Samuel Darcy staring back at him than he’d ever wanted to.
He was using people, getting what he wanted from them and then walking away.
And that wasn’t the kind of man he wanted to be.
It sure as hell wasn’t the kind of man Patricia had been raising him to be .
One could argue that at twenty years old, he was already raised by the time she’d had her accident.
But the truth was that no twenty-year-old had achieved actual manhood yet.
He’d been a boy in a man’s body, and at thirty, he’d recognized that he wasn’t much better.
Drinking too much, partying too much, and going through women like they were disposable.
That included the one beside him, or at least he’d wanted it to.
There was something about Lowey, though, something that had just crawled inside him and wouldn’t let go.
For the past two months, he’d driven by her bar at least daily.
Every time he’d been tempted to stop, tempted to grovel, and pride wouldn’t let him.
It had taken getting his shit handed to him by a brother he’d just met to humble him enough to go in there and face her, to face what he’d done.
The night that everything had gone south played over in his mind.
It had started like any other. He’d worked late, and after finally leaving the office, he’d headed to The Kicking Mule for a drink.
When the crowd had thinned out and Lowey could leave everything to the bartenders, she’d slipped away to her little apartment upstairs, and he’d followed.
It had hit him then, walking up those stairs behind her, that she’d become a habit.
Coming to her house every night, sinking into the welcoming heat of her, it was more than just scratching an itch.
Everything he did in the course of his day was just killing time until he could get back there and be with her again.
That’s when the panic had set in.
He’d done the only thing then that he could. He’d lashed out.
“This isn’t working for me anymore,” he’d said.
She’d stopped at the top of the stairs and looked back at him. “What the hell does that mean?”
“Look, Lowey, we both knew when this started this wasn’t a permanent thing for us.
We’re just not long-term kind of people.
” The doucheyness of his behavior was haunting him as he remembered the look in her eyes.
All the life, all the fire, had just faded from them.
And having her look at him with such cool loathing had made him want to squirm even then.
“With all due respect, Quentin Darcy, you’ve been way more interested in my ass than my mind. Why don’t you ask a few questions before you decide you know just who I am and just what it is that I want? The answers might surprise you!”
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he’d said. But he did. He wanted to hurt her badly enough that she’d never want him again. That bridge had to be burned because he’d never have the strength just to walk away from her on his own .
She’d turned then and walked back down the stairs, pausing on the one right above him so that they were eye to eye. “You might not want to, but you will…because you might not be a long-term kind of person, but I am. And the fact that you’d assume I’m not, tells me all I need to know.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
She’d looked so sad then, but also completely resolute. “It means that I know my place in this town. I know how people look down on me. I just let myself forget for a moment that you were one of them…so go on and go. I’ll be damned to hell and back before I try to stop you.”
Standing there, watching her walk away from him, knowing that when she reached the top of those stairs, the door would close and lock between them, he’d let it happen.
He’d been the one thing he despised above all else, the one thing he’d lied to himself about for most of his life. He’d been a coward.
Pulling himself back to the present and to the woman who sat beside him driving the car that he prized above almost anything else in the world, he said, “We should grab some food while we’re out. There’s nothing at the farm, and I don’t want to cook.”
She snorted. “You don’t cook. ”
“I do if it’s prepackaged and frozen. I know how to turn on the oven, Harlow.”
“I’ll cook,” she said. “We’ll hit the Fresh Market before we get out of town. But you’re buying.”
It wasn’t exactly an olive branch, but at least it wasn’t cold and uncomfortable silence.
Eventually, they’d have to talk about it.
Eventually he’d have to tell her that he ran like a scolded dog because she’d gotten so deep inside him that it terrified him.
It wasn’t a conversation he looked forward to, but more than that, he was terrified it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference.
So, he turned his attention to another question that was bugging the shit out of him.
“We’ve never talked about your ex…what is this really all about, Lowey?”
She clammed up then. He could see it in the firm set of her jaw. She would acknowledge that he almost killed her following their divorce, but she never talked about the marriage itself, she never shared details. And he had to know.
“Why did Joey Barnes come back and shoot up your bar?”
“Because he’s an asshole,” she replied stiffly .
“He’s an asshole on parole, and he knows that Silas can only do so much to protect him. Why take that risk, Lowey? What was in it for him?”
“Why will you not leave this alone?” she asked. “Does it really matter why?”
“Yes, it does. And if he’s doing this after the divorce, what the hell was the marriage like?”