Chapter 13
Winston slipped the CO three hundred-dollar bills in the parking lot like he was tipping a valet.
The guy pocketed the money without counting it and walked us through a side entrance that had no sign-in sheet, no intake desk, and no camera.
There was just a heavy door and a corridor that smelled like bleach, floor wax, and something underneath both that you couldn't scrub out of cinderblock if you tried for a hundred years.
Winston put his hand on my back going through the door. I let him. I was too busy processing the fact that Ranger Winston Valverde bribed a corrections officer like most men buy a round of drinks.
The CO brought us to a storage closet with a table at the end of the hall. "Thirty minutes," the CO said, and shut the door.
Winston pulled out a chair and sat down, legs stretched out, boots crossed at the ankle. He tipped his hat back and looked at me.
"You do this a lot?" I asked.
"Do what?"
"Bribe corrections officers."
He smiled at me. "Darlin', I do whatever gets the job done."
Darlin'. Nobody had ever called me that in my life, and Winston threw it around like chicken feed. My cock paid attention every time he said it though. The rest of me told it to stand down, on account of us being in a prison storage closet with a job to do.
"Sit," he said.
I stayed where I was.
"You gonna make me say please?"
I took the chair across the table from him.
He looked at the empty chair next to his and then at me, but didn't say anything about it.
"How you want to run this?" he said.
"You're the one with the badge."
"Badge ain't going to do much in here. We're off-paper. Whatever I get out of Joe, I get because you and I work this together."
"Then we make it happen."
"Yeah." He held my eyes. "We."
He left the word sitting there. I let it sit. The bulb buzzed.
Then his face went clean, and he tipped his head at the door. The boots came up the hall a second later.
The door opened.
Joe Dancing came in cuffed and looking like he'd been pulled away from something better, which for a man doing time at Los Lunas probably meant lunch.
He was shorter than I remembered. Wiry, buzzed head, a neck tattoo that had gone soft and blue with age.
He sat down, put his cuffed hands on the table, and looked at Winston first.
Then he looked at me.
Suddenly, I was seventeen again. I was in the back of a truck on a dirt road south of Las Cruces, Dolano's blood drying on my shirt, Joe Dancing was telling me to stop crying because men didn't cry and if I was going to act like a bitch, I could walk home.
"Ransom fucking Lanza," Joe said.
"Joe," I said.
"Look at you." He grinned, all teeth. "All grown up and still can't hold a stare. Who's the gringo?"
Winston leaned forward. "Bonney Ranch."
Joe's smile faded.
"You worked for him. Now you're in here." Winston kept his voice easy. "I'm guessing those two things are connected."
Joe worked his jaw. Whatever had been holding his face together went out of it all at once.
"I'm out tomorrow," he said.
"Congratulations," Winston said, and sat back.
I leaned forward.
"You don't look like a man who's celebrating, Joe."
"I walk out that gate tomorrow and I'm dead by noon." His eyes came to me. "Rex has eyes on the lot. Greyhound. Anywhere I'd go after that. This closet is the last safe room I'm ever going to sit in. So you tell me, Lanza. Why am I going to waste it running my mouth for free?"
"Because you came in here knowing who'd be on the other side of the table."
"Maybe."
"And because you've already decided what you want."
He let his mouth curl. "Maybe that, too."
"Say it, then."
He set his cuffed hands flat on the table.
"I want a place at Pae Saco."
The air in the closet changed.
Winston didn't move. The overhead bulb buzzed. I held Joe's eyes and let him sit in it.
"You want what?"
"A bunk. A job. Whatever Rafe gives the men, he takes in. I'll muck stalls. I'll dig holes. I don't give a shit. I want a place where Rex can't reach me, and there's exactly one of those in this state. Seems fair I get the same deal you got. You're nobody special, Lanza. You just ran faster."
"You think I'd bring you onto my ranch?"
"It ain't your ranch," Joe sneered. "No matter how much blood you spill for it, it'll never be yours."
"You're doing a piss-poor job of convincing me to intervene on your behalf," I said, crossing my arms.
"I can say whatever the fuck I want and you'll still get me whatever I ask for. You need what's in my head. I think you want Rex badly enough to put up with me to get it. And I think Rafe Lujan takes in a lot worse than me and calls it mercy."
He wasn't wrong.
"Talk," I said. "And we'll see. I need something to give him before he'll care either way."
"You want Rex. You can't have just Rex. Rex has a man. Otis Peabody."
"I've met Otis."
"Then you know."
"Tell me anyway."
"Otis is Rex's cleanup. Every ugly job, every body, every man who walked off the property and didn't come back.
Rex gives the order; Otis does the work.
" Joe's eyes came to me. "You've got the same job on your ranch, Lanza.
Different collar, same breed. Don't look at me like that. You know I'm right."
I schooled my expression.
"You take Rex without taking Otis, Otis takes the operation over by suppertime and comes for whoever put Rex down by the end of the week."
"So you kill them both."
"Same night. Same hour, if you can swing it. Otherwise, you're dead inside a week."
I waited.
"That's the piece I'm giving you here," Joe said. "The rest — the where, the when, the how Otis works — you bring me to Rafe's table tomorrow and I'll lay it out for him. Not in this closet. There."
"You're asking to live under Rafe Lujan's roof," I said.
"I'd rather answer to Rafe than take one in the back of the head at a bus station in Las Cruces." Joe held my eyes. He let his mouth curl.
"And what's stopping me from promising you a place and then shooting you, anyway?" I asked.
"I knew you was a pussy, but I didn't take you for a lying coward," Joe spat.
Winston uncrossed his boots and stood up. He walked behind Joe and slammed his face into the table.
The sound was wet. Something cracked. Joe came up with blood pouring from his nose, his eyes wide, and his cuffed hands scrabbling at the table's edge.
"What the fuck," Joe said.
Winston grabbed him by the hair and turned his face toward me. Blood ran down Joe's chin and dripped onto the metal in fat red drops. Winston held him there.
"See that man?" Winston said. "That man's mine. You walk onto his ranch tomorrow, you keep your eyes on the ground and your mouth shut, or I'll drive out there and finish what the bus station would've started. You understand me?"
"Yeah." Joe's voice was wet. "Yeah, I got it."
"Good." Winston let go of Joe's hair. He wiped his hand on his jeans and sat back down beside me. "Sorry about that. I just wanted us to be clear."
Joe spat blood onto the table. His nose sat at a new angle.
"Clear," he said.
Winston's knee found mine under the table and stayed there.
The broken nose hadn't been for the case.
It hadn't been for the badge. Joe had called me a name, and Winston had broken his face for it.
Nobody had ever done that for me. Not once.
Not my brother, not Rafe, not any man who'd shared my bed or my blood.
I'd been the one who did the breaking my whole life, and I'd done it alone.
My cock was so hard against my jeans I could barely sit still.
I left my leg where it was and put my hands flat on the table and looked at Joe.
"Tomorrow," I said. "Eight."
"Eight," Joe said.
"And when you sit down at Rafe's table, you tell him everything." I held his eyes. "You hold one thing back, you're not my problem anymore. You understand what I'm saying?"
"I understand."
"Say it."
"I tell Rafe everything. I'll hold nothing back."
Winston knocked on the door. The CO opened it. Joe stood, and the guard took his elbow, guiding him away. Joe let the blood sit there on his chin like he wanted it on the record.
"Lanza," Joe said over his shoulder.
I looked at him.
"Thank you."
I didn't answer. The door closed.
Winston pulled a bandana from his back pocket and wiped his hands, slowly, thoroughly, getting Joe's blood out of the creases around his knuckles. He folded it and put it away. Then he looked at me with those green eyes, that easy mouth, and a spot of blood on his shirt cuff.
"Well," he said. "That went alright."
The hallway was too bright after the storage closet. My hands shook. I shoved them in my pockets and kept walking. Winston fell into step beside me, and the space between us hummed like a wire pulled taut.
The sunlight hit us in the parking lot. The truck sat where we'd left it, the key scratch from Rex's boys dull and ugly. I climbed in the passenger side and pulled the door shut.
Winston got behind the wheel.
He didn't reach for the ignition. He sat there with both hands on top of it, staring straight ahead. The air in the cab had changed. Whatever had carried him through the closet, the easy hat, the smirk, the bandana, wasn't carrying him here. He didn't move long enough that I started to count it.
"Winston."
He turned, caught the front of my shirt in one fist, and hauled me across the center console.
His mouth was hot, and he tasted like the coffee he'd had that morning. He put his hand on my jaw to hold me where he wanted me and kissed me through the answer he hadn't gotten to give in front of Rafe. I made a sound against his mouth and he kissed me harder.
His hand slid down my chest. When he pressed his palm flat against the front of my jeans, I was already so hard it hurt.
He squeezed. I bucked up into his hand and groaned.
His lips went to my throat while his hand worked against me through the denim until my hips chased his palm.
A sound came out of me I didn't recognize.
Then he let go.
He sat back behind the wheel. I stayed where he'd left me, slumped half across the console, my mouth wet and my hands fisted in the bench seat. He looked at me with his hat still straight and his breathing barely off. He hadn't lost control of any of it.
Winston started the engine.
"Drive me to Albuquerque," I said, righting my hat. "I want to see my brother."