Ravenous

Chapter 33 Hard Work and Boning

Hard Work and Boning

RIPLEY

Two hours later, and Raphael is pacing around the living room, tugging violently at his hair while the big grandfather clock in the corner ticks down the seconds, each click or chime seeming to push him one step closer to a complete breakdown.

“I’m going to jail,” he mutters. “I’m going to jail, and I’m gonna get the shit kicked out of me because you couldn’t keep your fucking dick in your pants!”

Raph thinks we’re no better than animals; that we need to be controlled.

Each of the rants he’s gone on in the past twenty minutes ended with that punctuation.

And sure, I know it’s my fault, but I didn’t fucking know about the bag, or the phone for that matter!

Gabriel must have been planning the hand-off for weeks.

I must have killed him just days before he was going to have me shipped off.

Maybe even the same day.

Preacher stares at his brother, his expression flat and unreadable, the fireplace crackling as the dogs follow suit, guarding the doorway and watching him like a ticking time bomb.

“Calm the fuck down,” Preacher snarls. “We found the phone, now we need a solution. That’s your job, isn’t it? Solutions?”

“And the money?” Raphael asks, completely ignoring the question. “These bills could all be marked! Did you check?”

“Yes,” Preacher sighs. “Unmarked. Untraceable, but that would only matter if we’re planning on spending the money. Are you planning on spending the illegal drug money, little brother?”

He lets out a sigh, grinding his teeth.

“You should have killed her when you had the chance.”

“Oh, please!” I laugh. “This little cop problem would still be yours to solve even if I was six feet under, you weasely little fuckrag! They’d just be looking for a dead body instead of a live one.”

Raphael snarls, rolling his neck from side to side.

The sound of his vertebrae popping makes my skin crawl, but I try to keep myself in line.

He’s been in a frenzy since he blew in here with his laptop; said he could extract whatever was on the phone, but instead, he’s spent the last twenty minutes screaming at us.

“I should rip you a new asshole.”

He hates me, and I hate him, and that’s the way I like it, because It’s simple. His anger gives me something tangible to take mine out on.

“You’re too late, sweetheart,” I purr. “Preacher already did that the other night.”

“Can I kill her?” He asks. “Brother to brother, think of it as a gift to me for all my years of supporting you.”

“You even breathe wrong around her and I’ll hang you up in my barn, o’ brother mine.”

Raphael’s jaw clenches, and he snatches his bag up from the coffee table, tossing it onto a nearby chair. The swift action makes Hades take a step forward and growl, but Preacher only has to whistle.

“Heel. You know Raph.”

“Still, you should watch your temper, Raph,” I tease. “You know violent outbursts tend to upset animals.”

“Then how come you’re so calm?” He grumbles under his breath, plunking himself down and pulling out his computer.

I kiss my middle finger and hold it out to him.

“That’s for you, sweetheart. Happy birthday.”

Preacher just snickers, pulling me close.

“I don’t know why you two shitbirds seem to think this isn’t a big deal.”

“No one’s sayin’ it isn’t, but I know how you get,” Preacher rumbles, calm as ever. “You’re already planning for a disaster, and you haven’t even been here half an hour.”

“Because this is a disaster, Preacher! A cop, who is clearly going to be coming back, basically went as far as to tell you he knows what he wants is here! Are you both fucking insane?!” He pauses, scrubbing his face with his palms. “You know what, don’t even answer that.

Ripley, be a doll for once in your life and pass me the cell phone. ”

“Sure, and how about you bend over so I can shove it right up your ass?”

I toss Raphael the phone and he immediately pries it open, pulling out the tiny SIM card from the back and sticking it into another device, one that he plugs straight into his computer.

“So what, does that chip track locations or something?” I ask. “How does plugging it back in help us?”

Raphael shakes his head, already tapping away at the keyboard.

“Only if the SIM is still in the phone. It has to ping off the cell towers— and anyway, unless it died before the storm, they already know it’s here.” He picks the phone up, looking at it like it’s offended his entire bloodline. “God, this thing is ancient.”

“Yeah, wait, why would he use such an old phone?” I ask.

“For a burner, it’s great. All it does is take calls and texts.

There’s no cloud storage to worry about, no photos that could be used as evidence.

It’s hard to hack these things with software because there’s no internet or data connection.

Your ex was at least smart about one thing, I’ll give him that much. ”

He keeps typing away, lost in his techy little world, and it’s at that moment I realize that this is the first time he’s actually spoken to me like a person.

Suddenly I’m a lot more curious about Raphael.

Specifically, how and why he decided to go into business with his brother, considering the fact that he’s so repelled by the gruesome shit.

Sure, money is the great motivator, but I wonder if there’s something more to it than that.

“Okay, so what are you looking for on the card then?”

“Text messages, call logs, shit like that. I have a program that extracts them and spits them out into one big document. Makes it easier for me to sort through.”

He flashes me the slightest ghost of a smile.

As a kid, I used to get called selfish and impolite because I never asked about people. I didn’t really know how without it sounding manufactured, and I always thought that they would just say the shit that was on their minds, like I did.

“Where the hell did you learn all this stuff?”

Preacher isn’t technologically savvy. He’s got a phone and cameras hooked up around the property, but I’m sure Raphael did all that for him, and other than that?

I don’t think I’ve seen a single computer in his house.

The guy owns a record player, and he still watches movies on VHS.

It’s hard to picture what made the two of them turn out so different.

“Our daddy had a computer in the basement of the church. At first I just used it to look at porn, as you do, but the more I snooped around, the more I realized how much… access he had. Banking information, email addresses, phone numbers, shit like that, and for pretty much the whole town. I started finding ways to dig up dirt on the good citizens of Babylon.”

His ghost of a smile grows into a full-on cheshire grin as he works.

“Of course, that turned into hacking; the bullshit kind at first, you know, figuring out passwords or tricking your friend into handing you their messenger account or some bullshit like that, but before too long I was moving on to the real shit. Police computers, government computers… whatever I could get my hands on. Everyone’s got a secret that they’d do anything to protect, and not everyone is who they say they are.

You’d know all about that, wouldn’t you, Ripley? ”

“Don’t try to profile me, you shit-sucker. I know exactly who I am, and I’m not trying to hide it.”

And now we’re back to where we started: he wants to piss me off and I want to punch him in the teeth.

I think, deep down, he wishes he could enact the kind of justice his brother does, but the funny thing is Raphael’s the one who does the real hunting…

looking through police databases, court records, and dredging up people’s dirtiest secrets.

There’s a lot of power in being the guy who rounds up sacrificial lambs for slaughter.

Before now, he had all the control, and by adding me into the mix, he’s starting to lose some of it.

It’s not my intention to come between the man I love and his brother, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to be pushed out of this business.

I earned my place here after all, through hard work and a whole lot of boning.

“Are you two done squabblin’?” Preacher mutters, reaching down to give Charon a quick scratch behind his ears.

“No!”

Our reply comes in perfect unison, the two of us awkwardly letting things drift back into silence rather than acknowledge we may have more in common than we’d like to admit.

In the movies, they make it seem like this hacker stuff can be over and done within seconds, but that’s far from the truth. By the time the half-hour of awkward silence is over, I’ve pretty much forgotten what we were even arguing about.

“Done!” Raph leans back in his chair, cracking his knuckles. “I’ve got everything that was on that fuckin’ brick.”

“And?” Preacher asks.

“Gimme a minute.”

“You’ve had thirty.”

“Perfection can’t be rushed, dear brother.”

Raphael pours over the information as we wait a little longer, listening to the tick, tick, ticking of the grandfather clock in the background. Now I know how that guy in The Tell-tale Heart felt, that shit would have driven me so crazy I’d have burned the house down.

But in contrast, Preacher seems all-too comfortable, leaning back and closing his eyes every few minutes, looking like he’s always seconds away from a good nap. I wonder how he can be so calm about this while I’m feeling like I’m headed down an existential spiral.

Why was that cop looking for me? Is it a legitimate case, or did Adonis hire him? What—

“What was the cop’s name?” Raphael asks. “The one who came here.”

Preacher doesn’t even open his eyes, digging into his jeans and tossing a piece of paper onto the table for Raph to snatch up.

“The number he gave you is registered to a Justin McKinney,” he mutters. “What the fuck is an Provincial Officer from Alberta doing all the way out here… He’s completely out of his jurisdiction.”

“That’s what we’d like to know,” Preacher replies, opening one eye. “So, whaddya got?”

“Well, I can tell you officer McKinney here is under investigation for some pretty illicit activities.”

“Such as?”

“Taking bribes from local biker gangs, and turning a blind eye to some serious shit. Right now, there’s an internal investigation that connects him to three clubs in Edmonton, all involved in some level of sex trafficking.

He’s supposed to be on desk duty, definitely not out pulling over potential serial killers.

” Raphael looks up at me. “You must have been important to someone.”

My stomach drops, the realization of my deepest fear turning my guts to jelly.

“The phone you found is a burner, but all the evidence shows that it belongs to your shitbag ex-boytoy. Almost all the texts are between him and some guy named Adonis. And like… seriously? That’s his name?”

“Adonis Murphy,” I sigh.

Raphael already seems to be a few steps ahead of me.

“President of the Disciples, yeah. But how did you get tied up in all of this?”

Adonis’s favorite thing to do was to run his mouth, and talk about how tough and well-connected he was. I just assumed he was compensating for his limp little cock.

“Adonis had been saying he was gonna come kill Gabriel, and take everything he was owed, including me. We think Gabriel was planning to deliver me and the money to save his skin,” I sigh. “He was planning to skip town. I had no idea at the time, but I killed him before he got the chance.”

“And now Adonis wants what he thinks he’s owed,” Preacher mumbles.

“Well, that makes sense. These texts make it look like it was McKinney who was supposed to deliver you to some shithole in Swift Current. Gabriel had the whole thing set up; was gonna give the cop a shitload of money to do it.”

My stomach sinks. I never liked the way Adonis looked at me when he would come over, his eyes always lingered too long. I even started dressing in baggier clothes when I knew he was coming around— well, as baggy as Gabriel would allow me. I just didn’t want to be gawked at.

Preacher stands, leaning forward on the table.

“Okay, so we know what he wants, we know who he’s working for, and we know he’s coming back. I think that’s enough for us to set a trap, and get this all sorted before our dirty little secret gets blown wide open.”

He’s right. If Adonis is the one after me, that means he’s pulling strings with corrupt cops, which means the entire business is at stake.

There’s also no chance he’ll just roll over on what he’s owed.

We could die, or we could go to prison, and I don’t think that piece of shit really cares one way or the other.

“So what’s the plan?”

“I call McKinney. I tell him I know he’s lying about being your brother, and that we know all about his connections to the Disciples.

We’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse, he’ll think it’s a trap and bring backup, and when they get here, we take ‘em all out at once. It’ll be easy enough to make it look like a gang war gone wrong in the middle of nowhere if we play our cards right. ”

“Adonis won’t show up,” I mutter. “He’s too much of a coward.”

Preacher’s face breaks out into a big smile, and he turns to Raphael.

“You know what I’m thinking…”

“No,” he snarls. “Absolutely fucking not. We keep this operation small—”

“Come on, Raph. Do your big brother a solid.”

“I already drove all the way to this fucking slaughterhouse, dug up dirt on some corrupt pig, and saved both of your asses, and now you want me to call her?!”

“We could use the extra help. Extra protection, too.”

Jesus Christ, this is ridiculous.

“If someone doesn’t tell me what’s going on, I’m gonna fucking scream.”

Preacher is grinning from ear to ear, and Raph just puts his head in his hands and lets out a deep sigh.

“This asshole wants me to call my ex-wife.”