Chapter 25
She’d moved back home. The girl.
Dwayne had been following her around Value for weeks.
Ever since the day he’d picked up her fucking trash and realized where she lived.
Girl lived alone.
Until now.
He kept smirking about that. Right back to precious Hillerland, where her big brothers could coddle her forever. He also knew her precious secret. He’d seen the books on pregnancy in her room. Seen the pregnancy test itself in the drawer next to her bed.
Why the hell did women want to keep a stick they’d pissed on? He had never understood that. He’d had a girlfriend show him one of those damned things once, told him it had been his kid. He supposed that kid was still out there now, probably around fourteen or fifteen.
Dwayne had taken off the minute she’d said ‘child support’.
Hell, kid was better off without him. And Dwayne was for damned sure better off without a kid to support.
If he’d been paying child support to her all this time, he’d have been even more screwed when he got out.
Did the state make a man in prison pay backpay or something?
She could possibly still sue him for it, he supposed. But what would she get? Twenty bucks a month was about all he had to spare.
Maybe she’d married, given the kid a real daddy or something.
He had wondered about that kid some when he’d been behind bars.
Tried to look his ex-baby-mama up a few times.
She wasn’t easy to find—had privacy settings up and everything.
He’d seen one picture of his kid total. A boy.
Thin, nerdy pansy looking thing. Not overly impressed.
But still, that was literally the only family Dwayne had.
And the kid probably didn’t even have his last name.
Probably didn’t even know about Dwayne at all.
Hillers had all those kids, but he…all he had was a loser kid who didn’t even know Dwayne existed.
Dwayne drove around in his truck, trying to think.
He did that sometimes, on Mondays. He was off on Mondays—ran ten-hour days Tuesday through Thursday and the part time guys ran Fridays and Saturdays.
It was a small town. Didn’t need much on the sanitation crew.
Didn’t pay much, either, that was for sure.
He just kept driving around.
Until he was at the Hiller Ranch.
That’s when he saw the big red truck pulling out of the drive of the Hiller Ranch. Right there on that gravel drive where his life had changed forever.
He knew who drove that red truck now, too.
He paused at the stop sign, pulled his hat lower over his head.
He wouldn’t put it past some of those Hillers to recognize him.
Some of them brothers had shown up at his parole hearings throughout the years, after all.
Saying all kinds of shit against him—even the preacher man.
Hadn’t exactly preached forgiveness, that one.
That red truck, though. The mayor’s. Fucking George Hiller had become the mayor. He remembered George, all right. They’d been two years apart in school, and George hadn’t fucking like him one bit.
They’d made each other miserable, and if Dwayne hadn’t had Kevin to keep him from doing something stupid—like murdering that son-of-a-Hiller-bitch—Dwayne would have been sent away for fighting with the golden asshole of Value.
Dwayne turned his truck onto the highway and pushed the pedal down, before he could even stop himself.
There were other cars out there. Who could see him, see his damned truck.
He didn’t care.
What could they do to him, send him back? At least then he’d have a roof over his head he didn’t have to pay for. But even as he thought it the other part of himself shouted no. He wouldn’t go back.
But damn it, he wanted to make every Hiller out the pay for what they’d done to him.
The mayor’s big fancy red truck was a good place to start.