Chapter 16 #2
The crowd was still dispersing. Ethan saw a group of teenage girls watching them intently. Probably deciding whether he was himself or not. He had a hundred questions for Jeremiah. But they clearly couldn’t have a conversation out here. “You uh, want to talk in the trailer?”
“In the truck,” he said. “We need go get a move on.”
“Where we goin’?”
“Like the song says, home. And there’s reason to hurry, so go get your shit. I’ll explain on the way.”
Ethan met his brother’s eyes. They were dead serious. “I’ll go get my shit.” He unlocked the pickup’s doors, using the keypad, as the keys were back in his trailer. “Be right back.”
Jeremiah nodded and got into the passenger side to wait.
Ethan didn’t know his brother, so he sure as hell didn’t trust him. He was calling his uncle Garrett before he got five steps away.
“Son,” Garrett said when he picked up. “How was the show? You done already?”
“Just finished up.” He walked into the trailer, pulled his big bag out from under the bunk, and laid it unzipped on top. “Listen, my um…my brother’s here. Waitin’ for me out in the truck. He says we need to hightail it home.”
“Why’s that?” Garrett asked, his voice suddenly serious.
“Hasn’t said yet. Thought I’d best check in with you while packin’ up to head back.” He gathered his bathroom gear and dumped it in. Most of his stuff was still in the truck. He had some kind of mental block about unpacking, this trip.
“You’re comin’ home tonight? That’ll thrill everybody. ’Specially Lily.”
“Yeah, but keep that to yourself.” He looked around the room, gathered up some clothes, a notebook, and pencil and threw those in. That was everything but the guitar.
“Ah. I gotcha,” Garrett said. “It’ll make for a great surprise. What’re you, about two hours away?”
“Closer to three,” he said. “Everything’s all right, then?”
“Everything’s fine. We’re s’posed to arrive in two hours for the meal, but we’ll still be there in three. Drive safe. Your brother comin’ with you?”
“Looks like.”
“Good. Use the time to get to know him.”
“I will. Keep an eye on things, okay?”
“She’s surrounded by family, Bubba. She’s safe. I’ll head over early, soon’s we hang up, if it’ll make you feel better.”
“It would,” Ethan said. And for some reason his old man calling him Bubba hadn’t even chafed that time.
He pocketed the phone, put his guitar into its hard-shell case, and headed back out with the duffle over one shoulder and the guitar case in his hand. He slung the bags into the back of the truck and got behind the wheel.
For a while, he had to focus on the bumper-to-bumper crush of vehicles trying to get out of the fairgrounds all at once, but eventually they pulled out of the crush and onto the highway.
That was when he finally said, “I don’t know what question to ask you first. Why have I never known about you?”
“I didn’t know about you either, till a coupla years ago. Our father didn’t want us to know about each other.”
Ethan kept taking short looks at him as he spoke. “Why not?”
Jeremiah shrugged. “He was training me to help him run the biz, he said. But he was really getting me just entangled enough to take the fall for somebody’s fuckup.
Somebody more important. I was sure he’d get me out.
But he didn’t. After a year, I got my own lawyer, had him set up a meeting with the prosecutor.
Told ‘em everything I knew and they turned me loose early.”
Ethan nodded slowly. He listened with care. His brother’s voice was deep, with a rasp at the lower registers. He seemed the epitome of calm.
“And then you started hanging out at my family’s favorite little cantina.”
“I was still working for Dad, you know. He was running his organization from behind bars. He didn’t know I’d talked—wouldn’t have known until I testified, but he died before it got that far. Meantime I had to play along. If he’d found out—I’d be as dead as our mothers.
Ethan winced when he said that.
“He sent me to Manny’s Cantina to look things over, he said. I knew by then I had a brother. I knew his last name was Brand and he lived in Quinn, Texas, and how close that was to Mad Bull’s Bend. And while I was there, I saw one of your cousins, heard her talkin’ about you.”
“Which cousin?”
“The drop-dead gorgeous one,” he said.
Ethan crooked a brow. “They’re all gorgeous.”
“Willow.” Jeremiah looked out his window at the passing scenery.
“She was sayin’ something about Bubba being as big as his dad even though he was adopted, and I knew it was you.
Took another six months of my hangin’ around that cantina to learn that Bubba Brand was Ethan Brand, the country singer.
” He shook his head a little self-deprecatingly.
“I should’ve known first time I saw you, though. You have our father’s eyes.”
Ethan managed not to grimace.
“When Dad died, the lawyer told me he’d left you everything and you were plannin’ to refuse it all, so I’d be next in line to inherit it. I can’t afford to turn it down.” He shook his head. “Not the business, though. That’s done. I’m cashin’ out. Let other crooks fight over his territory.”
“That’s probably smart.”
“Yeah.” He sighed. “But he told me, Dad’s estate guy, that he’d signed the cantina over to you in some kind of side deal with Manny, and that you were keeping it. And that worried me.”
“Why’s that?”
“Dad was tied up with seven other little places like Manny’s, was washing money through all of ‘em. Since he died, his biggest rival, Nathan Silver, has been moving in, taking over where Dad left off. Had his kid brother Angus running that end of things for him.
“That clears up a lot,” Ethan said. “Angus made me an offer. I told him to shove it where the sun don’t shine.”
“I’m aware.”
Ethan looked at Jeremiah. He was working his way up to the accident that might not’ve been an accident, so he probably ought to quit interrupting him.
“Two other business owners told him to shove it, too,” Jeremiah said. “The nail salon and one of the bars. The owner of the nail salon’s adult daughter was found floating in her backyard swimming pool a few days later. It was ruled an accidental drowning. I even bought it at first.”
Ethan looked at him sharply. “At first?”
“Yeah. The strip club was owned by a smart-ass entrepreneur who thought the days of shakedowns were over once our father kicked it. His young bride turned up dead in an ally. She’d been beaten and raped.”
Ethan swore in an entirely un-Brand-like manner.
“He’s fond of taking out his rage on young women. You see what I mean? And I saw him come talk to you. And I knew you’d tell him to take a flyin’ leap. And I knew he’d go after one of the women in your life. Willow, or Maria, or Lily, or young Drew.” His words had come faster as he’d gone along.
“I believe you,” Ethan said.
Jeremiah nodded, as if that was important to him.
“But he wasn’t trying to shake me down, exactly. He wanted to buy the place.”
“Either way, if he doesn’t get what he wants, people die.”
Ethan took a breath and asked the question. There was brown paint on the Caddy,” he said. “Was that you?”
Jeremiah nodded. “It was only supposed to be a warnin’. Run him off the road, then get up in his face and tell him who my father was, talk a big game, put a little fear into him. That’s how Dad always did it.”
Ethan nodded.
“The passenger bailed. But the passenger wasn’t Silver.
It was his driver. Silver was behind the wheel.
I didn’t see that coming.” His eyes had gone distant, and Ethan knew he was remembering.
“I was stalled there in the road. He tried to ram me, broadside. I got her started, slammed her into gear, and shot out of the way.” He let his chin drop low.
“I couldn’t believe it when he went over the side,” he said.
Then he took a deep breath. “I killed a man.”
“You didn’t kill him, you just ducked. And you saved a life in the process. A life I’d have hated like hell to see end.”
Jeremiah glanced sideways, his lips curving up at one corner. But the slight smile died before it was fully born. “But there’s still the brother. Nathan.”
“So Willow told me.”
“Nathan’s bad news, Ethan. Makes Angus look like a Boy Scout.
I left the hospital, because if they’d arrested me for trespassing in your shed, I wouldn’t’ve been able to keep an eye out, and if Nathan got wind of what had really happened, he would have come back for vengeance.
He’d assume it was you, since you’re the last person his dumbass brother messed with.
I had to get close to him. Find out what he knew. ”
Ethan frowned hard. “That’s where you’ve been.” Jeremiah nodded. Then Ethan asked, “Close to him, how?”
“Doesn’t matter. What matters is that Angus’s driver came back, and he talked. Nathan knows that accident was no accident, and he’s not gonna let it go. I got this information earlier today, and I been tracking you down ever since. He’ll try to get revenge.”
“I’m not even there,” Ethan said.
“But everybody you love is.”
Their eyes met. Ethan sensed his brother was telling him the truth, and he pressed down harder on the accelerator.
Lily couldn’t keep the smile off her face.
Everyone was enjoying the food, the drinks, the band, the dance floor.
If only Ethan were there to see it all. There’d been a minor disaster in the kitchen, a collision and some spilled taco beans, possibly due to too much help out there (Maria).
But since then, everything had been smooth, fun, and joyful.
“You’re beaming, you know that?” Her brother came up to stand beside her near the front of the room.
“If I am, it’s with relief. This is…” She looked around at the smiling, dancing, taco-devouring people she loved. “It’s almost perfect.”
“Would be if Ethan was here, huh?”
She shot him a quick look. “Well, yeah, I guess. He’s the only Brand missing.”