Epilogue #3
The wiry one turned first—saw him coming and went for something in his waistband—but Cottonmouth was already inside his reach, driving a fist into his throat with enough force to collapse his windpipe. The man dropped, gasping, hands clawing at his neck while his face went purple.
The big one released Jolene and spun, but he was too slow.
Cottonmouth caught his reaching arm, twisted it against the joint, and felt the elbow give with a wet crack that echoed off the tin roof.
The man screamed—high and shocked, the sound of someone who'd never had violence done to him by someone who meant it—and Cottonmouth drove him face-first into the bar with a crunch of cartilage.
Blood sprayed across the worn oak. The big one crumpled.
Cottonmouth stood over them both, breathing steady, feeling the old familiar calm settle into his bones. Five years in a Mississippi prison had taught him many things, but the most important was this: violence was a language, and some men only understood it when you spoke it fluently.
The wiry one was still choking on the floor, not dead but not far from it. The big one wasn't moving at all.
"You killed them." Jolene's voice came from behind the bar, rough with shock.
"Not yet." Cottonmouth crouched down and checked pulses. Both still beating, though the wiry one's was getting thready. "The little one might not make it. The big one will wish he didn't."
He looked up and found her standing behind the counter with a baseball bat in her hands and blood running down her chin from the split in her lip.
Her eyes were wide, but not with fear—with rage.
The particular defiance of a woman who'd just watched strangers destroy pieces of her grandmother's legacy and had been ready to fight them herself with nothing but a Louisville Slugger and stubbornness.
Cottonmouth felt something shift in his chest. Something he hadn't felt in a long time.
"You know who Victor Ruiz is?" he asked.
"Some Memphis asshole who thinks he can buy anything."
"He's more than that." Cottonmouth rose, stepping over the groaning bodies.
"He's a cartel middleman who went independent five years ago.
Built a distribution network running meth and pills down Highway 61 from Memphis to Greenville.
Those bars that burned last year in Leland and Hollandale?
That was him. Owners who wouldn't sell."
Jolene's knuckles went white on the bat. "And now he wants the Crooked Porch."
"He wants every crossroads location between Memphis and Vicksburg.
Your bar sits on the route he's building.
" Cottonmouth looked at the broken photographs scattered across the floor—forty years of history in shattered frames.
"These two aren't shakedown artists. They're an advance team for a pipeline operation, and they just declared war on Destroyer territory. "
"Destroyer territory." She said it flat, testing the words. "The motorcycle club."
"My club." He met her eyes, held them. "The Delta Destroyers MC has protected these crossroads since before you took over this bar. Every juke joint, every one-stoplight town, every family the state walked away from—they're under our patch."
"I didn't ask for your protection."
"You've had it anyway." He stepped closer, close enough to see the pulse jumping in her throat, the adrenaline still running hot through her system.
"But what's coming isn't something you handle with a baseball bat and a bad attitude.
Ruiz has forty-plus armed men between here and Memphis.
You tell him no, he sends more than two guys with gold chains. "
"So what—I just sign over my grandmother's bar because some Memphis drug dealer says so?"
"No." Cottonmouth reached out, slow and deliberate, and lifted her chin with two fingers.
Examined the split lip, the bruise already forming on her cheekbone.
His blood went hot at the sight of it. "You let me handle Victor Ruiz.
And the Crooked Porch goes under official Outlaw protection starting tonight. "
She should have pulled away. Should have told him to go to hell the same way she'd told Ruiz's messengers. Instead, she held his gaze with those furious dark eyes and said, "I don't need a man to fight my battles."
"No, you don't." His thumb traced the edge of her jaw, a touch that was more claiming than gentle. "But you're going to let me fight this one anyway. Because Ruiz isn't a battle—he's a war. And you can't win a war alone."
Something flickered across her face—pride warring with practicality, stubbornness fighting against the part of her that knew he was right.
"Fine." The word came out like it hurt. "But this is still my bar. My rules."
"Your bar. My protection." Cottonmouth released her chin and pulled the burner phone from his cut. "That's the deal."
He dialed while she watched, her bloody baseball bat still clutched in white-knuckled hands.
"Church," he said when Outlaw picked up. "Tonight. Get every brother to the compound. We've got a situation."
"What kind of situation?"
Cottonmouth looked at the two men bleeding on the Crooked Porch floor, at the shattered photographs and broken glass, at the woman standing behind the bar with fire in her eyes and her grandmother's legacy crumbling around her.
"The kind that starts wars." He ended the call and met Jolene's gaze. "You got somewhere to be tonight?"
"I'm standing in it."
"Not anymore." He grabbed the big one by the collar and started dragging him toward the door. "Help me get these two into my truck. Then you're coming with me to the compound."
"Like hell I am."
"Ruiz knows you said no. By morning, he'll know his boys didn't come back." Cottonmouth dropped the body and turned to face her. "You stay here tonight, you're dead by sunrise. That a fight you want to have, or are you coming?"
The silence stretched between them, thick with Delta heat and the smell of blood and bourbon.
Finally, Jolene set down the baseball bat and moved around the bar.
"I'm driving myself."
"Fair enough." He went back to dragging the body. "But you're following my truck. And Jolene?"
She paused at the door, looking back.
"What just walked through that door isn't two thugs with a real estate pitch." Cottonmouth's voice dropped into something cold and final. "It's a Memphis drug operation declaring war on this country. And by the time this is over, a lot of people are going to die."
He watched her face for fear, for hesitation, for any sign that she understood what she was walking into.
All he saw was that same furious determination.
"Then I guess we better make sure it's the right people," she said.
And walked out into the Delta night.
Chapter Two
The broom made a sound like bones scraping as Jolene swept broken glass across the Crooked Porch floor.
Dawn light filtered through the windows, turning the destruction into something almost beautiful—shattered frames catching the pink and gold, splintered wood scattered like kindling waiting for a match.
She'd been at it for two hours now, refusing to stop, refusing to sit down, refusing to do anything except move her body through the familiar motions of cleaning up a mess.
That's all this was. Another mess.
She'd survived worse. The flood of '16 that put three feet of water in the bar.
The condemned-property notice from the county that took her six months and every dollar she had to fight.
The three separate buyout attempts from developers who thought a woman alone would fold if they pushed hard enough.
She hadn't folded then. She wasn't folding now.
Glass crunched under her boots as she worked her way toward the wall where her grandmother's photographs used to hang.
Forty years of blues history, reduced to broken frames and torn paper.
Howlin' Wolf. Muddy Waters. B.B. King before he was B.B.
King, just a young man with a guitar and a dream in a juke joint that smelled like this one.
Gone.
Her throat tightened, but she shoved the grief down where it belonged. Grief was a luxury. Grief was for women who had time to sit and cry and wait for someone else to fix things.
Jolene Mayes fixed things herself.
The rumble of motorcycle engines cut through the morning quiet.
She didn't stop sweeping. Didn't look up. Just kept pushing broken glass into a pile while the engines grew louder, then cut off in the parking lot outside.
Boots on the porch steps. The creak of the screen door.
"You've been here all night."
Cottonmouth's voice rolled through the empty bar like thunder on a distant horizon—low and unhurried, the kind of voice that expected to be listened to without ever having to raise itself.
"Somebody had to clean up." She still didn't look at him. "The mess fairy doesn't come to juke joints."
"Jolene."
"I've got glass to sweep and frames to—"
His hand closed around the broom handle, stopping her mid-stroke.
She looked up then, ready to snap at him, and found him standing closer than she'd realized. Close enough to see the iron-gray threading through his temples, the pale scar running down his forearm, those river-mud eyes that seemed to see straight through every wall she'd ever built.
Two more men stood behind him in the doorway, both wearing the same leather cuts with the Delta Destroyers patch. One was lean and weathered, with the patient look of a man who'd learned to wait. The other was younger, broader, watching her with an assessment that said he was reserving judgment.
"Let go of my broom."
"When's the last time you slept?"
"When's the last time you minded your own business?"
Something flickered across his face—not quite a smile, but close. He released the broom and stepped back, giving her space she hadn't asked for but found herself grateful to have.