Chapter 12 #2
Gary looked at her and thought about the last two weeks with the compressed, slightly tequila-adjacent clarity of a man who had been managing a complicated situation with considerable self-restraint and was now standing in front of an uncomplicated one.
He thought: Can it really get worse?
He stayed for one more drink.
? ? ?
They left together around eleven-fifteen, the night campus quiet around them, the moon doing exactly what it should on Halloween — three-quarters full, enough light to navigate by but not enough to make everything feel ordinary.
They were halfway across the main quad when the heels she was still wearing caught on something — a seam in the path, a gap in the pavement — and she stumbled, not badly, just enough to redirect the route.
She spotted a bench at the edge of the quad path and steered them toward it; Gary followed, and they sat down in the Halloween moonlight with the comfortable lack of hurry of two people who aren't in any particular rush to get where they're going.
She slipped her shoes into her bag. Gary sat back and looked at the quad — the pumpkins on the building steps, the orange lights reflected in the library windows, the fog machine's contribution still drifting faintly from the open event room door in the distance.
She kissed him first.
He kissed her back, his hand moved to her waist, the night was warm, quiet, uncomplicated in the way that most of his week had not been, for about thirty seconds he was simply present in it without any of the surrounding architecture.
Then the bench moved.
Not the bench — someone had grabbed him. Two hands, from behind, closing on his jacket and jacket collar simultaneously, with the practiced grip of a man who had done this before, yanked him backward off the bench and threw him toward the path.
Gary hit the ground on one shoulder and rolled, and by the time he was processing the impact he was already looking up at the shape standing over him.
Brett. Sami had been used in a set-up to get Gary alone.
Not in a costume. Dressed in jeans and a jacket, which on Halloween on a college campus somehow made him more conspicuous than anything in the party room had been.
His face was the particular red of a man who has been angry for a while, has been drinking on top of it, has now found the destination for both.
"You remember me," Brett said. "Prince Charming. From Sunday dinner."
Gary sat up slowly, assessing. One shoulder would have a bruise. Nothing structural. Sami had stood from the bench and taken two steps back and left the scene like someone who had not signed up for this part of the evening.
"I remember you," Gary said.
"You fucked my wife." Brett's voice was controlled but only just, the control sitting on top of something considerably less controlled. "And now you're out there pulling the inventory logs, getting Lou checking the books, trying to get us killed."
Gary looked at him and let the pieces land in order. Us. Jed and Brett. The barrels. Lou checking the logs because Gary had mentioned something felt off. The buyers on the other end of those barrels who had no tolerance for supply problems.
"I don't know what you're talking about," Gary said.
"Yes you do." Brett stepped closer. "You think you're helping the Steeles. You don't give a damn about the Steeles. You're sleeping with their women, playing distillery worker, and pretending to be someone who belongs here."
Gary opened his mouth.
Brett's foot caught him in the stomach — hard, targeted, the kick of a man with some experience in the mechanics of it. Gary's breath left him in a single compressed sound.
He did not get up immediately. He sat with his hands on the path and breathed and waited for the world to stop rearranging itself.
When he looked up, Brett was standing over him with the expression of a man who had said his piece and was deciding whether he was finished.
Gary spat onto the path. Looked at Brett with the particular, clear-eyed assessment of a man who is going to say the next thing regardless of the consequences.
"You fight like a bitch," Gary said. "Must fuck like one too. Sarah hasn't been treated right in years. Does your dick even still work, or is that why she needed a Thursday?"
Brett's jaw set.
The left hook came off his back foot and hit Gary on the right side of his jaw with the full committed weight of a man who had stopped caring about escalation.
Gary's head snapped sideways, the bench leg was briefly very close to his face, then the concrete was closer, then everything went quiet and dark; somewhere in the distance of the quiet dark he heard Brett say something about Belle, Lou, the help, then a second kick connected somewhere in his midsection, then nothing.
? ? ?
Water.
Cold, specific, poured directly on his face from a bottle.
Gary came back to the Halloween quad bench with the gradual, disorienting sequence of a man whose brain is reestablishing contact with the outside world. The moon was where it had been. The orange lights were where they had been. The fog from the event room had mostly dissipated.
Someone was crouching in front of him.
He blinked.
Belle.
She was in a costume — dark wings, something intricate and dark with iridescent edges, a butterfly of some kind, her dark hair loose around her face, and she was crying in the specific, bewildered way of a woman who hadn't expected to be crying tonight and wasn't entirely sure when it had started.
"How long was I out?" Gary said. His voice sounded like someone else's.
"I don't know. I found you like this." She checked her phone. "It's midnight."
Not long, then. Twenty minutes, maybe less.
She was still crying. It was a strange thing to see — Belle in a butterfly costume on Halloween, tears running down her face in the moonlight on the campus quad, holding a water bottle over the man her husband's friend had just put on the ground.
"Gary." She set the water bottle down and put her hands on either side of his face, carefully, checking with the instinct of a woman who had grown up around people who occasionally got hurt. "I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry."
"I'm okay," Gary said. He probed his jaw with the back of his hand. The left side was already doing something interesting. "Brett doesn't hit as hard as he thinks he does."
Belle made a sound that was partly laugh and partly something else. "Can you stand?"
Between the two of them, and the bench, and a certain amount of mutual effort, yes.
She found his keys in his jacket pocket.
He let her navigate — she'd been to the apartment twice now and knew the route — they walked back across the campus in the Halloween dark, Gary moving at the speed of a man taking inventory of his own structural integrity, Belle with her hand under his arm and her butterfly wings folding and unfolding slightly in the breeze.
? ? ?
Marv met them at the door with the enormous, undiscriminating warmth of a dog for whom the specific circumstances of a return are less important than the fact of it.
He pushed his face into Belle's hands first — he had decided about Belle on her first visit, apparently, and had not revised the assessment — then leaned heavily against Gary's leg in the way he did when he sensed something was wrong and had decided that proximity was the response.
Belle fed him, filled his water bowl, and came back to find Gary lowering himself onto the couch with the careful economy of a man whose midsection had opinions about the evening.
She sat beside him and looked at him for a long moment — all of it, the jaw, the way he was holding his side, the general condition of a man who had been put on the ground twice in rapid succession.
Then she got up, found a clean cloth in the kitchen, ran it under cold water, and came back and pressed it to the side of his face.
"You should probably see a doctor," she said.
"Nothing's broken," Gary said. "I've had worse."
"That's not the reassurance you think it is."
He almost laughed, which hurt, so he stopped.
Belle held the cloth to his jaw and looked at the middle distance of the apartment with the expression of a woman who has been carrying something for a while and has arrived at the place where putting it down is the only available option.
"This is my fault," she said.
"Brett did the hitting."
"Brett knew about you because of me. He knew about the inventory because of you, and you were only looking at the inventory because I'd received money from the pub that first night.
" She shook her head. "I've been letting this happen for two years.
Looking the other way. Taking the cash Jed handed me like that made it less real.
" She paused. "It started small. That's how it always starts. "
Gary kept the cloth where she'd put it and listened.
Belle pulled her legs up onto the couch, turning toward him slightly. The butterfly wings had gotten the better of the couch logistics and she reached back and unclipped them, setting them on the coffee table, which made her look simultaneously less festive and more like herself.
"The tunnels were Jed's idea," she said.
"Eighteen months ago, maybe two years. He came back from a rodeo circuit stop in Austin and he had these numbers — what specific aged whiskeys were selling for privately, off-market, to restaurants and buyers who didn't want to go through distribution.
The gap between what the Steele family was getting for product through normal channels and what those bottles were worth to the right buyer.
" She looked at her hands. "The old barrel storage in the back section — the one Lou doesn't go into often because those batches don't move regularly — there were barrels in there that hadn't been inventoried properly since the eighties.
Some of them date back to before I was born.
A hundred-year-aged barrel sells at auction for twenty, twenty-five thousand. Some of the really old ones more."