Chapter 16
Bait
Gary returned to his regular life after the beach trip with the particular attentiveness of a man who knows something is coming and doesn't know exactly when.
He walked campus a little more carefully — not paranoid, not obvious about it, just present in his surroundings in a way he hadn't needed to be since the weeks before Passer's confrontation behind Moe's back in Rosetown.
The feeling was familiar enough to be manageable.
He'd been here before. Different state, different players, same low-grade awareness of a clock he couldn't see ticking toward something he couldn't fully control.
He kept the schedule. Gym, café, classes, office hours, Thursdays with Lou, Saturdays with the line dancing class where Ethel continued her improvement campaign on his footwork with the focused persistence of a woman who had decided this was her project now.
Sunday dinners at Stu's, where Amber was in the final weeks of the pregnancy and the house had taken on the specific charged energy of a place bracing for a major event, the nursery finished, the bags packed, Annie oscillating between excitement and the philosophical uncertainty of a child about to permanently lose her status as an only child.
Gary said nothing to Stu about what was coming. He ate the Sunday dinners and drank the bourbon and played with Annie and Marv and kept the weight of it entirely on his own side of the table.
He waited.
? ? ?
The first week of March, David texted him on a Tuesday morning: Jed left the circuit early. Claimed an injury. Nobody on the circuit has confirmed it. He's back in Renton.
Gary read it at the kitchen table over his coffee, set the phone down, and sat with the information for a moment.
He texted back: Understood.
He went to the gym.
? ? ?
It happened on a Thursday.
Gary had finished at the distillery around six — a normal afternoon, moving product, logging inventory, Lou making coffee in the small office off the main storage room while Gary worked the far end of the rack system.
Nothing unusual. Nothing that would have read as anything other than a regular Thursday to anyone watching.
He drove back toward campus on the county road, the familiar route through the open land east of Renton, the evening darkening around him in the way of early March, winter not entirely finished but loosening its grip.
The road was quiet, the Jeep's headlights cutting the dusk, windows down enjoying the night breeze.
His phone buzzed on the console.
He glanced at it at a straight stretch.
A number he didn't recognize. A single line of text.
That's Jed.
Gary set the phone face-down under the seat without responding.
He looked up at the road ahead and saw them — two sets of headlights, stationary, blocking the road in the particular V-shape of vehicles that have been positioned rather than parked.
Deliberate. Planned. The kind of roadblock that announces itself as a roadblock before you're close enough to do anything about it.
He drove toward them at the same speed. Anything else would tell them something.
He parked twenty feet back, cut the engine, and got out.
The headlights hit him full in the face, bleaching everything behind them to silhouette. He raised one hand against the glare and put on the grin — the specific, unhurried, Gary Ryan grin that had gotten him into and occasionally out of situations like this for the better part of his adult life.
"Anything I can help you with?" he called toward the light.
No response. He kept walking toward them.
"Run out of gas? Flat tire?"
He'd closed the gap to ten feet when the voice came from the side — not from the vehicles at all, from the dark beside the road where he hadn't been looking.
"Actually, there is something you can help with."
Gary turned.
Jed Calloway stepped into the edge of the headlight beam.
Without the Sunday dinner context around him, the full physical reality of the man was more apparent — the broad, sun-weathered build of a man who had spent his adult life in physical contest with things larger than himself, the specific coiled quality of a man who is about to do something he has been thinking about for a while.
"You can stop," Jed said, "fucking my wife."
The left hook came off his back foot with the full committed weight of a man who hadn't been on the injured list at all, and Gary's head snapped sideways and the ground came up fast.
He hit the dirt road on his shoulder and tucked immediately — knees up, arms in, protecting his ribs — because the boots started arriving almost before he'd stopped moving.
He couldn't count them in the moment, couldn't identify how many men were in the dark around him, just absorbed the impacts with the focused economy of a man who has been here before and knows that the primary objective is to stay conscious and not break anything structural.
It stopped as abruptly as it had started.
A beat of silence. Then the sound of a man spitting, the dirt near his face shifting slightly with the impact of it.
Brett's voice, from somewhere above and behind him. "That's enough. We need him functional." A pause, the tone of a man managing personnel rather than expressing any particular concern for Gary's wellbeing. "For now. After that I don't care. Lake, cement block, whatever. His call."
Gary lay still for a moment, cataloguing the damage. Ribs tender but not broken. Jaw familiar in its complaint from October. One eye already doing something interesting from the initial hook.
He started to laugh.
It came out genuine, which was either a sign of resilience or a head injury, and Gary was comfortable with the ambiguity.
"That's all you've got?" he said to the dirt. He rolled onto his back and looked up at the silhouettes above him. "Belle has more power in her legs than that. And her aim's better."
The silhouette that was Jed moved. Someone caught his arm.
"Don't," Brett said. "We need him."
Jed stopped. He stood over Gary with the specific, concentrated fury of a man exercising restraint he does not have in great supply. "I'm going to kill you," he said, quietly. The quiet version of it was worse than loud would have been. "But not yet. Right now you're useful."
He crouched down to Gary's level.
"You know what we've been up to." Not a question.
"Lou's been distracted having his little Thursday helper.
The inventory logs are getting attention they shouldn't be getting.
We need someone on the inside to move the product clean before anyone else starts looking.
" He held Gary's gaze. "Twelve barrels from the old reserve.
Next Thursday night. You get them to the tunnel entrance and that's where your job ends. "
Gary looked at him. "That's not a one-man task."
"No," Jed agreed. "Which is why Bill has arranged to have Lou off the property next Thursday. All you need to do is operate the forklift and get the barrels to the tunnel entrance. Three of my guys handle the rest."
Gary was quiet for a moment, the dirt road cool beneath him, the headlights still burning across the scene.
"And after?" Gary said.
"After, you and I leave this town and never cross paths again." Jed stood. "Or we revisit this conversation in a more permanent way. Your choice, Professor."
He looked down at Gary one more time.
"Good boy," he said. Then he drew his foot back and put it across Gary's face with the full commitment of a man who had been waiting months to do it. "And stop," he said, as Gary's vision went white at the edges, "fucking my wife."
Vehicles. Engines. The spinning of tires in the dirt, the spray of it across Gary's face, and then the sound retreating down the county road until there was nothing left but the dark and the wind across the open land.
? ? ?
Silence.
Then, from somewhere in the darkness off the road, the sound of a small engine. A single quad materialized out of the dark, headlight bobbing over the uneven ground, and came to a stop beside Gary.
David stepped off. A medic followed, kit already in hand, moving immediately to where Gary was lying.
"You alright?" David said.
Gary opened the eye that was working better and looked up at him. He could feel the blood from the facial impact, the specific warm copper taste of it in his mouth.
He smiled.
"Never better," he said. "Apparently I fucked his wife."
David looked at him for a moment with the level, unhurried expression he brought to most things. Then something moved across his face — brief, controlled, unmistakable.
He laughed. A short, genuine sound that appeared to surprise him slightly.
The medic looked up from Gary's jaw with the expression of a man who had worked with the DA's office long enough to know that David did not laugh at scenes like this and was therefore recalibrating several assumptions simultaneously.
"Let's get you up," David said, composing himself with the practiced speed of a man returning to his professional setting. He reached down. Gary took his hand.
? ? ?
The week that followed was the quietest Gary had spent in Renton.
He healed — the eye resolved to a bruise that yellowed and faded over the days, the ribs stayed tender but functional, the jaw was old news by now.
He went to class. He graded papers. He told Sue over coffee on Saturday morning that it had happened, that he was fine, and Sue looked at his face with the expression of a woman absorbing information she had expected and still found difficult to receive; then she poured him more coffee and they moved on.
Lou and Nancy had been told.