Chapter Eleven
As Cox made a turn around an outside corner of Abigail Freeman’s prodigious kitchen garden, he kicked something that chimed faintly. Stepping back and looking over his load of scrap wood, he saw a rounded, weather-burnished edge of metal in the grass and recognized it immediately: a bell from one of her legion of windchimes and whirligigs. Since his arms were full, he nudged it with his boot until it was on the garden soil and no longer hidden by the grass.
Four days after Abigail had come home from spending a week with her goats in Chesterfield and found her property trashed, they were still finding bits of her broken treasures all over the place. The whole club and half the town had started helping her put her life back to rights within hours of her discovering the mess, but even so, it would probably be a week or more before the damage was cleared.
The worst material damage was the goat barn—someone had driven straight through it, and they’d had to pull what was left down. If Abigail hadn’t had her brush herd out on a job, if those goats had been in the barn or the attached enclosure, she might have lost her main source of income.
Half a dozen of her hens and one young cockerel had been killed, most mowed under the wheels of the three trucks—they knew that because of the three distinct patterns of tracks everywhere—that had done a sadistic joy ride through her home. But the cockerel had had its neck broken.
Some things had been broken beyond repair. Cox had never cared enough to pay much attention, but it turned out that Abigail had made most of the silly yard decorations herself, over the course of her whole life, and several had been made by generations before her.
So far, she’d been bearing up cheerfully, warmly thanking everyone who came to help, putting on big meals for the helpers, repeating the refrain It’s all just things, just things. Losing Buster and my girlies is the only part that really hurts.
Cox didn’t believe that she wasn’t grieving her things as well as her chickens, but he admired her brave face, and it made him all the more furious. One of the few truly decent, harmless humans the world had ever made, and some random assholes had done her dirty like this? He wanted to find them and inventory their internal organs. Three trucks meant at least three, and probably more, random assholes.
Nobody, not even Abigail, had a reliable guess about who’d done it or why. It had to be personal, and Cox figured it for teenagers or twenty-something shitheads; the words FAT FREAK had been spray-painted in a huge, Day-Glo orange scrawl across the side wall of her house. That was something immature shitheads did. But who the hell wished Abigail Freeman ill?
She’d left those nasty words right where they’d been sprayed. Instead of painting over them she’d painted around them: a riot of beautiful flowers vined through all the letters, and honey bees and butterflies flitted around them. She’d taken that hate and made a garden.
Inside that pretty garden was, Cox thought, a spicy message for some real pieces of shit. That message was Fuck You, You Lose. It made him like her more to know there was steel inside her soft exterior.
He didn’t care if these assholes were sixteen or sixty. He was going to dismantle them—and if they were sixteen, he’d go for their parents, too.
“I want to get my hands around these bastards’ necks,” Mel growled, coming up to the scrap pile with his own load. “How hard can it be to track ‘em down? They went through the fuckin’ barn—that’s gotta be a broken grille, at least. Should be obvious.” He heaved his load onto the pile with rhetorical force.
“Might have a big guard on the grille,” Cox suggested.
Mel wasn’t satisfied. “Then we track down every damn truck with a guard and check ‘em out for scratches!”
Cox shrugged. Half the trucks in town had grille guards. He didn’t have any interest in detective work, and the only opinion he had about the doers here was what he wanted to do to them when they were found.
“Don’t you fuckin’ care, man?” Mel challenged, looking like he meant to square up.
Cox stood his ground. “I’m here, ain’t I?”
Mel glared at him. Cox was mildly shocked; Mel rarely got fired up like this. He was the kind of guy who always had a grin, whose teasing was always good-natured, who rarely showed worry or anger. When he did get angry, though, he went all the way—and he also got this weird, almost confused look, like he didn’t know what to do with so much bad feeling.
For a second or two, they stared at each other. Cox thought there was a chance Mel might actually throw a punch, which would be remarkable; Mel didn’t even like to fight in the ring.
“Hey, boys!”
Abigail’s voice broke the tension. Mel turned toward her, and his aspect changed completely as one of his big grins filled his face. “Hey there, pretty lady. How you doin’?”
Wearing a loose, flowery red dress and bright yellow rainboots, her curly dark hair pinned up in a haphazard arrangement that looked to Cox like nothing so much as a wasp’s nest, Abigail stopped beside them and set her hands on her wide hips.
“I’m doing good. You know, I don’t see people ‘round here all that much, and I didn’t know anybody really cared too much about me any which way, but this week, I feel like I found family I didn’t know I had. If not for the chickens, I’d say what happened was a blessing in disguise. Y’all hungry? I’m layin’ out a lunch. Got cold cuts and cheese, fresh-baked bread, egg salad, deviled eggs, melon salad, and a strawberry tart—plus lemonade and sweet tea.”
Still wearing a big grin, Mel made a show of rubbing his belly. “That all sounds amazing. If I’d’ve known what a cook you are, I’d’ve been hanging around up here looking for odd jobs long before those shitheads showed up.” He blushed. “’Scuse my language.”
Cox was mildly shocked again to see Mel Lind drop his head like a chastised schoolboy.
Abigail laughed and patted his arm. “Nothing to excuse, hon. My ears can take it, and those fucking shitheads deserve worse than some nasty words. C’mon, you two. Let me feed you. It’s the least I can do for all you’re doin’ for me.”
Mel and Abigail started to walk back to the house. Cox followed.
“Don’t you worry, Abigail,” he heard Mel tell her. “Those fucking shitheads’ll get all they deserve.”
Cox didn’t chime in, but he agreed wholeheartedly.
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~oOo~
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Dom pushed a photo, enlarged to about 11x14, onto the Keep table. “I’d say that’s enough to move on,” he said as the rest of the club leaned in to study the image.
The photo had obviously been shot through a dirty garage window, but it was clear enough. It showed a late-Nineties or early-Aughts Chevy Bronco, with a big crack in the windshield, significant damage to the hood, and a badly scraped grille guard. Cox would have said he knew just about everybody’s ride in town, and he could name at least ten people who had Broncos, but this one wasn’t ringing a bell. Somebody from away had fucked up Abigail’s life? Or maybe this wasn’t a regular ride for its owner? Who did he know who’d once driven a Bronco but didn’t anymore?
Tommy, their SAA, asked the question it hadn’t occurred to Cox to voice. “Whose is it?”
“Gary Prentiss,” Badger answered before Dom could.
Zaxx Bello, back at the table after three months following his girlfriend (and Isaac’s daughter), Gia, around while she played intrepid reporter, interviewing outlaws for her PhD, sucked in a sharp breath. “Fuck. Seriously?”
Gary Prentiss was a fairly regular problem child in town. He and his wife, Leigh, had a small sheep ranch, but, despite Gary being several generations down the family sheep-ranching line, they weren’t especially good at the work. They lived on the line between subsistence and starvation. Gary had an unfortunate habit of stealing what he couldn’t afford, usually from his neighbors. Being longstanding homesteaders themselves, most of them tolerated it to every extent they could, but occasionally Gary pushed too far—siphoning precious gas from tractors, stealing whole loads of hay, shit like that. The Horde had corrected him several times, sometimes leaving permanent reminders.
For example, Gary had only nine fingers. He’d lost a pinky as punishment for stealing a load of hay.
The man was an idiot, but would he be this idiotic? Also, he stole things he needed. Nothing had been stolen at Abigail’s. It was only damage. A personal attack.
“Why would Gary fuck with Abigail?” Mel asked, his voice sounding both confused and furious.
“It was three trucks,” Cox reminded everyone. He pointed at the photo and said the obvious, which everyone seemed to be missing. “That’s just one.”
“Obviously,” Double A answered. “But it looks like Gary’s truck is one of them, and if we’re right, that weak-ass dope will bend over so far and so fast we could get a good look in his colon. If he was part of it, he’ll give us the others.”
“But why?” Mel stressed again. “What the fuck reason’s he got to hurt Abigail?”
Showdown turned and studied Mel. One of his small, wise smiles ticked up a corner of his mouth. “You’re gettin’ bent as hell over this, brother. You got a stake here?”
Mel’s complexion took on a decidedly ruddy hue. “She’s a nice lady is all. Never hurt nobody, don’t deserve shitheads shittin’ on her.”
“Do we know she’s never hurt anybody?” Thumper asked. When Mel reacted to that like he wanted to make an issue, Thumper put up his hand. “She’s a nice lady, yeah. But she keeps to herself a lot. And, come on, she’s fuckin’ weird. All those ointments and weird shit she sells at the fairs and such? I’m just sayin’—do we know she doesn’t beef with anybody? They’re all a little weird up there, y’know?”
“He’s not wrong,” Cox said. When Mel’s head swung his way, Cox continued, “The people livin’ up there are mostly backwoods types. We don’t know anything more’n they say out loud how they all get along with each other. That’s all I mean.”
“She’s a nice lady,” Mel repeated, like nothing else mattered.
“I know she is,” Cox told him. “But plenty of assholes like fuckin’ with nice people most of all.”
“He’s right,” Bart added. “Pick any harmless post online, even something like a litter of puppies rolling around, and see how many people jump in just to tear the poster down. That impulse happens in real life, too. Some people just need to ruin other people’s happiness.”
And that right there was why Cox hated people. As a group. Some were bearable, a few were good, but most were selfish shitheads. Cox hoped to see the day humans got the same extinction special the dinosaurs got.
“I don’t care why,” Badger finally said. “It happened. It needs correction, and this is a good lead. Unless anybody has an angle that changes my view on this, my call is we bring Gary in and find out what he has to say.”
Nobody had a different angle. When the table was quiet long enough to be clear no one would speak, Badger nodded. “Good. Tommy, bring him in—and make it today. We need to get this settled up fast, if we can. We got just more than a week before the groundbreaking, and of course we got a honey-do list from the women long as my arm.”
With the shift in topic, Autumn Rooney strolled into the center of Cox’s head. She’d been spending way too goddamn much time in there for the past several weeks, but he generally managed to keep her shoved off to a back corner.
Autumn had won. The Horde were going to build her ‘Heartland Homestead,’ and he knew he’d been a factor in the club’s change of heart. That damn crack about Signal Bend being a company town had dug into him and impelled him practically against his will to talk to Badger.
Maybe he had been instrumental. There was a good chance he’d live to regret that.
But it was done. The contract had been negotiated, the ink had dried, and in about a week and a half, there would be an actual groundbreaking ceremony.
The women in this town loved any excuse to throw a party. The ‘honey-do’ list Badger was currently reading sounded as involved as one of the seasonal fairs: they’d hired a band, so they wanted the outdoor stage put up on what was left of the old Keyes parking lot. They wanted speeches and lights and concessions and games and balloons and confetti and ... the list went on so long, Cox tuned it out. He didn’t need to listen; somebody would give him a job, and he’d do it.
He thought it was stupid to make a big deal out of this. For months the Horde, and all of Signal Bend, had fought against this project. Turning it into a party made it seem like they’d gotten exactly what they’d wanted.
Maybe that was the point: make it a party so Autumn and her company’s win was diminished. Well, that was a little better, if it was true. But it was still another stupid party.
At least this one wasn’t being advertised across four states. It was a hometown event, for hometown folks. And Autumn, who Badger had just announced would be attending.
Cox did not like the weird twist he felt in his chest when he heard her name.
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~oOo~
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“Cox!” Tommy called as the patches filed from the Keep.
Among the first from the room as usual, Cox slipped his phones into his pockets and turned to the SAA.
“Come with.” Tommy grabbed his phones and headed toward the front door without waiting for Cox to respond.
Badger had told Tommy to collect Gary Prentiss, so Cox didn’t have to ask where he was going. It was also pretty common for Tommy to want him at his side for that kind of work. However, Cox hated getting orders thrown at him like that, so normally he’d’ve ignored such a terse directive or fired a shot back. He wanted in on this one, so he followed Tommy without a word.
“I’m comin’, too,” Mel said.
That was unusual; Mel preferred to stay clear of the more violent work. But he was fired up over what had happened at Abigail’s, so all bets were off on the man’s good nature.
Almost at the door, Tommy stopped. “No. That’s too many. I don’t want it lookin’ like we thought we needed numbers to take that fuckin’ worm. But you can get in when we bring him back. We’ll bring ‘im back pretty so you’re here for all the fun.”
With a grin and a nod, Mel backed off.
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~oOo~
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Gary and Leigh Prentiss’s place was about a mile deeper into the woods on the same road Abigail lived on. The road petered out with their property, ending at a stand of white pines a hundred feet or so after their gate. Though the road had been paved over, it had been years since a resurfacing crew had gone all the way to the end, and the Horde van bounced over asphalt so broken it was barely more than plus-size gravel.
Tommy was behind the wheel; he turned through their open gate and drove over a badly rutted dirt road.
“Fuck me,” he muttered. “Gonna break a damn axle out here. Lazy shitheads not keepin’ their shit up.”
Cox had nothing to say to that, so he continued glaring out the side window. The pasture where the Gary and Leigh’s sad little herd of sheep grazed was dry, more dirt than grass. An old-fashioned hay feeder, made of desiccated wood, leaned drunkenly. It was empty. Cox wasn’t from a farming family, but he’d lived in the country all his life. He knew it wasn’t necessarily noteworthy for a feeder to be empty in the middle of a summer afternoon. The fact that it was about to fall over, however, spoke to some neglect.
Neglect could mean they didn’t give a fuck, or it could mean they couldn’t afford to give a fuck. Cox didn’t know where the Prentisses landed on that question, but he had a good guess.
The house and outbuildings up ahead were in no better shape. The house was little more than a shack, with weather-beaten wood siding that had last seen a paintbrush probably thirty years ago. The dusky shingled roof sagged near a stovepipe chimney, and the porch drooped down the middle. A collection of rusting old appliances stood in a hunkering cluster like a junkyard fairy circle, and all manner of rusty metal bits scattered and leaned throughout the yard. The garage tilted precariously on its cinderblock foundation, and the barn was barely a phantom of a structure that had probably been raised with the help of a lot of neighbors, at a long-ago time when the Prentiss family was doing alright.
Nothing remarkable here; hundreds, thousands of folks lived just like this in the hills and woods of Missouri. And every other state. But Autumn’s argument about the limits of Signal Bend’s prosperity echoed between Cox’s ears.
Tommy parked the van behind the Prentisses’ aging Chevy truck. A skinny mutt of uncertain color dragged itself to its feet and started barking, shaking the chain clipped to its pinch collar.
That was a new strike against the Prentisses: that dog needed to be fed better, and fuck an asshole who kept any animal on a damn chain. And don’t get him started on those fucking pinch collars. He’d like to wrap one around Prentiss’s neck.
“You carryin’?” Tommy asked as he grabbed hold of the door handle. “I don’t know if this shiteater’s been waitin’ to get caught.”
Cox was always carrying. He patted the left side of his chest, where his shoulder holster held his Sig P320.
With a nod, Tommy pushed open his door and jumped out of the van.
As Cox climbed down, a shot rang out from the direction of the house, and Tommy fell from view.
Cox dropped to a crouch at once. Shielded by the van, he pulled his piece, checked the mag, and racked it.
“GET OFF MY PROP’TY!” Gary Prentiss shouted. “YOU GOT NO BID’NESS HERE!”
“Tom!” Cox called, keeping his voice low enough that Prentiss wouldn’t hear, but hoping it carried to Tommy, if he could hear.
“Yeah,” Tommy replied in a raspy groan, and Cox let out a held breath. “I’m hit, fucker got me in the chest, but I ain’t dead. Not yet, anyway. Get that shitstain, brother—but don’t kill him. I want that.”
Cox crab-walked to the back of the truck and ducked his head out to get a look at the house. No sign of Prentiss; he must have been shooting from inside. Cox focused on the windows, but the afternoon sun hitting the dirty glass occluded his view. Two were open, but he saw nothing through those low, dark squares but fluttering curtains.
Another shot rang out; Cox heard it strike wood somewhere far to his right—probably the side of the barn. Little late for a warning shot, motherfucker.
“GET OUT!! PICK HIM UP AND GIT!” Prentiss shouted—and shot again.
That time, Cox caught the flash. He aimed at that window, low. If he managed to hit Prentiss, it would likely be around his midsection, low enough to keep him alive to find out why he’d gone for Abigail and who’d been with him. If he missed, maybe he’d get a better bead on Prentiss as the man reacted.
He fired and saw Prentiss drop. A rifle dropped from his hand, the barrel bouncing off the windowsill.
From deeper in the house a woman—Leigh, no doubt—began to yell.
Fully expecting Leigh to rush for that rifle and seek to finish her husband’s job, Cox broke for the house. He ran straight for the window, ducked low as he hit the side of the house, and waited.
On the ground beside the club van, Tommy worked himself to a seated position and aimed his Glock with a shaky military grip. His complexion had gone waxy, and his white t-shirt was turning red beneath his kutte. Cox did not have much time to fuck around here.
As he had that thought, the rifle barrel pushed carefully through the open window. Cox surged up, grabbed that barrel—still hot from the shots Gary got off—and yanked as hard as he could. He got the rifle out of Leigh’s hands and pulled her halfway through the window. She looked down at him, eyes huge with shock and fear.
Cox pointed his Sig directly in her face. She was a woman, and she hadn’t shot Tommy, but it was all he could do not to pull his trigger.
He mastered the urge and moved his finger from the trigger guard. Instead, he grabbed her by the front of her shirt, yanked her the rest of the way out the window and dropped her on the rocky, dusty ground.
When Leigh hit the ground, Tommy dropped his gun and fell over with a worrisome groan. Quickly, while she was too stunned to struggle, Cox yanked his belt from its loops and bound her arms behind her back. He paused, thinking through how to keep her still while he helped Tommy, and decided on tying the laces of her ratty sneakers together. That wouldn’t hold her long, but if she thought to kick her shoes off, she’d have to run barefoot with her arms behind her back, so he was sure to catch her if he had to chase her.
He left her lying on the ground beside her house and ran back to Tommy.
Tommy’s eyes were closed, and he didn’t react to Cox rushing at him.
“Hey,” Cox said, crouching before Tommy and setting his fingers on the side of his neck. A pulse, moderately strong, but the rhythm was too fast and jazzy.
“Hey!” he said again, more loudly.
Tommy’s eyes stuttered open. “Hey. I might be fucked here, man,” he mumbled. A bubble of red formed at the corner of his mouth, swelled, and popped. Fuck. Then he closed his eyes and sagged back into limbo. Double fuck.
Cox slapped him on the side of the head. “Don’t be a fuckin’ pussy. You’re fine. Hold your shit together, asshole.”
Tommy met that challenge with half of a grin and a weary, wet chuckle. “Don’t get all mushy on me now.”
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~oOo~
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“YOU KILLED HIM! YOU FUCKIN’ KILLED HIM!” Leigh Prentiss wailed.
She was now bound more securely, with zip ties at her wrists and ankles, in the back of the van. Gary, who was not dead but would be eventually without medical attention, lay unconscious and bound (Cox was taking no chances) beside her. Cox’s shot had found its target so low on Gary’s torso there was a solid chance he’d never use his dick again, even if he lived long enough to want to.
“Can we please gag the bitch?” Tommy gasped. He leaned against the front passenger door, looking like every ounce of his strength was devoted to remaining conscious. He was snow-white and pouring sweat. His breathing was labored and had a rumble Cox did not like at all—like dice in a cup—and he kept licking fresh blood from his lips. The bullet had hit him almost dead center in his chest, slightly to the right; it had gone clear through, which was likely why Tommy was still breathing any kind of way, but it looked like it had taken a bite out of his lung on the way through.
“Yeah, hold on,” Cox said, climbing back to shove his bandana in Leigh’s mouth. She fought him, tried to bite him, so he punched her in the side of the head and got the gag in before she could shake off the stun.
He jumped into the driver’s seat and tore hell back to town. He needed to get Tommy to the clinic.
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~oOo~
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Badger raked a hand through his greying hair. “Fuck me sideways. God DAMN it!” He slammed his fist onto the bar.
The patches standing with him, half the club, said nothing.
A few hours had passed since Cox sped through the Prentisses’ gate with Tommy bleeding in the passenger seat and two people trussed up in the back. Now, Tommy was in surgery at Phelps County Memorial, in Rolla, to repair his deflated lung, and Leigh was still trussed up, but now she was tied to a chair in the warehouse.
Gary was dead. He’d bled out in the van and was dead by the time Cox parked behind the clinic.
And Leigh swore up, down, and sideways that they’d had nothing to do with the trouble at Abigail’s. Sobbing hysterically, begging not to be hurt, she’d insisted that the fucking Bronco in their garage hadn’t run for years. Gary had been scrounging parts out of it to keep other shit running.
Isaac and Zaxx had just returned from that bedraggled old farm to confirm that yes, the Bronco was missing about half its engine, and there was an actual rat’s nest in a wheel well that had obviously not been recently disturbed.
They’d been wrong. Weaselly as Gary Prentiss had been, he had not ransacked Abigail Freeman’s property.
Now Tommy was hurt, Gary was dead, and Leigh was a fucking mess they had to sort out before they could even consider letting her go.
Missouri was a stand-your-ground state. Gary had shot first, but he was on his own property, so it was, by definition, justifiable that he’d shot Tommy.
Cox had killed the man in his own home.
If law got wind, he’d likely do life or get death, and the investigation could dredge up the deaths from last year—which had been self-defense, and Gia Lunden, not a patch, had shot them, but that didn’t matter. The club had handled things on their own, so there would never be any proof of the truth, only decomposing, waterlogged bodies for cops to write their own story on.
They could not let Leigh out of this compound until and unless they were extremely sure she would never speak a word of the truth about her husband’s death. Leigh knew that, and had been robustly insisting she never would—however, once she was loose, they had no leverage to keep her in check. Gary was the last thing she’d had to lose.
So the patches who’d hadn’t followed the ambulance to Rolla, those who’d stayed back to deal with the mess—Badger, Double A, Isaac, Len, Nolan, Zaxx, Mel, Thumper, and Cox—now stood in the Hall and tried to come to grips with the possibility that they had to kill a grieving woman who’d done nothing to them.
“We can’t do it,” Mel said. “It ain’t who we are. Hell, was it who we ever were?”
“No,” Nolan said with conviction.
Isaac sighed. “Yeah, it was. We killed a girl right here in this clubhouse once, to make her father hurt. She hadn’t done shit to us. Doin’ her sent us down a real bad road. And that’s on me.”
“That ain’t it, Isaac,” Len challenged. “That girl was a fox in our henhouse, remember? She came in like club pussy, snuggled up to the patches, and gave her old man intel that got Show’s whole family hurt, and his girl Daisy killed. That bitch deserved what we gave her. It was ugly, and yeah, doin’ it sent us to hell and back, but she earned it. You gotta set that weight down someday.” He looked around at the other patches. “Far’s I know, Leigh’s never hurt us. But she can. She can burn us to the ground with this.”
Again, Badger punched the bar top. “FUCK! What the fuck is goin’ on? We got the fuckin’ shit in the quarry, now we got Gary wrapped up in the van, and we’re standing here talking about putting his wife with him—how the hell do we got bodies pilin’ up again? We haven’t worked dark like this in twenty fuckin’ years.”
“Why’d he shoot Tommy?” Thumper asked. “You said he shot as soon as Tommy got out the van—why the fuck’d he do that, if he didn’t fuck with Ms. Freeman?”
“When has the Horde showin’ up at his place ever meant anything good?” Isaac pointed out.
The old man was right. Gary was—had been—a habitual fuckup, and the Horde had put hurt on him repeatedly as punishment. He’d earned those punishments, but it made sense he’d be afraid of the club.
Cox chimed in, keeping the conversation on a productive track before Badger’s existential crisis went around the whole club. “There’s got to be a way to keep Leigh quiet. She’s got no family? Nothing?”
Double A answered. “No. She’s got nothing. But maybe that’s the play. Can we pay her off?”
“What’s a husband worth these days?” Zaxx asked with black irony. “You know, on the open market.”
Regaining his equilibrium, Badger stood up tall and said, “Paying her off is just kicking the can down the road. She’s a messy bitch, and she’ll be trying to up the ante every chance she gets. Somebody go back, make her more comfortable—but keep her tied. I’m calling Dom and Bart. There’s gotta be a depth they can dig to strike something we can use. Doin’ her is still on the table, but Jesus fuck, if we go there, I don’t know how we come back.”
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~oOo~
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The woman really had nothing.
By two o’clock in the morning, while Tommy slept through his post-op drugs and all the patches were gathered in the Hall except Saxon and Kellen, who’d stayed on hospital watch, it was clear that there was nothing for Dom and Bart, two high-level intel experts, to find. No leverage but fear and money.
She was already as afraid as they could make her, but that would wear off eventually.
“We fix up her place and pay her a salary,” Showdown suggested. “Not a lump sum, but we keep it comin’, so she’s dependent on us. Enough that it would hurt her to lose it, but not so much it hurts us to pay it. That’s leverage to keep her quiet.”
“That’s good!” Bart said. “We can make the story that Gary had a heart attack, and he had life insurance.”
“And if she makes a play for a raise?” Isaac asked.
“Depends on when and how she does it,” Badger answered, clearly interested in this idea. “Ten years from now, maybe it’s right to give her more. Cost of living increase, like. Ten weeks from now, or too big a play, then it’s a problem.”
“If it’s a problem,” Thumper said, “I guess we’re back to the final solution.”
Cox scowled at him. “Really? Nazi talk?”
“Huh?”
Zaxx backhanded Thumper in his beer belly. “Bruh. ‘Final solution’s’ what Hitler called the Holocaust.”
“Oh. Sorry, didn’t know. I meant kill—”
“We know what you meant!” Badger barked. “Shut up, asshole.”
Thumper shut up.
Badger sighed for about the thousandth time this accursed night. “Okay. This idea is full of fault lines, but it’s the best we got, so let’s make it a plan. Dub, you and me figure out what to give her. I don’t want Kel involved in this, so I’m glad he’s in Rolla. Len, go tell her she’s gonna be okay but put the fear of the Mane in her while you do it. Isaac, will you call Ben Kellogg and get him on board?”
Badger had trouble giving Isaac an order; he always framed it as a question. Same with Showdown. Everybody else got an order, but Isaac and Show got a request.
Ben Kellogg owned a funeral home in Springfield. It had been long years since the Horde had needed illicit help from a mortician, but Ben’s father had helped the club in the dark days, and they still used Kellogg & Son Memorial Services for their normal burying needs. Like his father, Ben was a friend of the club.
“You got it,” Isaac said.
“Everybody else in on cleanup,” Badger ordered. “Let’s get this shit straight and cleared out of our lives.”
It was going to be a very long night.