Chapter 15 #2
Phantom looks at Cash. Cash looks at Roan. Roan looks at me.
"Plan still works," Phantom says. "We just take him sooner."
Roan nods. "Fifteen minutes earlier means his crew's still not here. We're clear."
"Then we move," Phantom says.
We walk in through the live oaks at the back of the property.
Dawn hasn’t hit us yet. The brush country is gray and the cicadas haven't started.
The only sound is our boots in the dust and Cash's brother peeling off east toward the house with two of Cash's other men.
The barn is a two-story metal structure with a corrugated roof and lights burning yellow through the slats of the back wall.
Phantom and I go to the front. Roan and Banshee around to the back.
Cash stays at the corner of the barn with a rifle on the door of the house in case Loretta comes out.
We pause at the front door. Phantom looks at me one time. He doesn't say anything.
I nod.
He pushes the door open and we walk inside.
Asher is leaning over a chute in the middle of his barn with a feed bucket in his hand, a Camel Wide in the corner of his mouth, and a rifle leaning against the chute next to him.
He looks up when we come in. He sees Phantom. He sees me. He sees the door at the back of the barn open.
I know what he’s doing. He’s looking for an escape route… but Roan and Banshee come in with their pistols already drawn.
The cigarette falls out of his mouth.
He goes for the rifle.
I'm faster than he is.
I cross the barn floor in three steps and put my hand on the rifle barrel before he can get his hand on the stock.
I sweep it off the chute and it clatters across the concrete.
He swings at me with the feed bucket.
I catch the swing and break his wrist over my knee.
He screams. The sound bounces off the corrugated roof of the barn, and the broncs in the back chutes start moving—shuffling, snorting, hooves on metal.
One of them whinnies high and panicked. Asher's good hand cradles the broken wrist against his chest and his face has gone the color of old paper under the yellow barn lights.
Banshee and Roan close the back door.
With the barn sealed, we can really begin.
Phantom walks across the floor slowly. His boots are loud on the concrete—deliberate steps, unhurried, the sound of a man who knows his man on the floor isn't going anywhere.
The barn is quiet around the sound of him walking. The broncs in the back chutes have stopped moving. Banshee and Roan have stopped breathing. Asher's eyes track him from the concrete with the kind of fear a man only has when he understands he's already dead.
He stops six feet from Asher.
Asher's on his knees in the dust with his broken wrist cradled against his chest and he's looking up at Phantom with what could be resignation in his eyes. "Phantom."
"Kane."
"Phantom—listen—"
"You came for my daughter," Phantom says.
"I—"
"You stalked her. You photographed her. You cut her saddle. You wanted her to come down off a horse at twenty-five miles an hour with a thousand pounds of animal on top of her."
"Phantom, you don't understand—"
"I understand exactly what you did. You held a grudge against me for years. I can respect a grudge. I can't respect a man who comes at a woman to get to her father."
Asher tries to stand. I put my boot on his chest and shove him back down on the concrete. He stays down.
Roan walks across the barn floor and stops next to Phantom. He looks down at the man who used to be his friend. "Kane."
Asher looks up at him. "Roan. Tell him. Tell your brother."
"Tell him what?"
"Tell him I was your friend. Tell him I never meant—"
"You came at my niece," Roan says.
"Roan—"
"You came at my fuckin’ niece, Kane. There is no version of this where you walk out of this barn."
Asher closes his eyes. When he opens them he looks at me. "You're the one who marked her."
"Yes."
"She told me about you. Seventeen years old at junior nationals and said her father's club had a prospect in it she was going to marry someday. I laughed at her then. Thought she was a kid."
I don't answer.
"You were the one she meant."
"Yes, I sure the fuck was."
He laughs. It comes out wet. There's blood at the corner of his mouth from where his teeth cut his lip when he went down. "All these years."
"All these years," I tell him.
Phantom looks at me. "Spur."
"Yes, Prez."
"Whenever you're ready."
I look at Asher.
I think about the photo on Dakota's phone of me kissing the top of her head on the porch of her father's house. I think about the cinch cut three-quarters through.
I think about her coming around the third barrel bareback at twenty-five miles an hour because this man wanted her to die in the dirt.
I shoot him in the right knee. He screams and goes flat on the concrete. I shoot him in the left knee. He screams again, louder, more blood curdling.
Roan, behind me, low: "Spur."
"He doesn't get a clean kill, Roan. He tormented Dakota, and now his sorry ass gets tormented."
I shoot him in the right elbow, then the left.
He's screaming and writhing on the concrete and the blood is pooling under him. The dust turns dark, not a crimson per say, but a maroon.
I know I’m not going too far, because Phantom doesn't stop me.
I crouch down next to him. He's breathing wet. His eyes are rolling. His mouth is moving and no sound is coming out. "Asher."
His eyes find me.
"Look at me. You hear me? Fucking look at me."
He looks.
"I want you to know what's happening. I want you to know what comes next.
The men in this barn are going to wait for you to bleed out.
Then they're going to chop you into pieces with the saws you keep in this barn.
Then they're going to feed you to the hogs you keep behind the barn.
The same hogs you were going to feed an hour from now.
The same hogs that are going to be processed for slaughter in about two months.
By August, you're going to be in a freezer in a feed store outside Big Spring.
By Thanksgiving, somebody's going to be eating you for dinner. "
His mouth opens. Nothing comes out.
"You don't get a grave, Asher. You don't get a marker. You don't get anybody mourning you. You get eaten. That's what you bought yourself when you came for my woman."
His eyes are still on mine.
I stand up.
Phantom hands me his pistol. Mine still has rounds. His is a forty-five. Heavier round. "Finish him."
I put the forty-five against the center of Asher Addison's forehead, look him in the eyes, and I pull the trigger.
His body goes still on the concrete.
The barn is quiet for a long second, then Phantom puts his hand on my shoulder. Once. Squeezes. "It’s done."
Roan walks over to the body, looks down at it, and doesn't speak for a while.
I haven’t really taken a moment to think how this is for him. Kane used to be his friend, or Asher, or whatever the fuck we should call him.
Then he crouches down and closes the dead man's eyes with his thumb. "Goodbye, Kane."
Banshee, at the back door of the barn: "Cash is on the radio. The wife's been dealt with. Cash's man is in the kitchen with her now."
"Tell Cash to take his time," Phantom says. "Make sure she hears him. Make sure she knows what happens if she opens her damn mouth."
"Yes, Prez."
Cash himself walks in through the front door of the barn a minute later.
He looks at the body on the concrete. Looks at me. Looks at Phantom. "Hogs are out behind the barn."
"How long do you need?" Phantom asks.
"Two hours. My boys have done it before. We'll process him here, run him through the chipper out back, feed him in pieces. The hogs'll do the rest by morning. She’s already called his crew and told them not to come in, that Asher died in an accident. I watched her do it and then took her phone."
"And the property?"
"My boys clean the barn. Bleach. Power-wash the concrete. By tomorrow afternoon there's nothing here."
Phantom nods. "All right. We’ll get out of your way. You handle it."
We walk out of the barn the way we walked in, through the live oaks and back to the trucks.
Roan drives his F-350 back to the clubhouse. Phantom drives ours. I'm in the passenger seat. Banshee in the back.
Nobody talks for the first hour.
Around Sweetwater, Phantom looks at me as we pull off an old back road and rip the wrap off the truck. "Spur."
"Yes, Prez?"
"You good?"
"I'm good."
"You sure?"
"I told her I'd come home to her, Prez. I’m pretty damn sure it can’t get any better than that."
He nods and we get back in the truck.
I look out the window at the brush country going by in the late afternoon light.
The mesquite is throwing long shadows now. The sun is coming down behind the western horizon.
We pull through the gate of Sharp at sundown.
The whole property is on the porch of the main house. Marlena at the door with Cal on her hip. Grace beside her with Waylon. Bex sitting on the porch swing with a coffee. And Dakota at the top of the porch steps in jeans and one of my flannels, her hair loose down her back.
I get out of the truck before Phantom has it in park.
I cross the gravel, climb the porch steps two at a time.
She's already coming to me.
I catch her against my chest. Her arms go around my neck and her face goes into my throat.
She's not crying, she's holding on, the way a woman holds on to a man who came home to her when she didn't know if he would. "Spur."
"Yeah, baby."
"It's done?"
"It's done."
She holds me tighter.
Banshee finds Bex on the swing.
I lift Dakota off her feet and carry her into the main house and up the stairs to the back bedroom.
I close the door behind us.
Asher Addison is in pieces in a hog pen a few counties away. The Lyle family is in this house, all in one piece. My woman is in my arms.
I lay her down on the bed and climb in beside her without taking my boots off, and we hold onto each other.
Neither of us speaks for a long time, but we don’t need to.
This is the only damn thing we need right here.