Chapter 19 Phone Calls #2
“I don’t know, Aunt Elaine,” he retorted with deep sarcasm. “You think maybe her deathbed confession had something to do with it?”
Or the thirty years of bullshit and drama she put him and his father through before that happened.
“That makes her no less your mother,” she snapped.
“At least that’s true,” he muttered.
“She would be heavily disappointed in you, Ranger. Broken. Destroyed. This isn’t the son she raised.”
“She didn’t raise me,” he bit. “I was a toy. Sometimes her favorite. Sometimes she forgot I fuckin’ existed.”
“Don’t use that language with me, Ranger Hutchison.”
He’d had enough. “Good Christ, woman, you know the results of what she did. You know what I lost. What Dad lost. How you have the absolute fuckin’ gall to get up in my shit about her, I honest to Christ will never understand.”
“Well, at least I now understand why you refuse to come home to be with your family to remember what we lost,” she returned.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “At least you understand.”
“I’ll lay a rose on her grave for you,” she sniffed.
“Do whatever you want, but that rose is not from me. I know you won’t understand this, but I have enough feeling for the woman to say I’m glad you loved her so much. She didn’t deserve you either. But that’s all I got for my mother.”
“Lisa would be broken. Destroyed,” she repeated in a whisper.
Good, Hutch thought.
“Until we do this shit next year, have a great Thanksgiving, Christmas and a Happy New Year,” he said.
Then he hung up.
With a day to get on with, Hutch put that out of his mind, Blitz back in his pen and pulled out Major to work with.
He was heading inside to shower so he could pick up Mabel to take her to the sanctuary when his next call came.
Lug.
Probably to settle the day next week when he’d come out and put on the padded suit to be Hutch’s dogs’ prey when they went through attack drills with his clients.
“Yo, Lug,” he answered.
“Hutch, my man, something bizarre happened last night at The Link.”
Hutch stopped in his kitchen to listen to the answer after he asked, “What happened?”
“One of those guys, you know, the pseudo-Amish folk down the road?”
Hutch’s skin got tight. “Yeah, I know those guys.”
“Well, he strolls in last night, and everyone in the joint, all five of them, freaked. I did too. Not expecting that guy to walk into a drinking establishment.”
“No. Agreed. That’s unexpected.”
“So, see, this guy walks in, looks at the stage and then comes to me.”
“Yeah,” Hutch prompted, a creeping sensation slithering up his spine.
“And he asks if you’re singing that night.
I say no. He then asks if you’re singing tonight.
I said you weren’t on a schedule. You came when you came, and I didn’t know when the next time would be you were gonna come.
Then, seein’ as I wasn’t real thrilled he was asking about you, I asked what this was about, he requests I give you a message. ”
Fucking hell.
“Did he?”
“Yeah. He did. He said, ‘Tell him I’ve had words, it’s back under control. No more worries and our profound apologies.’ That gave me so many skeeves, I’m reading it to you right now because I wrote it down.”
Hutch said nothing.
“You know what that means?” Lug asked.
“I know what it means,” Hutch told him.
“Am I overreacting, or should I have the skeeves? You got problems with those people?”
“I did. But his message is meant to tell me I don’t anymore.”
“You wanna share what’s going on?”
Hutch mentally debated.
The Link was on Lug’s patch. Lug lived in a house just up from the shack where his daddy opened that bar. He didn’t have occasion to turn from the road into MP to head north and keep his eye on Mabel’s property.
But the man was on his patch. He was a friend. He’d run in a padded suit countless times and been taken down by one of Hutch’s dogs, and Hutch paid him for his time and trouble, but the lunatic enjoyed it anyway. Thought it was a hoot.
Still, not many men would do that. Even friends.
Hutch made a decision.
“Decoding his not very enigmatic message, I’m guessing he’s telling me one of his men went rogue in sharing through a note on Mabel’s welcome mat how he felt about the fact she was entertaining male company, that company being me.”
“The fuck?” Lug growled.
“Yeah.”
“Back under control,” Lug said. “So one of those fucks got his hand slapped.”
“At least,” Hutch replied.
“That’s good, right?”
It was, for Mabel.
But only if Enstrom—and he knew Lug’s visitor was Enstrom—actually could exert that control.
Enstrom could be a competent admiral.
Or this could be devolving into a Lord of the Flies situation.
“Let’s hope so,” he said to Lug.
“You want me to keep an eye?” Lug offered.
That was Lug.
Good people.
“On them. No. You have occasion to turn right rather than left and do a drive by Mabel’s every once in a while, I would owe you a marker. She’s right next door to them. North side.”
“Brother, I know you find what limited downtime you give yourself with a guitar in your hands and you don’t care where you’re playing it. But The Link would go bust if I didn’t have Hutch nights. You don’t owe me dick. I’ll keep an eye.”
“Thanks, man.”
“Don’t mention it. Later.”
“Later.”
They disconnected, and Hutch called Harry to tell him what Lug told Hutch.
“So rumor spreading around town is true,” Harry said. “You’ve shaken off that mess with Bree, and you’ve found somebody.”
Yes.
And no.
“She had a worse breakup than me before she hit Misted Pines, Harry. We’re feeling our way along.”
That wasn’t all the truth, but it was enough of it.
“I liked her when I met her,” Harry informed him. “Didn’t know at the time you two had hooked up, but thinking on it, she suits you. Though, gotta admit, Rus and I were wondering. When we met her, I gave her your name, and she didn’t mention she knew you.”
“Can we leave that at ‘it’s complicated?’”
“You don’t owe me any explanations, brother. We can leave it however you want.”
Good man, Harry.
“Speaking of Mabel, you know who runs the Misted Pines Community TikTok?” Hutch asked.
“No, but I can ask Meg. She’ll probably know.”
“Just tell her to tell whoever does it that they should get consent from the people they’re posting videos about.
They put up one of me and Mabel, and not only did Mabel’s ex find out where she lives now, something she didn’t want him to know, they didn’t blur out the faces of the minors they put on that video. ”
“Jesus, yeah,” he said irritably. “Not okay. And do we have a problem coming our way with Mabel’s ex?”
Hutch considered the annoying conversation he had with the man the day before.
“Likely,” he said. “Though, Mabel is no pushover. She’s done with his shit. And she has me.”
“Yeah.” Harry sounded a lot better. “She has you. At least we got some good news if Enstrom’s reined in a maverick.”
“Yeah,” Hutch agreed.
Just as long as it wasn’t Lord of the Flies.