Chapter 29 #2
“My husband was a good man,” Elise said before Paul could continue.
“But he knew too much, and they couldn’t let him out with the information he had, so they killed an inmate and set him up to take the fall.
He got almost thirty years added to his sentence for something he didn’t do just to guarantee his silence.
We became collateral damage if he fucked up.
” She looked at Drew and shrugged at her cursing, letting him know he didn’t have to edit on her account.
“I have one question,” Drew said quietly.
“And that is?”
He exhaled heavily, turning his palms over and shaking his head. “Who the fuck is this they everyone keeps talking to me about?”
With one look at each other, both Elise and Paul rose from their seats.
“I think you’ll understand Clint’s letters better than we do.”
I frowned and watched as the two of them made their way toward to the house, their heads together as they discussed things quietly.
My gaze turned to Clint’s aging parents, the sadness emanating from the two of them so brutally that my fingers curled into Drew’s leg.
They didn’t say anything to us. Their eyes just rested on us as though they were waiting for a profound revelation of some kind.
One we couldn’t give.
When the sliding door to the house reopened, Paul appeared with a large box in one hand, the other helping his mother from the house as she carried a tray with two mugs and a mountain of food on it.
They approached quickly, Paul barely saying a word as he handed the box directly to Drew.
He turned to his grandparents, helping his grandmother from her seat with gentle concern, and huffing as the older gentleman batted his hand away when he tried to do the same for him.
Elise set the tray on a table and smiled at the exchange before straightening again. She was the chosen ambassador now.
“We’ll be inside if you need us. Please, if you need more coffee, feel free to come and get it.
Take all the time you need. We have to get back to everyone inside.
” She glanced to her son and in-laws. “I don’t know how much more help we can be, but anything at all you need from us, I will gladly give to help stop whoever the hell is behind all this. ”
I nodded, clasping the woman’s hand in both of mine before releasing her and keeping my silence as she rushed around the pool to follow her family inside.
“This keeps getting weirder and weirder,” I said to Drew as the door was pulled closed.
“You ain’t kidding.”
Drew opened the box to reveal a mountain of opened letters stacked on top of one another.
Some on white paper, some on blue, each one clearly having been read a hundred times already.
A yellow post-it note was stuck to the lid.
Drew pulled it out and scowled at the words that were scribbled on there.
“Upset equals set up,” he read aloud. “Bugs equals rat. What is this?” Drew scowled, handing it to me.
I studied the short list. It was like reading convoluted directions. Words meant certain things, and patterns indicated others. “This is how he got messages to them. He was giving them his secrets as insurance.”
“Because the letters are read before they leave Huntsville. He had to talk in code,” Drew breathed out as things slotted into place for him. “He knew Taylor would read his shit.”
“There have to be hundreds of letters here.” I looked into the box at the stack and back up at the one Drew had picked up.
Inside the box, there was a legal pad with a pen that the family had obviously used to decipher whatever secrets Clint had given them.
“Jesus, Drew. How deep does this shit go?”
“I don’t know. All we know is that what Helen Taylor told us about Jon, The Navs, and the Mayor was only the tip of the iceberg.
” He stared at me, his face ashen. “And I don’t know why, but I have a feeling that I’m in the center of all this, Ayda.
They were coming for me. Harry, Clint, and everyone else were collateral damage.
I know I don’t know that for sure, but there’s too much shit surrounding the club and me.
Everyone seems to know about it but me.”
I hated the thought of another sizable target being on his back; on our backs, but Drew wasn’t alone in this anymore.
The problem was we didn’t know why these ghosts were coming after him.
What reason was there to make him the center of this insanity?
What did he have that all these people wanted?
It couldn’t have been money. Most of his cash was tied up in the club.
He had power, but that wasn’t something you could take from him. It was natural.
I leaned over and picked up a random letter from the stack in the box, unfolding it carefully. The paper was thin and cheap—the note scrawled untidily in pencil. Some passages sounded like rambles, the handwriting untidy, and different to the rest of the letter in small, unobvious ways.
Holding the page out to Drew, I flattened it gently between us as I slipped the post-it from his fingers. I studied the thing for almost ten minutes before I managed to get something out of it, and even then, it only made half sense until I mixed it with some of the real facts in the letter.
“This can’t be right,” I said quietly. “Clint is saying they used the prison laundry to wash cash?”
Drew stared down at the letter. “It’s Huntsville, Ayda. You could tell me they were boiling babies in there, and I wouldn’t be surprised.”
I bent over to grab another letter and scanned it, handing it to Drew before diving in for another.
The ones I plucked out had some new information in along with some of the particulars Helen had fed to us.
The fact that Clint seemed to have a more detailed account meant that either Helen was holding back or Clint heard more while inside than he was ever meant to.
“Drew, this is insane.”
He was too lost in scanning letter after letter, searching for something neither one of us knew we were searching for. That intuition of his had taken over, and I knew he wasn’t going to stop until he found whatever it was he was looking for.
“Jon Taylor,” he said, placing down a letter.
“Mayor of Babylon. Mayor of Dawson, Mayor of Purdon, Mayor of Silver City, Mayor of Navarro Mills. No surprise there, but fuck.” He placed down a letter after he spoke each name, his movements getting quicker as he scanned line after line of Clint’s ramblings.
“Name after name of people Clint had seen in Huntsville, cozying up to Taylor and his men. I get there’s corruption in power, but what I don’t get is what I have to do with—”
All at once his face froze and his words caught in his throat.
Everything else fell away from him, except the one letter he was now clinging to with both hands, his fingers shaking around the edges and his face turning ghostly white as his eyes darted from left to right over and over again.
I leaned in closer, reading over his arm, scanning, scanning… my eyes flicking between the words and the cipher. Then I caught the first line of it, my eyes reading over and over and over again. The coffee and donut I’d eaten while searching the letters turned to acid in my stomach.
I don’t think I breathed for a full minute. Even out in the open, I couldn’t find enough oxygen to take a breath.
Drew turned to look at me, disbelief taking over, his lips parting and his eyes searching mine wildly, silently begging me to tell him he wasn’t seeing what he was seeing.
But it was there, and there was nothing I could say to make it untrue.
“Drew—”
“The Hounds,” he croaked. “My club. We have a fucking rat.”