Epilogue #2
He never saw it coming.
There was a loud bang.
Then complete and utter silence.
Who the fuck was that?
And when the fuck did he climb into my trunk?
I had more questions than answers, but I knew I couldn’t let this fucker just… waltz away after he watched me off someone.
I moved out of the treeline, arm raised, gun aimed on the guy as he straightened.
He was tall, lean-fit, and wearing a black tee and black jeans. A silver chain hung from his neck, but I couldn’t make out the medallion on it.
He had an angular face, dark eyes, and black hair that was dripping with sweat from being inside the hot trunk.
“Didn’t think you’d mind the assist,” he said, kicking the body of the man that had fallen into his own car so that he fell to the ground with a sick thump. “Couldn’t imagine you would have managed to get him without a risky shootout.”
“Who the fuck are you?”
He’d set his gun down, but I didn’t dare lower my arm.
He held out his arms and shot me a devilish grin.
“Spiro.”
“Is that supposed to mean something to me?”
“Not yet, but it will.”
“We’re standing here over two dead bodies. I’m not in the mood for fucking games, Spiro.”
“Call Huck.”
How the fuck did he know Huck?
And if he knew Huck, why didn’t Huck mention him to the club?
“I don’t bring my phone to a crime scene.”
“Oh, right. Yeah. I think I’ve got my burner in here… somewhere.” He turned to dig around in the trunk before producing a phone, which he tossed in the air, sensing I wasn’t about to get close to him.
I kept my arm out to dial so I could watch his every move, but all he did was stand there and watch me as I pulled the phone to my ear.
“Hello?”
“Huck,” I said.
“York?”
“Who the fuck is Spiro?”
“Spiro?” he asked, not sounding confused. “He’s from the prison in Shady Valley. Slash was sending him our way for consideration. Why?”
“Because he was in my fucking trunk.”
“He… what?”
“Yep. Hiding in my trunk and popped out to put a bullet in one of the guys’ heads.”
“Christ. Alright. Well. I guess he’s in on this. Get this done and get back here.”
“I’m supposed to trust him?”
“You got bodies together. You’d better hope you can trust him.”
Huck hung up and I sighed and slammed the phone as hard as I could toward the ground.
Spiro looked at the phone as I stomped my heel on it and shrugged. “Guess I didn’t really need that. So, are you gonna help me get this body in the trunk, or…”
He was already bending down and sliding his arms under the dead guy’s arms.
Which meant he had no way to reach for his weapon.
I tucked mine away, took his, then grabbed the guy’s legs.
I went for the other body as he fished around in the guy’s pockets, producing the wallet, phone, and a set of keys.
“You shouldn’t be touching that shit without gloves.”
“Right. You’re the clean-up guy. I’ll wipe it before I toss it in a mailbox,” he said as he thumbed through the wallet, grabbing all the cash and shoving it in his back pocket. “I’ll wipe down the phone, too, before I reset it and recycle it.”
Alright.
So maybe he did know what he was doing.
“Grab these legs. We have a lot of work to do tonight.”
With that, we loaded up the bodies, then I forced Spiro to drive with me out to the swamps, finding a spot with a high gator population. We backed up near the water, opened up the trunk, and swung each body between us and tossed them into the water.
Once the water started splashing and the bodies were pulled under the water, we nodded to each other, slammed the trunk, climbed back in the car, and drove back to the house.
“What are we doing with the car?” he asked as I searched through it to make sure there was nothing about Runa, Denali, Sonny, or Runa’s grandfather inside.
“Pulling it behind the house and leaving it here. This place is in foreclosure. It’ll probably be a few months before anyone happens out here. By then, the bodies will be good and gone. As would any possible evidence.
He nodded at that.
“Think the water is still on?” he asked, walking over toward the hose wound up on a wheel near the corner of the driveway.
“I’m counting on it.”
Spiro cranked the tap, and it sputtered to life.
As I moved the car, he picked up shells, washed the blood into the ground, then rinsed down the tarp and folded it while singing some random-ass song I hadn’t heard in a decade.
Once we were both satisfied, we shared a look and climbed back in the car.
On the way back to Shady Valley, Spiro had me stop in three separate towns—one to donate the tarp to an unhoused man, one to drop the wiped-down wallet into a mailbox, and one so he could drop the cell phones into a recycling box at an electronic store.
Huh.
Maybe Slash was right in sending him down here to us.
“Why Golden Glades?” I asked when we pulled into the lot in Miami where some old friend of Huck was going to strip and crush Runa’s car.
“What do you mean?”
“Why Golden Glades instead of Shady Valley?”
“Have you seen Shady Valley? Landlocked small town in the middle of nowhere. I want to be on a beach, peeling bikinis off a new girl every day. Not creating a rotation of the same small-town girls and shooting pool or drinking at the only bar in town.”
“I see your point,” I agreed. “Though Golden Glades isn’t exactly a big town either.”
“It’s close enough to one.”
“Fair. Ready to meet Huck?”
“He’s gonna love me,” Spiro boasted with a devilish smirk.
The thing was… I was pretty sure that was the case.
Runa - 3 months
“I love it,” I told Teddy as we toured one of the buildings he and his team had come up with that they thought might work for the site of a future women’s shelter.
“It needs a lot of work, I’ll admit,” Teddy said, turning in a circle. “But you’ll soon have the money. And I don’t think any of the other locations will be as protected as this one.”
He was right. It was at the end of a dead-end road with no access to the back of the building, thanks to a large lake.
Sure, if someone was determined enough, they could come across the lake to access the building.
But that was where a tall, unscalable fence came in.
I wouldn’t want open-access to the water anyway, if kids were going to be around.
“And there is a lot of room out back for play equipment,” I agreed. “What was this place again?”
“Some sort of factory. It’s built well. The brick walls work in its favor, even if it’s going to take a lot to turn it into the little apartments you are aiming for.”
“If I’m going to do it, I want to do it right. There is such a need for these places. And for places to stay that feel like a home, not a shelter.”
“It’s an amazing project. And you will have more than enough money soon enough.”
Teddy had been invaluable navigating this whole process of figuring out how to handle the rare earth mineral rights, how I would even handle that much money, where I could invest, and how to save.
It was enough to make my head spin. Me, who never had more than a few thousand dollars at a time in my life.
But Teddy had a lifetime of experience with even more money than I would ever have. He was able to break down the complications into simple terms and ease my fears.
And he wasn’t pushy.
He was as rich as God, but he still worked hard at creating more wealth.
Yet he understood that my path was different.
Sure, I wanted money for Denali, and maybe even Denali’s kids.
But I wanted to dedicate a large chunk of this found money to things to help women like the one I had been for so many years.
This would just be the first of the many projects I had planned all across the United States.
“This is the one. I can feel it. Let’s try to lock it down.”
“You know,” Teddy said as we made our way back out of the building, “you still haven’t talked to me about any of the houses I found for you and your family.”
“I know. I’m having a hard time making that decision.”
We’d mostly been staying in the apartment York had rented out—one, cute, happy little family in enough space for us for the time being.
We had months left on the lease. Plenty of time to figure out what we were going to do next.
York and I had been batting around ideas for staying until the school year was up, then taking Denny on a cross-country road trip.
We could buy a nice camper so she didn’t have to sleep outside.
We could visit a bunch of the national parks, tourist attractions, and random towns that were always packed with things to do.
She was young, sure. But old enough, I felt, to remember a lot of the experiences. Or, at the very least, enjoy it in the moment.
And, yes, in doing so, I would get to reacquainted with a part of myself I’d needed to set aside to take care of a baby on my own.
“You might be putting too much pressure on it. You don’t have to commit to a house forever, you know. You can change your mind every year or five years if you want.”
“That’s true. But Denny has known so much instability in her life. I want there to be something constant for her.”
“I can understand that,” Teddy agreed as we made our way to his town car.
“I will let the lawyers know your plan,” he said, since I decided to use his lawyers to keep things simple.
“They should start mining for the minerals in the next three months. I very much doubt anyone will try to buy this before then.”
“I do have some money now, if they are being difficult.”
The rocks that had been taken out of Sonny’s truck (and the shed full of them on his property) equaled more than enough money to buy the building. But I was anxious about spending anything until I was sure things with the ranch would go as we planned.
“I think we can schmooze the owners into waiting.” By that he meant that he could. Because the name Theodore Kane, the Third, held a hell of a lot of weight in Florida.
“Thanks, Teddy. You’re the best.”
“It’s nothing.”
It was always “nothing,” when he did something for someone in the club. I understood he had a lot of history with Huck and the OG guys, but the generosity of his spirit truly had no bounds.