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  Brian put a hand on Nash’s shoulder and spun him, slapped cuffs over his wrists, and walked him out of the cell.

  CHAPTER 10

  Jacy wasn’t cuffed, but the back of the patrol car was a fortress in miniature. Unescapable.

  Nash kept his eyes out the window, watching the light die over the low hills and unkempt yards. He stared back in time.

  Brian glanced at them through the rearview. “I take it you didn’t know, did you, girly?”

  Jacy turned to her stepbrother. Dried blood caked his upper lip and chin. It looked black in the dusky light coming through the window.

  “I thought everybody around here heard the story,” Brian said. “Or maybe you heard it, just didn’t want to believe it. Didn’t want to think he could kill a man in cold blood.”

  But he was wrong. She wanted to believe it. She wanted it to be true and that’s why she called Nash to come get her. If things went haywire, she wanted the man who could kill the right person if that person needed killing. She’d underestimated how haywire things could go, though.

  “Well, don’t you two worry none. You’ve reached the end of the line. Our time together has come and gone.”

  Brian steered the cruiser down a long, bumpy driveway. A house crawled out of the long shadows and stood in relatively good condition for the area. A cluster of cars was parked on the gravel, some on the grass. A large barn stood off to the side, unused for livestock anymore, but not crumbling into kindling the way most barns were that dotted the landscape for miles around.

  On the other side of the house, a field of green stretched out and Jacy recognized the crop as marijuana. Tall plants in neat rows.

  The police car didn’t run sirens, the lights weren’t on. Brian calmly brought it to park behind a pickup truck Jacy recognized. She’d seen it before at Robin’s house when Evel climbed out of it.

  “What are we doing here?” she asked. She threw a look over to Nash who brought his gaze away from the window now that the view had gone still.

  “I’m releasing you,” Brian said. “Into someone else’s custody, like we said. I’m done with you.”

  Two men stepped down off the front porch, each with a handgun drawn and hanging by their hips. Brian powered down his window. “Tell him I’m here.”

  Brian opened his door, looked into the backseat and said, “Well, let’s go.”

  Evel awaited them inside, seated in a reclining chair. His refusal to stand was his statement to both Brian and his new house guests. They were in his house, where he was king of the castle. A castle built on the bones of meth-addicted teenagers and hard-luck truckers just looking to stay awake long enough to not die in bed.

  Nash counted four armed men, two of whom he recognized from the shootout at Robin’s house. How they got away when the police arrived made perfect sense.

  Brian unlocked the cuffs on Nash’s wrists.

  “How much does he pay you to stay out of his business?” Nash asked, turning to Brian. “Because I bet he set the price. And it was lower than what you asked for.”

  Brian ignored him. “They’re all yours.” He gave a two-finger salute and turned to go back out the door.

  “You bastard,” Jacy said. “You let him do your dirty work? How much of a fucking coward are you? You rape a teenage girl in her bed and you don’t even have the decency to finish the job yourself.”

  Brian paused in the doorway with his back to her. Evel laughed, clapped his hands once. “Oh, shit.”

  Brian twisted his neck, popping the joints, then continued back to his car.

  “You piece of shit!” Jacy called after him.

  Nash kept his focus on Evel.

  Evel smiled. “Well, fuck. We meet again. Seems our last get together was a bit interrupted. And as much as I want to hear more about this teenager sex, I got plans to make. The sheriff sorta sprung this little gift on me with short notice.” Evel stood. “Bobby, watch ’em.”

  One of the gunmen from the afternoon turned his body toward Jacy and Nash, set his feet shoulder width apart, and stood guard.

  Nash could hear Evel in the next room.

  “Call Earl, see if he can take ’em at his place.”

  “Why not do ’em here?” one of Evel’s gunmen asked.

  “Because this is a place of business, and my home. I don’t want no fuckin’ bodies junkin’ up my yard. You see any rusty junkers out there? Any piles of scrap wood or old toilets? No. I aim to keep it that way. This is a respectable goddamn drug empire.”

  Nash couldn’t tell if Evel was being sarcastic or not.

  He looked at Jacy. Her body hung loose, a feather about to be blown over in the wind. She’d given up. He saw it in her face, the blank stare.

  “We’re not dead yet,” Nash said.

  Jacy turned a slow eye to him.

  “Aren’t we?”

  CHAPTER 11

  Martha’s insides clenched into a tight ball the way they always did when she heard the screen door creak the alarm that he was home.

  Third time’s a charm, they said. You can’t marry three assholes in a row, they said. He’s a good man, he is a sheriff after all, they said.

  Husband number one, Nash’s dad, spent nine unremarkable years married to Martha until he realized you could order up an Asian bride through the mail. Then he left her and drove directly to the airport to meet Lee Nguyen and start over as if Martha, and their son, had never existed.

  Jacy’s dad, Buck, had seemed like a good one. Dependable. Employed most of the time. Until the day Brian had him arrested and sent to prison for trafficking in narcotics and possession of child pornography. Goes to show, you never really know someone.

  A lesson she didn’t learn soon enough after Buck because she fell right into bed with the big, bad sheriff who saved her from that villain.

  At least Buck never hit her, never used a badge to bully even his own wife.

  And whatever had been going on with Jacy…Martha felt a deep shame that she never did a thing about it. She never knew how bad it got, kept her head in the clouds and figured Jacy was the toughest kid she’d even known and if things got out of hand, she’d deal with it herself.

  A goddamn coward she was.

  Brian didn’t come into the kitchen. He went straight for Jacy’s room, started making a hell of a racket in there.

  She pushed aside her empty Oxy bottle, the label mocking her with a smeared pen marking zero under the refills. She took her lighter and her half pack of smokes with her.

  “Whacha looking for?” she asked from the doorway. Brian had Jacy’s bedspread off, the mattress set askew. Top drawers in her desk and dresser were open.

  “You seen Jacy’s laptop?”

  “No,” Martha said, crossing her arms. “You seen Jacy?”

  Brian stood straight, turned to her for the first time and gave her a don’t give me any lip, woman stare.

  “I’m hoping if I find it, it can help me find her.” He went back to dismantling the room. “She was involved in a shootout this afternoon. At a house known for drug use.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “She was. And guess who else was there?” He didn’t leave her time for any guesses. “That son of a bitch Nash.”

  “You know when you say that, you’re calling me the bitch.”

  He turned away from Jacy’s dresser, a handful of her underpants in his hand like a clump of weeds he’d pulled from the ground. “Well, if the bitch fits…”

  “What are you really looking for?”

  “I told you,” Brian turned to Jacy’s desk and pulled out the top drawer, flipped it over to check under it. “Her laptop computer.” He pulled a small baggie of weed duct taped to the bottom of the drawer, held it up for Martha’s inspection. Proof her daughter wasn’t a saint.

  “But what’s on that computer? What could you possibly want with it?”

  “Her contacts, address book, Facebook friends. Stuff a cop would u
se to find a missing teenager. You do remember I am a cop, right?”

  “Among other things.”

  He slammed the side drawer of the desk with a crack. Straightened quickly and kept his back to Martha. “We gonna have a problem here?”

  “No. No problem here.” She put a cigarette in her mouth and spun the wheel on her lighter. “Tell you what, though. I hope she never does come home.” She drew a deep drag off the cigarette to get it going.

  “You may just get your wish, darlin’.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “Means if you don’t shut up and let me look around here, I may never find her. Or more like some farmhand come spring will find what’s left of her in a ditch swimming in a river of cow shit runoff.”

  He moved to her closet, shoved hanging clothes out of the way.

  “Whatever it is you did to her, you’re gonna pay. Maybe not in this life. But someday.”

  Brian turned to her, a level stare boring through her. For once, Martha didn’t shy away. She held the rock in her gut, swallowed it down, and prepared herself for whatever his fists had to say about it. But she wished her little girl would run and not stop.

  She exhaled a cloud of smoke. “Who’s the son of a bitch now?”

  Brian crossed the room in three bounding steps, led with his fist and pounded her in the face. She went straight to the floor of the hall, her cigarette crushed inside her mouth.

  The inside of her lip burned, but soon her scalp pulled the pain away and focused it. He dragged her back to the kitchen, hauled her up by the hair into the same chair she was sitting in when he came home, and pulled his handcuffs from his belt.

  He wedged her arms painfully behind her, clamped the cuffs too tight as he pinned her wrists to the metal back of the chair and attached her solidly in place. He pulled a mold-covered kitchen towel down off a hook over the sink and stuffed it in her mouth.

  “I warned you,” he said. Absolved and justified. In his mind, anyway.

  He walked back to Jacy’s room.

  Martha’s jaw ached as it hinged wider open than it was meant to go. Tears overflowed her eyes. Too little, too late for Jacy, but she felt good about saying something instead of continuing her years of saying nothing at all.

  Brian walked back into the kitchen a minute later, the grey shell of Jacy’s laptop tucked under his arm. He smiled at Martha as he crossed to the junk drawer, took out a hammer. He set the laptop on the table in front of her, didn’t say a word. He kept his eyes locked on hers as he smashed the computer to pieces. Blow after blow rattled the table. Chips of plastic casing sparked up and cut Martha’s cheeks.

  Letter keys scrambled nonsense on the tabletop and the microchip insides of the computer were revealed. Green circuit boards were broken down to the size of cereal flakes. The larger, metal-encased hard drive was harder for Brian to break through, but he got there, sweat falling from the end of his nose. His wild eyes never left Martha, even though she had to look away.

  CHAPTER 12

  Jacy looked at the man guarding them. Bobby might have been cute if it weren’t for the gun in his hand. He watched her, his jaw working a wad of gum, his eyes obviously playing out scenarios as he ran long looks over her body. She didn’t care anymore. Let him look. She’d be nothing but meat soon anyway.

  She turned to Nash who still stood. He looked like he was trying to match their guard in his solid stance. Really, he was listening.

  Jacy tried tuning it out, but Nash reached for every word coming from Evel in the next room. What he gathered was they were going to be killed, that was a certainty. Evel needed a place to put the bodies. He called three different numbers. Nash wouldn’t know what to dial the first time if he needed to dump a few fresh bodies. The first two people didn’t answer. The third did.

  A rock quarry, or some other large pit, was discussed. Nash got the idea Evel wanted to both hide them there and do it there. His desire to keep his home blood free seemed a high priority for him. At first it seemed a picky preference, but then Nash could see the attention to detail that made Evel the successful businessman he was. Each of the other muscle-headed goons in the house would have already bloodied the living room and been left with cleanup as well as disposal.

  Not that trace evidence was a concern, not with the endorsement of the local sheriff behind your assassinations.

  “I’m so sorry, Nash,” Jacy said.

  Nash kept his steel gaze on Bobby the guard. He knew their best chance was to make a move before the room got too crowded again. “What for?”

  Jacy scoffed, wiped away tears threatening to fall. “Oh, I dunno. For getting you killed I guess.”

  “I’m not dead. Neither are you.”

  Jacy picked at her fingernail, mumbling her answer. “For now.”

  “This one isn’t gonna kill us,” Nash said.

  The guard turned his eyes from Jacy to stare down Nash. “You willing to bet on it?”

  “Yes. I am.” Nash kept his eyes even, his stare hard. Bobby shifted his feet like he had an itch to scratch. Nash took a few slow steps toward the door and the row of nails driven into the wall he’d seen there, each with a different set of car keys on it. The inventory for the parking lot outside.

  “He’s not allowed to shoot us, Jace,” Nash said. “His boss doesn’t want it done here.”

  Jacy stopped chewing on her finger. She watched Nash, wondering if she should brace herself.

  Nash reached the wall. “He can’t do shit.”

  Bobby moved all over, staying in place, but his limbs wriggling like he was standing on a hot plate.

  “Like if I did this, for example.” Nash lifted a set of keys blindly from the hooks.

  “Nash, what are you doing?” Jacy hissed.

  “You know what stops most people from standing up for themselves? What stops them in the moment of decision?” He pocketed the keys. “They can’t get over the moment when there’s no going back, it’s only forward from then on out. Me? I’m good at that moment. I’ve been there before.”

  Bobby raised his pistol. “You put them keys back.”

  “Or what?” Nash asked. He moved forward, toward the gun. “You shoot me and you have to deal with Evel. You know better than I do what happens when you piss off the boss, but I’m guessing it ain’t good.”

  “You sit the fuck down.”

  Again Nash moved closer. Jacy pulled tighter into a ball in the chair.

  “Now’s your moment, man. Can you let everything else go? Can you forget all the consequences and not worry about what will happen ‘if’? See, for me, it’s move forward or die time.”

  The guard tightened his grip on the gun. “Sit. The fuck. Down.”

  Nash got to within an arm’s length of him, the gun barrel only inches from his face.

  “Maybe you’d like to start with her? She’s sitting down. Maybe you’ll only get blood on the chair.”

  “Nash,” Jacy said. “What the fuck?”

  Bobby moved his eyes to her, a busy decision playing in his head. Nash took his opening. He slapped the gun arm away with a backhand left, then drove the heel of his right hand up and into the guard’s nose. Warm blood filled Nash’s palm as Bobby’s nose caved in and he fell like his spine had been cut.

  Jacy unfolded herself and scrambled out of the chair.

  Nash kicked the gun out of the guard’s hand as the man started a primal roar, turned nasal from the broken nose.

  Nash tuned to Jacy. “Go.”

  Bobby’s scream sounded the alarm call to the others, but Nash already had the door open and Jacy was making her way through it, track-meet fast. Nash hit the wood planks of the front porch and looked out at the lawn and the seven cars parked there. He had no idea which keys he held in his pocket.

  “This way,” Jacy said, sensing his panic. She bolted for the barn and he followed.

  A dozen steps across the yard and the door behind them open
ed, spilling armed men with Evel in the middle of them yelling orders. Nash dug the keys from his pocket and checked them for any identifying marks or logos. The ram’s head of a Dodge was etched into the plastic of the key. He’d seen an orange Charger among the cars, but it was behind them now and four armed men stood between them and the vehicles.

  Evel’s rule about killing on his land had been preempted by their escape attempt. A shot blasted and kicked up a tuft of grass to Nash’s left, like an invisible golf club had wedged in from the rough.

  Jacy reached the barn first and pulled open the tall wood-plank door. Inside was not the sawdust and hay covered vision they expected. Nash pushed through the door behind his stepsister into a brightly lit space reeking of chemicals. Two rows of long tables held bubbling glass containers and burners were lit. Evel’s manufacturing lab.

  Jacy tried to take in the setup, her eyes bounding between the confusing array of tubing and equipment. She let go a tiny shriek when she saw an alien-looking figure in white, the face covered with a breathing apparatus and goggles.

  Nash saw the alien too, and he—the cook—spun to look at the intruders. Nash charged him, unsure of what defenses the lab had on tap for this kind of invasion. He tackled the man around the midsection, tearing open the full body jumpsuit as he rammed them both back into a long metal table.

  Glass crashed, flames spat, and Nash fell to the floor. Over his head he saw a flat blanket of flame shoot from a spill on the table. Flaming liquid hung in the air over him, dousing the cook as it splashed. Nash began crawling for the door.

  Jacy ducked into what used to be a horse stable when the flames began. A larger explosion chased her to the ground.

  Evel opened the barn door as the explosion lit the air. He and his crew all recoiled from the heat. The outside fresh air was drawn into the barn like an inhale as the fire spread.

  Nash kept low, heat pressing down from above. The cook flopped to the floor of his lab, his protective suit on fire.

  Nash made it to the doorway, saw Evel and his boys retreating from the flames outside. The heat began crawling up his back. Nash knew he couldn’t stay in the barn any longer, even in the open door with air rushing past him. Jacy was curled in the corner of the old stable. He held out a hand to her and she took it. They belly-crawled out the door, the dewey grass feeling good on their skin.