Chapter 28
“Did you ever get shot?” Kim asked on the long drive back to town. “Hey, what’s so funny?”
“Nothing,
” Brendan replied, suppressing his laughter. “It’s just that there are always two groups of people,” he said, watching the sun dip down as night came on quick. “Scratch that. There’s really three groups. The first group don’t want to ask me anything about my time in the Marines. That’s people like my mom. They all have their reasons, and most are noble, like not wanting to induce PTSD and crap like that.
“The second group always want to know how many people I’ve killed, and a special segment of that group wants to know how I did it and what it was like. Those are the folks you want to steer clear of.”
“And the third group ask you if
you
got shot?” Kim asked.
“That’s right. Good job,” Brendan said, genuinely impressed. “I like to think that small group of people care about my wellbeing, and that’s where the question comes from.”
“I’m glad you’re still around.” She took his hand in hers over the center console. Her soft hands felt nice, but not so delicate that he worried about squeezing too hard or anything. “So answer the damn question,” she insisted.
“I didn’t get shot, but I did take a rock chip in my left shoulder. It would be kind of hard to show you the scar right now, since I’m driving and all.”
“You can show me later.”
Brendan had never pretended to be a smooth operator, or to understand the gentler sex, but even he was receiving the signals loud and clear. Kim was pretty, nice, and not stupid, and those were all positives in his book. Unfortunately, the misguided debauchery with her older sister hovered like a dark cloud over the space between them. Was it unfair not to tell Kim about it? Opening that can of worms was dangerous for a number of reasons, chiefly that she’d probably go telling people and Grant would find out. The next time Brendan saw his brother would be from the wrong end of a revolver, and that didn’t really seem worth it.
“You want to stop at Trish’s on the way home?” he asked.
“I really hate that place.”
“Got any better suggestions?” Like her apartment?
“We could go to
the Tavern.”
“I haven’t even heard of that place. Is it in Shallow Creek?”
“Yeah, it’s a newer bar not that far from my mom’s house,” she explained. “They try to be all Irish, but I doubt any pubs in Ireland keep three light beers on tap.”
“Those aren’t even beer in
this
country, if you ask me.”
“What do you like to drink?”
“Shiner, mostly, but I’ll drink most beers in a pinch,” he replied. “What about you? Fancy cocktails?”
“Yeah, sure. Try to find me a fancy cocktail anywhere in our little town,” she said. “I settle for a vodka tonic most of the time.”
“I’m not going to lie, I really hate vodka.”
“Then don’t sip my drinks.” She smiled, and the
twilight shadows gave her a dazzling, yet mischievous look.
They arrived in town in the evening, with the sun already long gone. Kim provided concise directions to the Tavern, holding Brendan’s hand the whole way.
Driving an automatic transmission definitely had its perks. Shifting manually all the damn time would’ve interrupted their physical bond as soon as they got off the state highway.
Just like Kim had described earlier, the bar owner had gone in for the Irish crap in a big way. The front fascia of the place had “The Tavern” illuminated in gaudy green neon stret
ching across the length of the building. Brendan had been here before, but it wasn’t a bar back then. He couldn’t remember the name of the old place, but he mentioned it to Kim.
“Yeah, it used to be a family restaurant,” she said. “You know, one that pretended we still live in a dry county.”
“Is that why it didn’t last?”
“No
. The food sucked.”
“Fair enough.”
Brendan held the door open and waved Kim through in as regal a manner as he could muster. They hadn’t even made it up to the bar before a random guy stepped in front of them with a bad attitude written all over his face, just above a series of leathery burn scars.
“What are you doing here with
this
guy?” the stranger demanded of Kim.
Brendan stepped up beside her.
“Watch how you talk to the lady.”
Kim put a hand on Brendan’s arm and shot him an exasperated look.
“Don’t worry, it’s just Brice.”
The ex.
“Okay, Brice, how about you move on?” Brendan urged. “I’m sure you’ve got friends here that miss you already.”
“Funny you should say that, Brendan
,” Brice said with a smugness ripe for a punch in the face. Brendan immediately tensed up as he realized this punk knew him somehow. “You’ve moved on pretty fast yourself.”
“What is he talking about?” Kim asked, confused.
Brendan had a good idea from the shitty look in the guy’s eyes. Kim had mentioned this tool lived in Michelle’s neighborhood.
“We should go,” Brendan said, taking Kim’s hand.
“No,
you
should go,” Brice said, obviously loving every minute.
Would Kim forgive him if he pounded her ex unconscious?
“Brice, what’s going on here?” Kim asked again.
“Your new friend here left your sister’s place yesterday morning,” Brice said. “Real early in the morning.”
“So what? They’re old friends.” God bless her for defending him, but Brendan had a nasty premonition about where this was going to end up.
“It’s not weird that an old
friend
would stay over when her husband’s out of town?” Brice asked.
“That doesn’t mean anything. It’s not like they slept together.”
Kim looked him right in the eye in that moment, and Brendan just couldn’t keep his face as deceptively neutral as it needed to be. How had years of interrogation training not prepared him for such a simple lie?
It was game over.
“Oh my—”
The last word was muffled by Kim snatching her hand from Brendan’s and covering her mouth. Was it too late to smash Brice’s teeth in?
“Are you fucking kidding me, Brendan? After all this shit with you pretending to like me?”
“That was
yesterday.” Brendan knew it was lame, but he didn’t have any other legs to stand on.
“Oh, so that makes it okay? No, don’t answer that. We’re done here.”
And there she stood, arms folded tight, chin up, but wavering slightly. He’d really done a bad thing here. She’d liked him and he’d let her down right as she’d dropped her guard.
“I can drive you home—”
“You are nuts if you think I’m getting back in that truck with you. You need to go.”
This was music to Brice’s ears. He perked up as he probably figured his odds of scoring just skyrocketed.
“Fine, just do me a favor and don’t sleep with this limp dick junkie.”
“You
don’t get to tell me what to do.” She turned and stomped off towards the brightly lit restrooms.
“That was a dick move,” Brice said, now that the two men were alone.
“You just made a big mistake.” Brendan lunged towards the smaller man.
Brice backpedaled into the bar so hard that he knocked a few shot glasses clean off the backside with his flailing arm. Before Brendan could say anything else, the bartender, a graying old man with a funny Irish hat on, came to say he’d call the cops if Brendan so much as touched one of his best customers.
It wasn’t worth the trouble. Brendan backed down and stormed out into the night.
Chapter 29
A second set of fifty pushups drew to a close and Brendan was still pissed. He’d spent most of the night tossing and turning and punching his pillow, but now even his old trick of working out
to vent the frustration had little effect. Normally after one hundred pushups all anger and consternation fled with the rest of his pent-up energy. Apparently this was all too heavy to wash away with physical exertion. He sat with his back against the wall and banged his head against it.
He’d already beaten himself up mentally over whether or not he should’ve tried harder to lie to Kim and defend his name. The back and forth was fruitless, though. At the end of the day, she needed to know, so it was probably best to get it all over and done with now, rather than breaking her heart even more
at a later date.
But more importantly, how the hell did Brice know about Brendan staying over with Michelle, yet Grant apparently still had no idea? If Brice was so willing to tell Kim about it, surely he’
d told others.
Man, he should probably just pack up his things and leave town again. This
could get real ugly, real fast.
There was still the slim possibility that his brother
really didn’t know. If so, then maybe it was a perfect opportunity to skip town. Why stay on the beach when the category 5 hurricane is roaring past the seawall? The smart money was on leaving.
Brendan snuck out of Grant’s old room and scoured the house looking for his mom’s phone. Eventually he found it wedged between one of the couch cushions and the armrest. His phone didn’t have Grant’s number in it, but his mom’s
would. He touched the button to light up the screen and wasn’t prompted for a password. That made sense; his mom would never be able to remember a password anyway, so why bother?
The secondary benefit of using his mom’s phone to call his brother was that Grant
wouldn’t screen a call from his dear mother. Brendan touched the screen to initiate the call, and then waited through a few painfully long rings before his brother answered.
“Hey Grant. It’s Brendan.”
“Oh, hey there,” Grant said amiably enough. “Good to hear from you, but I’m kind of busy right now. I’ve got to get a bunch of stuff packed for this road trip. Customers hate it when I’m late.”
“Sure, okay.
” Brendan felt relieved for the first time in twelve hours. “When are you leaving?”
“In a few hours, around noon probably,” his brother
said. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do you want to know?” Brendan had no reply to that. “Do you need help with something? I can push the time back a little if I need to.”
“No, no. Nothing like that,” Brendan said hurriedly. “Was just curious, that’s all.”
“Okay, man. Cool. You still going to be in town when I get back?”
“Unless you’re heading to the Arctic or s
omething, I should still be here.”
“Sounds good. I’ll see you later.”
With that, Grant ended the call and Brendan collapsed onto the couch. He now had two options. Either he could bail out of Shallow Creek and wait for his family to be ripped apart by this inevitable drama, or he could keep pushing on with his meth investigation. Regarding the latter, he didn’t have much to go on. Kim suspected that Grant had a hand in it, and the fact that he made a legitimate career out of peddling chemicals seemed so obvious that it couldn’t possibly be true.
Grant had mentioned he had some customer visits to make in a few hours. Brendan hadn’t tailed anyone in a while,
and this seemed like a good opportunity to refresh his skills. Hell, the activity might help clear his overburdened mind. And what was the harm? Grant was probably doing exactly what he’d said, dropping in on his clients.
And if not? If his
brother wasn’t the freaking angel that everyone thought he was, would that lessen the blow on Brendan when the shit finally hit the fan? Wishful thinking, but it was enough to get Brendan off the couch and hunting for his pants and a clean shirt.
As he dressed, he ran through a few options in his head for how to proceed.
Grant would probably recognize Brendan’s truck, since he saw it at the bar on Sunday night, so he’d need to get some new wheels. The family vehicles were all out of the question, and he didn’t really know anyone else well enough to ask to borrow their car or truck for an undisclosed purpose, so that left him needing a rental car. There were only two such establishments in town that he knew of, so he pulled out his phone to search the Internet for more information.
He just hoped he wouldn’t have to take a crappy little rental Hyundai off
-road.
Chapter 30
The non-smoking rental pickup stank of stale cigarettes and staler body odor. Each little bump in road flustered the worn-out shocks and twisted chassis into an orchestra of creaks and thuds. This Ford Ranger had certainly seen better days, but it hadn’t given Brendan any
serious grief yet.
That said, umpteen passersby had stopped to ask if he needed any help. An ailing old truck sitting at the side of the road with the hood up wasn’t that uncommon around town, but Brendan had forgotten this was the kind of place where people would actually stop to offer assistance. As he waited for his brother to pull out of his neighborhood through the only exit, Brendan now worried he’d attracted too much attention already. He definitely had a lot to learn about being slick
in the civilian world.
After convincing
the eighth Good Samaritan that he had his broken-down truck under control, Grant’s shiny new red pickup eased out onto the road. Brendan slammed the hood down and jumped in, stumbling around in his haste to get the vehicle in gear. Of course the only one the rental place had left was a stick shift. Why wouldn’t it be? Brendan hadn’t driven one in about five years, but it came back to him one jolty gear change at a time.
Brendan followed Grant as the road
out of town merged onto the highway. At lunchtime on a Tuesday traffic flowed at a reasonable pace, so the Ranger didn’t stick out like a sore thumb as Brendan managed his distance. For the sake of this surveillance exercise, Brendan assumed Grant was dirty. As such, he’d probably be fairly vigilant for tails, so riding his bumper wasn’t the best plan.
Grant’s right turn signal
blinked on about thirty minutes later. Brendan started slowing down way early, trying to build the gap between them. The red pickup disappeared from view behind a row of tall bushes lining the road. By the time Brendan made the turn, Grant was a fair ways down the perfectly straight pavement. A number of small farms and ranches zipped by on either side as Brendan kept his distance.
A work truck pulled out in front of him, providing some cover between him and his brother. Not even half a mile later, the
random truck turned onto a dirt road and disappeared in a cloud of dust. Up ahead, Grant’s brake lights flashed on and he subsequently whipped onto the next turnoff.
It had been a dry year, Brendan guessed, because he didn’t need any fancy radar or satellite assistance to track his brother. The plume of brown dust spewing from the truck’s tires could be seen a mile away.
Unfortunately, that the trick went both ways. Grant could see him too if he chose to turn around.
Brendan pulled over at the end of the paved road and waited. These little country roads typically didn’t lead to many different places, so chances were good he’d be able to work out Grant’s location without too much trouble.
While he sat idle, his brain still spun. Grant had said he did a lot of customer site visits. Well, these farmers were probably his customers, so that story more than likely held water. On the other hand, if someone wanted to participate in illegal activities, there weren’t many spectators or witnesses out here in the sticks.
One man’s paranoia was another man’s common sense, and now that Brendan saw the lay of the land, perpetrating a drug deal in the middle of nowhere made a lot of sense.
He got out of the truck and stood up on the rocker panel to get a view over the top of the short trees blocking his view of the dirt road his brother was traversing. Well off in the distance he saw the cloud of dust shift and head to his left. The small pair of binoculars he’d stolen from his dad revealed the roof of a big barn off down that way, so Brendan guessed his brother was heading there.
He didn’t have to wait long for his suspicions to prove correct. The dust cloud settled over by the buildings.
They stood probably a solid three miles from his current location, and there was no way he was driving his rental down there. They’d see him coming immediately, if anyone cared to watch. Instead, he got back in his truck, drove past the entrance to the side road, and then ditched the truck behind some big bushes sitting just back from the pavement. He’d hidden vehicles more proficiently in his past life, but honestly, the traffic on these little farm roads was light enough that he doubted anyone would notice it, and even if they did, why would they care? It was out of plain sight for anyone approaching from the same direction Brendan had come, and that was the only way in from the main highway.
His boots crunched loudly on the caliche as he jogged down to where he estimated his brother had turned off. The noise stood out like a fart in church, but he knew it was just an illusion caused by the
prodigious silence. The lack of ambient sound really got to some people, but these country folk relished it. Moving to the city would be like having elephants trample through their house all day long.
It was a nice day for a jog, but the dry dust eventually clogged his throat
. His time in the sandbox now seemed even better spent. Who’d have thought running around in Desolation, Afghanistan would help him sneak up on his brother in the middle of Nowhere, Texas?
He found the turnoff easily
since it was the only turn, right where the road dead-ended. A peek around the tall grass running along the barbed wire fence revealed a straight shot up a dirt road to a large barn and a farmhouse. Both were offset to one side of the road, so he could probably get halfway down the path before he needed to climb the fence and cut through the fields to avoid detection.
Ah, to hell with it. He darted across the road entrance and hopped the fence into some tall
, dried grass. Apparently the landowner didn’t keep up with his fields, because even Brendan could tell they looked rough and neglected. He trudged along, keeping low to the ground, and staying close to the fence, which gave him an easy reference point for his location.
When he eventually ran out of field and found himself looking at the
barbed wire fence dividing his field from the buildings dead ahead, he paused and counted six vehicles, including his brother’s truck. That meant quite a few people were around. He couldn’t see or hear any, which was strange, because the place wasn’t that big. A shiny new tractor stood at attention outside the main doors to the barn, but it didn’t even look used.
Brendan kept watch from a low crouch until he was satisfied no one was outside. After taking a few steps slowly away from the fence, to get more grass cover in front of him, Brendan cut to his right and
then followed the fence around to get a view of the back side of the barn. All was clear, so Brendan settled in to wait, something his time in Force Recon had taught him well. The first time they’d done extended reconnaissance training, him and a buddy had traded twelve-hour shifts for days, lying perfectly still, not even moving to piss. And all they had to do was watch. Most people would think that was easy enough, but try watching the same damn thing for twelve-hours every damn day.
Afternoon
gradually turned into evening, and finally Brendan spotted someone. A lone man exited a small side door near the back of the barn and lit a cigarette. He stood close enough that the faint hints of secondhand smoke eventually reached Brendan’s nostrils. After a few rapid puffs, the man ground out his nicotine fix on the ground and went back inside. When the door opened, Brendan didn’t see any kind of internal locking mechanism, not even a latch for a padlock, like the outside of the door had. Over the next few hours, while night drew close, the same man repeated this process every fifteen to twenty minutes. Having established this routine, Brendan skirted around so that now he was looking directly at the back of the barn.
From this perspective, Brendan had a clear view of the space between the farmhouse and the barn. No electrical cables ran overhead between the buildings, so either they’d taken the extraordinary measures to bury them, or they hadn’t hooked up any power in the barn. That would mean no alarm inside the barn either, unless they used a battery-operated
, wireless setup.
Brendan
lay down in the grass and waited for night to fall completely, praying no copperheads or scorpions decided to check him out. Humbly asking his brother to call an ambulance for him wouldn’t look too good right now.