Page 13 of The Bad Brother
Dropping my hands away from her shoulders, I move for the door. “What’s going on?”
Crossing my cramped living room in a handful of long-legged strides, I head out my open front door to the top of the stairs to find Cade standing at the bottom of them. When he sees me, he lets out a long, relieved breath. Aiming an over the shoulder look in the direction of the bar’s backdoor, he lifts his fingers to his mouth to let out a loud, shrill whistle. “He’s here,” he shouts before looking back at me with a frown. “What the fuck, Jen—you forget how to answer your phone?”
My phone?
I used it to call 911 last night but don’t remember where it went after that.
Shit.
“I don’t know where it is,” I admit, coming down the stairs, River hot on my heels. “Now, someone want to tell me what the fuck is happening?” When I say it a little louder than necessary more than a few disapproving looks turn in my direction.
“And what the hell are they doing?” I whisper yell while flinging an irritated arm in the direction of the bar because there are about thirty middle-aged women in rubber gloves, scrubbing tabletops and sweeping up glass.
“They heard what you did for the crash survivors over at Dave Gaston’s place and?—”
“Jesus,” I bark out before I can stop it, swiping a rough hand over my face to smother the curse. The last thing I need is to incur the wrath of the Barrett church lady brigade. “Sorry…” Offering a grimace to the few who heard me, I drop my hand on a sigh. “Well, make them leave.”
“The fuck I will,” Cade refuses, making no attempt to curb his language or his volume. A decade ago, he wasBarrett’s golden boy. Now, you’d be hard pressed to get any of them to even look at him. He’d have to do a helluva lot more than drop a few F-bombs to get them to acknowledge his existence. “This place hasn’t been deep cleaned inyears—you did a nice thing. Let them do a nice thing back.”
“I didn’t do it to be nice,” I gripe back while bending down to snap a wad of bar napkins off the floor.
“Then whydidyou do it?” Cade counters, arms crossed over his chest.
Because people died and those lucky enough to walk away had had their entire lives ripped apart in the blink of an eye. Someone had to do something and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be that cheap bastard, Dave Gaston.
“Because he’s a good guy,” River says, from her perch on the stairs behind me. “Whether he wants to be, or not.”
I’m really not.
Instead of arguing, I drag a slow, deep breath in through my nose before letting it out. When I’m relatively sure I’m not going to knock their heads together like a pair of coconuts, I open my mouth and try again.
“Whatever—someone want to tell me what’s goin on?” Catching a flurry of motion in my peripheral, I turn toward the bar’s open back door to see Austin, a lone giant, in a sea of Boy Scouts, clustered around Barrett’s only tow truck and its driver. “What’s Billy doing back here? I told him his bar privileges were suspended for the weekend.” When he doesn’t answer me, I turn my gaze toward Cade to find him watching me, mouth clamped shut, arms still crossed over his thick chest. When it becomes obvious he has no intention of answering me, I turn around to look at River who’slooking atmelike someone just kicked my puppy. “Will someonepleasetell me what the hell is going on?”
When River’s eyes go round and wide, Cade sighs behind me. “Someone put your truck in the Barrett last night and we were worried because we thought maybe you were in it.”
LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE IN MY LIFE WORTHhaving, the truck belonged to Tank—a fully restored ’78 Ford F150—and like everything else that he owned, when he died, he left it to me.
“I’m sorry, man,” Cade says, quietly. “I know it meant a lot to you.” He’s standing next to me, in the long shadow of the mill, watching, while across the wide stretch of grass, Billy uses the winch attached to the front of his tow truck to haul my truck out of the Barrett River while a gaggle of whispering church ladies and wide-eyed boy scouts watch the show.
“Just a truck,” I say, throwing in a shrug for good measure. “Was thinking of getting a new one, anyway.”
When I say it, Cade gives me a quiet scoff. “No, you weren’t.”
No, I wasn’t.
When I don’t argue with him or tell him to fuck off, Cade gives me a sigh. “Think it was them?”
No, I don’t think it was them.
Iknowit was them.
Themis the pair of spoiled trust fund babies my brother sent in here to harass me last night. Whether they smashed the window on my truck to roll it into the river on his orders or they did it because I took them for their strip club money before sending them back to their country club with their tail tucked between their legs is another question all together but I’m not going to tell him that. Like me, Cade is a convicted felon. Unlike me, he’s still on parole. He has too much to lose if I let him get involved in whatever’s coming.
“Doubt it,” I answer him with another shrug, not bothering to look in his direction. “Brakes were soft. I’ve been meaning to replace them but, I guess I waited too long. Must’ve popped out of gear and rolled into the river on its own.”
“The window’s smashed out,” he says like I might’ve missed it. “I don’t?—”
“The brakes were soft.” I say it again, carefully and quietly enough to narrow his gaze and tighten the muscle in his jaw. “Must’ve popped out of gear and rolled into the river on its own.”
