“Well, when he came back and found Midnight still standing around in his little patch of heaven, what do you think he did?”
“Let me guess,” I said, the moral seeming obvious even if the purpose of the story did not. “Snuggled up to him and they became the best of friends?”
“Heavens no,” she laughed. “He went right back to chasing that cat as if that day was no different than any other.”
She stopped to refill Moose’s coffee which was now almost empty.
“Did they ever become friends?” Ash asked.
“No sir,” she said, shaking her head. “That very day, Keebler chased Midnight so far around the property that he drove her right off a little cliff about half a mile away. She was dead as soon as she hit the ground.” With that, Bea turned and began to walk away. “Served that cat right for trusting a dog to help it out of a jam. Anyway, you boys holler if you need anything else.”
The three of us were silent for a few moments.
“Told you that old broad was weird. What the fuck was that all about?” Moose finally asked, the confused look on his face surely no match for the one on my own.
There was something about her story that made me feel like there was more to it than just the ramblings of a half-senile old waitress, but I just shrugged, too preoccupied to give it much more thought. Ash was quiet and looking at Moose strangely, obviously still not trusting him.
“Well, whatever. Anyway, why don’t you tell me what the hell’s going on, Brody? What happened to your girl?”
I wasn’t really sure how much to really go into with Moose, but I knew I had to play it straight with him if I wanted any chance of him helping us talk to the MC. So I only held back on the details about what was done to Hannah, focusing mainly on how her father was a general all around piece of shit, and hinted at how we had reason to fear for Beth’s safety.
“Sounds like you’re talking about Amos Miller,” Moose noted after hearing the story.
“Wait, you know him?” Ash asked. I’d never known Beth’s father’s first name, but apparently Ash did, and it was Amos.
Moose nodded. “Bad dude, I never liked dealing with him. Met him through your old man, actually.”
“What the fuck? Dad knew him, too?”
“More than knew him, I think your dad created him, in a manner of speaking.”
“Start explaining,” I said, leaning forward.
“This was back when the Beasts were small time, still running out of that old clubhouse in the woods, you remember that place? Anyway, we were having a hard time making money, most of the regular avenues were closed to us by some of the bigger clubs. Whenever we made an attempt to source drugs or guns, they’d choke us off from our suppliers. Either by physically intimidating them, or by threatening to pull their much larger business if they had any dealings with us. We couldn’t get a foothold in.
“That’s when your old man had a stroke of diabolical genius. He decided to create his own supplier. He knew about the Amish community outside of town, and how the cops mainly left them alone. So all he needed to do was find someone that he could buy off or corrupt from within, and he’d have a perfect supply route. Right through their village. No one would ever suspect them. So that’s exactly what he did. He found the most corrupt piece of shit in a wide black hat I’d ever met, and that man was Amos Miller.”
“Holy shit,” Ash breathed beside me. I was too shocked to even say that much.
“The two of them built a fucking underground drug running empire that moved more product than any of the other clubs, and your dad kept it completely quiet except for some of his top guys, like me. That way none of the other MCs would figure out how he was getting shit so easily and give them a chance to shut it down. And to make matters worse, while those clubs would occasionally lose supply to raids and shit, the Beasts’ flow never got caught. We grew bigger and richer, and then basically took over. All of it completely under the noses of almost the entire Amish community, not to mention the cops. Very few other Amish ever even suspected what Amos was up to, they’re all just so trusting and naïve by nature. He secretly employed outside men to help when needed, mostly with moving stuff once it left the village, and handled everything on the inside personally or with help from a select few other prominent members that he could trust or buy the silence of.”
“I think we may already be acquainted with some of those outside guys,” Ash said dryly. Then he turned to me. “How much you want to bet our friends from the barbecue are part of his drug running crew?”
I was still too shocked at what I was hearing to respond. Dad set this guy in business? He had a part in turning Beth’s dad into the monster that he was today?
“Well, like I said,” Moose continued, “something about that guy never sat right with me. Actually, I was never a supporter of any of that operation. To me, it’s one thing to exploit people by selling them shit that they want to buy, even though we know it’ll eventually kill them. They’re part of making that choice. But those Amish folk never bothered anyone. Always went about their business and kept to themselves. It seemed wrong to use them like that. That’s around when I started to step back from the club, and it was a big part of why.”
“I can understand that,” Ash said with a heavy sigh.
My head was spinning. For all the justification I’d made for my father’s actions in the past, this one was inexcusable. Ash was right. He was a fucking monster. We needed to undo the damage he’d done. Now more than ever, I believed that.
My anger finally loosened my voice. “Yeah. Well then, I think you can understand why we want to get Beth away from that piece of shit. And I hope the Beasts will agree enough to want to lend a hand.”
Moose looked uncomfortable all of a sudden. He took a sip of his coffee. “Wyatt, bro, I don’t think you understand. Everything I just told you, that’s exactly why the MC won’t help you guys. They can’t.”
“What do you mean?” My voice was tight as I swallowed down the rage that I could feel starting to simmer forth once more.
“The Beasts are still using him,” Moose said. “They don’t have the reach they once had, that’s for sure, but right now those drugs are the only source of income they have. You go to them with this, and I don’t even think knowing who your father is would stop them from at best warning Amos you were coming. At worst….”
He didn’t need to finish it. He was right. If that was their only source of income, even the small group of full timers left would do anything to make sure that flow didn’t stop. If they found out we were moving against Amos Miller in any way, even if it was just to get Beth back, they might decide not to take any chances that there would be an interruption in their supply.
“You’re right, we can’t tell them about any of this,” I said miserably.
“And how do we know you won’t?” Ash’s voice was sharp as he frowned at Moose.
The big man across from us made a face. “You don’t gotta worry about me, bro. Even if I wasn’t friends with Wyatt here, he knows I’ve been spending less and less time when the Beasts. It’s more just something I do to get out of the house now, to be honest.” He paused for a moment, looking around as if to make sure no one else was listening. “My wife is pregnant and sometimes she’s… difficult to be around.”
Ash smirked and looked to me, cocking his head towards Moose. “You trust him?”
I nodded.
“Good enough for me,” he said, turning back to the bearded giant. “Good luck with your pregnant wife. And the baby. Wyatt, we gotta jet now and get back to Hannah’s. It’s time you listened to my plan.”
25
Beth
I could get in so much trouble.
It’s not like I was a complete stranger to breaking the rules; I did run away with Sarah for a forbidden Rumspringa after all, but this felt different. Worse. Maybe that was because I still felt like Rumspringa was a right that had been unfairly taken away by our father and so we were entitled to
go, even if it was against his wishes.
But there was no such justification I could make for this, especially if I was wrong.
I had waited until after dinner, when it was getting dark and Father was settled in for the evening. I’d told him that I was just running over to a friend’s house to return some clothes that I had borrowed, making sure to have some old ones in a bag with me that I could discard on the way. In truth, the bag also included a couple of other items, one of which had me almost shaking with nervous fear. Father’s keyring.
After he had left on his overladen buggy this afternoon, he wasn’t gone very long. Less than two hours. Yet when he returned, the buggy was empty. That wasn’t long enough for him to ride to Bright Falls, so wherever he went had to be within the village. Of course, there were many places he could have gone, but as he had taken pains to close the buggy up to completely obscure his load, I had a feeling he was hiding something. And there was only one place I could think he could hide that much cargo and still be back so quickly.
His office in the basement of the church.
I was standing in front of it, hands trembling as I clutched the heavy keyring tightly in one hand and a kerosene lamp in the other. Both items had been wrapped tightly in my old clothes and hidden in my bag. I needed the keys to get into Father’s office and the lamp was because I knew how dark and deserted the church would be at this time.
All of the town elders had offices in the basement, but father’s was by far the biggest. And it was almost always locked. I hadn’t even seen the inside of it since last year when my father had forgotten to bring his lunch with him and mother had sent me to deliver it. I’d walked to the office and tried the door and even then it was locked, in the middle of the day. I knocked, and it took a few minutes before father answered. He took the lunch with barely a thank you, and didn’t invite me in at all. I only had a few quick glances around, but I hadn’t seen much.
It had seemed strange at the time, since many Amish don’t even lock their doors at night, never mind during the day. And I’d been inside other elder offices more than my own father’s, as I’d had a couple of friends whose fathers were on the council and we had gone down after church some Sundays to play in them. Yet even those times, my father’s door always remained closed.
If he was hiding something, it was surely in there.
The church was quiet and deserted at that time of night, but I still flipped through the keys carefully to prevent them from rattling nosily against each other.
I couldn’t believe I was doing this. It was already almost dark and I was breaking into my father’s private office in search of something that might not even exist. There was a very good chance that the only thing I would find was my anger at our earlier confrontation had provided fuel to my overactive imagination. There were plenty of perfectly legitimate reasons why he may have been carrying a heavy load, or even for him having covered it up. I was just having trouble thinking of any.
Still, something strange was going on, even if it had nothing to do with his cargo, and maybe there would be answers in his office. He was working with those men, for one thing. They weren’t Amish and they certainly didn’t share our ideals and beliefs. If father had simply wanted us to come home, perhaps they should have asked instead of trying to grab Sarah at the carnival or chased us through the woods at Hannah’s. And they were no strangers to fighting, either. Luckily for us, neither were the Brody brothers.
And then there was Hannah. She had been so desperate for us to leave here, just as she had been so quick to disappear. Why was that? She never did tell us what made her decide to run away so suddenly on her own Rumspringa and then never return. Maybe she knew something? Hannah was many things, but I found it hard to believe she would just abandon us without good cause. We had always been so close. As the eldest, she had helped to raise us. Something must have triggered her desertion.
Yet if she believed that father was dangerous, why wouldn’t she tell Sarah and me? I could make no sense of it.
Gathering my courage, I slipped the key into the lock and opened the door. As I was in the basement of the church, there were no windows and the room was dark, but the lamp I held was bright enough to light the room around me. I closed the door behind me and took a deep breath as I surveyed the office, unsure exactly what I would be looking for.
It didn’t take me long to find something suspicious.
Most Amish rooms are fairly empty, as we typically only furnish with the essentials. Father’s office was no exception, having a big desk and chair where he worked, and a bookshelf off to one side. In front of the desk were a couple of smaller chairs for visitors. That was about it.
What didn’t fit, however, were the large number of crates that were stacked in one area, taking up almost half of the entire room. Judging by the looks of them, they were enough to fill up an entire buggy and I’d never seen their like before.
I approached for a closer look, setting the lamp down on the desk. Inside the crates were packages—most of them wrapped up tightly in a brown paper that was impossible to see through. I picked one up. It felt heavy, but when squeezed it had some give to it. It was very puzzling.
Continuing to pick through the crates only revealed more of the same bundles. There must have been close to one hundred of them and I was desperate to see what they hid.
I finally found one that hadn’t been wrapped properly, the binding around the edges loose. With my fingers, I worked on carefully opening it without damaging the paper so that I could replace it afterwards and not give away my intrusion.
By the time it was unwrapped, I was even more confused. Inside was another bundle wrapped in plastic, but on closer inspection it simply looked like baking flour. Why would my father be storing flour here? Even with as much baking as my mother does, it would take us years to use this much flour. We didn’t own a mill, so I knew it didn’t come from our farm.
Something tugged at my memory. I had seen something like this before.
My fingers traced along the edges of the plastic as I searched my brain, trying to remember. Then it struck me. That show that Wyatt and I had been watching. The men on that were loading bags very similar to this into a truck.
Drugs.
I couldn’t remember what this substance was called, but I remembered what Wyatt had said about it. That they made the men who sold it rich, despite knowing how dangerous it was to the people that bought it. At the time, I’d been horrified at the thought of someone that was willing to do such a thing. Could my father actually be involved in something similar, or was there some other possible explanation?
Maybe it really was just flour, but I couldn’t believe that. I’d never seen flour packaged like this. The only time I’d ever seen something like this was on that show, and it was drugs. So what other explanation could there be?
Was my father an unwitting participant? Was he oblivious to the dangers of what he was dealing with? If that was the case, why did he go to such lengths to hide it? Closing up his buggy, storing it here in his locked office. It seemed suspicious, but there had to be a reason.
I set the evidence on the desk and looked around for some other clue. There were ledgers on his bookshelf, my father had always been meticulous about keeping track of everything—even at home. But when I opened them I couldn’t see anything that seemed out of place. Not that I had any idea what I was looking at, but the itemized lists of sales seemed ordinary enough. There were potatoes and carrots and milk, all things that our farm produced enough of for us to sell regularly, and the prices didn’t see abnormally high. Certainly there wasn’t an entry for drugs, although Father probably wouldn’t be foolish enough to list that in his ledger.
I continued looking around the office and noticed a drawer in his desk. When I tried it, it was locked. That seemed odd, given that the door to his office always stayed locked anyway. Fortunately, one of the keys on the ring unlocked it. Inside was another ledger.
Why would there be a
nother one? Perhaps it was a separate accounting of community based projects.
I pulled it out and flipped through it. The numbers in this book were bigger. Much bigger. And as far as I could tell, it was all income. Each entry was simply labeled with the word “Delivery” next to a date and then a dollar amount.
According to this, hundreds of thousands of dollars were flowing into the community. What would our village need with that much money? And what were they delivering? No one had a farm that was even remotely that successful. There had to be more to it, and it didn’t feel right. The covered buggy. The locked drawer inside the locked office. The lack of descriptive entries in this hidden ledger. It was too secretive.
These had to be drugs.
Something else Wyatt had told me popped into my head. I remembered the story about P.T. Barnum and his saying about there being a sucker born every minute. Father was using the entire foundation of trust that existed within our community to do something illegal right under our noses. And according to the dates in the ledgers, it had been going on for years. No one suspected a thing.
That made us all the suckers here. Just like Barnum, Father was using our own gullibility and naiveté to make himself rich.
I felt sick.
Immediately, I knew I’d made a big mistake coming here. Heart pounding, I quickly shoved the ledger back in the drawer and relocked it, then picked up the opened package. As I was fumbling with the paper, trying to wrap it up again, my pounding heart froze. I heard the unmistakable sound of keys jingling right outside the office door and a click as one of them was slipped into the lock.
Father. He must have discovered his keys missing and had an extra set. He was about to come in and catch me not only in his office but literally holding one of his bags of drugs. My mind went blank with fear. I couldn’t think of a single justification I could give that would excuse my actions.
The Brody Bunch Collection: Bad Boy Romance Page 58