Once past the yard, Jake picked his way along the narrow path he must've trodden a thousand times in his youth. Tree branches and weeds had taken their toll on the well-worn trail, but he could climb the hill with his eyes closed. The day’s falling sun cast his shadow out front as he emerged into the clearing. Maggie faced the expansive valley below, her back to him.
“I never get tired of this view,” she said. Jake walked beside her, admiring the explosion of fall colors from the sun-kissed tree tops. He handed her a beer. She popped the top and took a long pull, licking the tiniest bit of foam from her upper lip.
“It was one of the few things I missed about this town.” Jake took a swig of his own beer. He sat on the ground, his knees drawn up in front of him. Maggie followed suit.
“Was I one of those things?” she asked, turning her gaze from the scenery to him. Jake resisted the overwhelming urge to kiss her.
“Yeah, you were,” he said at last. “This spot brings back a lot of memories. We had a lot of good times here.”
“And some bad times, too,” she reminded him. “I came up here every night for a month after you disappeared, staring out at this same valley, crying in anguish and anger. Just waiting for the crunch of your boots coming up the path, but you never came.”
The multicolored foliage swayed in front of them, almost hypnotic. “I can’t explain why I bailed the way I did.”
“You don’t have to explain. I know why.”
“It doesn’t make it right, though,” he said.
“No, it doesn’t,” she replied. The pain resonated in her voice. Pain he caused. “I tried to find you, you know. Nobody knew where you went or even heard a whisper about you for a couple of years.”
Yet again, intense guilt settled on his shoulders, his back aching from the weight of it. He’d run away from Stony, but left one heaping shit-pile of a mess behind—Janey, Nicky and, of course, Maggie.
“I drifted around for a while,” he said. “Took some odd jobs here and there. Some in Kansas City, then out to Nebraska and Oklahoma.”
“What kind of work?”
“Construction mostly. I was a gopher. Young and strong, good for hauling stuff around. Studied boxing and some martial arts wherever I went. Got pretty good, but eventually I’d overwork my knee, and get laid up and laid off. Then, I’d move on somewhere else and start over.”
“And now you’re back in Kansas City?”
“Yeah, for the last few years. Got hooked on playing poker for a spell.”
Her eyebrows arched in surprise. “Poker? You don’t strike me as much of a gambler.”
“It’s not really gambling if you know what you’re doing,” he said. “I got hooked up with a poker pro named Johnny Chase who taught me the ropes—staked me for a while. I could scratch out enough to cover the rent, but not much else. I was an okay player, but I got in a little over my head and owed a bit to the wrong sort of people.”
“Loan sharks?”
“Businessmen,” he said. “Businessmen who knew I was, at best, a mediocre player, but I had other talents. They let me pay them back through work.”
“What kind of work?” she said, a dubious tone taking over.
“Collecting, mostly. Some guy owed and was reluctant separating himself from his wallet, I helped collect the money.”
“A leg breaker?”
“Only for the assholes,” he said, flashing his teeth. He stifled it when she didn’t return the smile. “It’s not what I envisioned my life to be, but it puts food on the table for now.”
“Sorry, it’s not what I expected.”
“I’m not proud of it and it’s not who I am. But I have an exit strategy,” Jake said, thinking about Shane Langston. He obviously couldn’t tell her of his unwelcome mission to kill a man. “I was wiggling my way out when Janey called and told me about Stony. I told my employer I’m taking a little time off.”
“What prompted you for an exit strategy?”
Jake plucked a few blades of grass, thinking back. “I’m afraid to tell you.”
“Tell me anyway.”
He tossed the grass high and the blades fluttered away in the breeze, fading from green to black as the disappeared into the descending darkness.
“My boss sent me to an address in Kansas City. Dump of a hotel, the kind you can pay for a room by the week. The kind where all the cars and souls in the place are running on empty. The guy I was supposed to collect from cracks the door from a unit on the second floor, hiding behind one of those pencil-thin gold chains latching the door shut. He says he doesn’t have the five hundred bucks he owes my boss and won’t come out. Says he’s working hard to get the money together and asks for another week. I peek into the room behind him and see a bag of heroin and a syringe next to a new bottle of Jack Daniels. So, obviously he’s full of shit.”
“Sounds like a real winner.”
“I didn’t care who he was. He represented a job, no different to me than hamburger patty you’d flip at McDonald’s. I pump my shoulder into the door and bust the chain. The guy falls on the floor begging and pleading, eyes wide, hands raised, track marks running up and down his skinny arms. I have orders to bust him up if he doesn’t have the money and so I start bashing that scraggly face with my fists. Demanding money I know he doesn’t have. He screams when I grab his index finger and snap it like a twig, but I don’t care. I’m about to snap another one when this little girl busts out of the bathroom screaming bloody murder.”
“Oh, no,” Maggie said, raising her hand to her mouth.
“Yeah. She’s about six years old, dirty face in hand-me-down clothes that didn’t match. Like her dad rolled her in a pile of clothes that Goodwill rejected and accepted what came out. But, underneath that dirt, I saw her innocence, her beauty. She’s pleading at me to stop hitting her daddy with these big, brown, tear-filled puppy dog eyes. I just stopped, fist raised, blood dripping from my knuckles and it came to me that I wasn’t hitting a slab of meat like I was Rocky. I was hitting a real person, a father. He may have been a scumbag, but a sinking feeling of despair grabbed hold and jerked me out of this robotic state I put myself in. I saw then that I was no different from my father and if I didn’t stop, I’d permanently turn to stone.”
Jake swallowed, looking sideways at Maggie who sat in silence, absorbing the story.
“What did you do then?” she asked after a moment.
“I flushed the heroin down the toilet and took the bottle of Jack. Left him there bleeding on the floor. Paid the five hundred he owed my boss out of my own pocket and began to think about how to get myself out from the rock I’d crawled under. I’ve been paying people’s debts out of my own stash to keep from beating them, which I can’t keep up forever. But I can’t stop because I still hear the bone of that finger cracking. I can still see that little girl when I close my eyes at night. They’re the ghosts of reality that haunt me, but I think they’re still there to remind me I gotta get out of that kinda life.”
The burnt-orange sun rested just above the horizon, blasting a golden hue over the valley. The temperature dropped as the westerly breeze picked up, slapping the chill against their faces. Jake took off his jacket and draped it over Maggie’s hunched shoulders.
“Do you think people can change?” he asked, wincing as he waited for her response, afraid of what it might be.
She regarded him, her eyes searching his face. “Yes. Yes, I do. I think you already started down that path. You just need the inspiration to keep going.”
He breathed out. The worry about her running off when he told her the truth carried off in the Ozark evening breeze.
“I was worried you’d go busting down the hill away from me.”
“I can’t say it’s not a little scary, but I’m not running away,” she said, an uptick flashing at the corner of her mouth.
“What about you?” he asked.
“I’ve been here mostly. A couple months after you left, I needed a change of scenery and went to live wi
th my grandparents up north. Then, Dad died in a car wreck a couple of years later. Mom used the insurance money to send me to school in Columbia and get my nursing degree. She got sick after I graduated and I came home to be with her.”
“Is that how you got hooked up with Hospice?”
She swallowed the last drops of her beer and set the empty can on the ground. Jake remembered her mom well—tiny in frame, fiery in spirit. Maggie was their only child, her pride and joy.
“She fought like hell, Jake,” Maggie said. “It was six months from diagnosis until I buried her. The Hospice staff was so great I couldn’t see myself working anywhere but there.”
“So, now you’re by your lonesome in the house on the hill?”
“Not exactly.” Her hair danced across her face from the wind and she hooked the locks over her ear to hold it back.
“Married?” he probed.
She glanced up beneath long eyelashes. “No, just me and my baby girl.”
Jake drew back. What the…? Baby girl? He closed his dangling jaw before any leaves or bugs flew in.
“You have a baby?” he choked out. Maggie registered the shock on his face and laughed.
“Well, she’s not exactly a baby anymore. Teenager. She’s growing up so fast I can hardly keep track.”
“What happened to the father?”
She eyed the darkening ground. For a moment he thought she wouldn’t tell him.
“He’s gone,” she said. “Didn’t quite work out.”
“Sorry,” he said, still stunned that Maggie was a mother.
“Yeah, me too.” She stood. “But speaking of which, I’d better get home. She’s probably wondering where I am. And I still have to make some food for one of my patient’s family.”
“I thought volunteers did that,” Jake said.
“I’m a volunteer.”
“I thought you worked there.”
She tilted her head and smiled. “Not all the time.”
She climbed to her feet. Jake pushed his large frame off the ground and faced her.
“I’d love to meet your girl sometime,” he said.
“We’ll do that. You going back to Hospice tomorrow?”
“Yeah, I’m going to check in with Bear and Janey, but I’ll be there in the morning sometime.”
“I don’t suppose I could hitch a ride with you,” she said, bumping him playfully with her shoulder. “I kind of abandoned my car so I could spend some time learning what my ex-boyfriend has been doing all these years.”
“No problem.” He reached out and took her hand in his. “He didn’t scare you off?”
She rose to the tips of her toes and leaned in, kissing Jake on the cheek. It was soft and delicate, a whisper that sent shivers along his spine.
“Not yet, anyway,” she said, handing him his jacket. She walked the backside of the hill toward her house and disappeared into the darkened trees. A myriad of stars popped one by one in the sky as the darkness took control of the daylight, leaving Jake to wonder why the hell he ever left her in the first place.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The pole lights of Main Street flickered to life, but all was already quiet. They pretty much rolled up the Warsaw sidewalks after five o’clock. Bear sat with his back to his desk, eyeing the oak tree in the middle of the Benton County Courthouse square, recalling the time he and Jake climbed to its highest heights with their pockets full of acorns and spent hours throwing them at passersby. Every once and awhile, some unfortunate soul would settle against the base of the tree, and they’d keep score on direct hits to the head. Bear usually won and held it over Jake; he rarely beat him in anything.
The pleasant image faded and the stark reality of the present trumped the simpler times of the past. The shithead Howie Skaggs had been in the interrogation room with his lawyer for the better part of two hours and Bear teetered on the edge of tossing the lawyer out and violating Howie’s civil rights. He’d never actually do something like that to jeopardize his case, but he hated sitting around with his thumb up his ass. Howie had stood on the edge of the waterfall, about to jump off and give them Shane Langston on a silver platter when the lawyer showed up.
A knock sounded on the door behind him. Deputy Daniels leaned against the frame with a cup of coffee.
“He still in there with the lawyer?” Bear asked.
“Yeah. You seen the guy before?” Daniels crossed the room and sat in the chair opposite the desk. Bear spun around.
“No, but Langston has more than a few bloodsuckers at his beck and call. Damn it…we almost had him. Another sixty seconds and he would’ve spilled his guts.”
“We ain’t getting nothing out of him now,” Daniels said.
Bear reached out and held up the bag of red rocks. “I’m not so sure. I’ve seen this variety before. There’s a cook who works out of Kansas City who makes this red stuff. Saw some files on it when I was on the task force. Thought he was in prison somewhere. I do have another question, though.”
“What’s that?”
“How in the hell did the lawyer get here that fast? This is Warsaw, not New York City with a lawyer on every street corner. Somebody’s giving ole Shane a heads up.”
“Maybe somebody saw us driving him in and unloading him,” Daniels said.
“Can’t be that,” Bear said. “The bloodsucker had to drive in from somewhere unless he just happened to be fishing out on Truman Lake. No, he was already on his way before we even pulled into town. I think it’s a hell of a lot more likely we got someone in our house batting on both sides.” But who could it be? There might be a couple guys who'd look the other way, but teaming up with Langston? “Book him for possession of the gun and meth,” Bear continued. “Stick him in a cell and wait for me. I gotta go meet an old buddy.”
“You want me to give Howie some company? Big Dick Sanders is about to start humping the bars of his cell.”
“Nah,” Bear said. “Let’s leave Howie alone with his thoughts. I haven’t given up on rolling him yet. My ability to prevent the penetration of his delicate posterior by a dick the size of a tree trunk might be the trump card I need to get his trap flappin’. You hear about the bust in Sedalia?”
Daniels shook his head.
“Cops got an anonymous tip about a drug stash in a warehouse. Rolled up and found six kilos of coke in a floor drain.”
“Six keys? Who owned the warehouse?”
“Beats the shit outta me.” Bear shrugged. “I’ve never heard of the place. Global something or other.”
“Somebody’s gonna be pissed.”
“Somebody’s always pissed about something, Sad Dog. It’s one of life’s few certainties.”
Daniels left and Bear locked the Devil Ice in his desk drawer. He stepped into the cool night and headed out to meet Jake on Poor Boy Road.
#
Despite the cool autumn breeze, Willie had to wipe the sweat from his brow with the tail of his shirt as he, Bub and Bennett finished loading half the Devil Ice into Dexter’s van and half into Willie’s truck, their path lit by the gas generator lights Dexter brought with him. With each trip into the house, Willie noticed Bub eyeballing the closed door to Halle’s room. He could hear the thoughts rolling through his enforcer’s head and considered the size of the problem he had on his hands. His cell vibrated in his pocket. Willie checked the number and winced. He walked back inside the house, away from his crew and answered it.
“I hear we have problems,” Shane said.
“Depends on what you mean by a problem.”
“I mean a local teenage girl who saw you and my product with her own little eyes. I call that a problem.”
“I got it under control.”
“How do you figure?”
“She looked through a grimy window. I doubt she saw anything.”
“I’m not taking a chance. Off-load the stuff to your storage area and bring the girl to me. I’ll be at the blue house.”
Damn. Other than an order to put a bullet in
Halle’s head and dump the body, delivering her to Shane was the last thing Willie wanted to hear. In either case, nobody would ever hear from her again. The blue house hid deep in the Ozark countryside, one of three houses Shane maintained in the area that only a handful of people knew about. How the hell could he get her out of this?
“Second problem,” Shane said. “Where’s your boy Howie?”
“He never showed back tonight and won’t answer his phone. He was hungover as hell after last night so I sent him back to his trailer to catch a few z’s before we broke this place down.”
“You call him from this phone?” Shane asked, a razor edge to his tone.
“No, the other burner phone,” Willie said. “What’s going on?”
“Howie isn’t answering the phone because he got pinched by Bear this afternoon. He’s currently sitting in the Benton County jail.”
Willie’s gut cramped. “Oh shit.”
“Oh shit is exactly what you should be thinking,” Shane said. “He and your douche bag bodyguard beat the bejesus out of some guy last night and Bear hauled him in for it. In the process, they found an unlicensed piece and a bag of my product you guys have been cooking.”
Willie’s insides melted to jelly and he crashed at the tiny kitchen table, head resting in shaky hands. This was a disaster.
“I’m pissed, Willie,” Shane continued, the tension in his voice drawn as tight as a trip wire. “Thought you had better control of your crew than this.”
“Howie won’t say nothin’,” Willie said, but without much conviction.
“You got a hell of a lot more confidence in the little prick than I do. Let’s talk more when you bring the girl. And bring that tub of shit Bub with you when you come. We gotta tie up some loose ends. Be at the house in an hour.”
The phone silenced, and Willie held it with trembling hands. He glanced at the closed door holding Halle, mind racing at what could potentially happen when he got her to the blue house. What could happen to her? What could happen to all of them? Shane didn’t like loose ends and right now they were as loose as a cheap hooker on a Friday night. Bub lumbered along the hall toward him.
Poor Boy Road (Jake Caldwell #1) Page 12