Brutal Business: Book Three in the Mad Mick Series

by Franklin Horton

  Numerous lengths of rope, electrical power cords, and fence wire were piled onto the tarp for use in securing the loads onto the horses. The thought crossed Conor’s mind that at some point he may actually want to design a cargo buggy that could be pulled by a team of horses. He was surprised he hadn’t thought of it earlier but things had been a little busy since the shit hit the fan. A buggy like that would have been ideal for transporting this burden back to the firehouse. Surely there had to be an old hay wagon somewhere in the community he could easily convert.

  Wayne showed the men where he was in his tasks. He had most of the food staged in the yard and was doing a more thorough search of the house. He was searching for items they’d passed over earlier such as towels, toiletries, blankets, and cookware. His folks had to leave a lot behind on their trek southward and there were a lot of things they needed if they were going to winter over in the community. Come spring, they would be choosing to continue their journey or considering whether to stay in this community a little longer. If they stayed, these items would be of use. If they decided to move on, the gear could be left behind for the next resident of the firehouse.

  "Have you found any tools?" Conor asked.

  "There's a tool shed behind the house," Wayne said. "I haven't had the opportunity to go through it. I did stick my head in there just to see what the outbuilding was being used for. A lot of the stuff inside there was really old, like the rest of the farm. I think this place was at least two generations past having been an active working farm. It’s pretty neglected."

  "I’m going to take a look in that toolshed. If you have food and weapons covered, I want to see what other kind of kit the Lampkins family might have."

  "While you're doing that, I'll have my guys load the horses. I’ll continue searching the house. There’s places I haven’t got to yet."

  Conor stalked through the tall, dew-soaked weeds to reach the toolshed behind the house. It was a crude building about twelve feet long and sixteen feet wide. The walls were plywood that had been painted white to match the house. The windows were repurposed from other structures, each a different size. The door was an antique house door, painted blue and held shut by a rusty hasp with an old bolt securing it.

  Conor extracted the bolt, flipped the hasp back, and swung the door open. He played his light inside and saw immediately what Wayne meant about the age of the contents. This was the kind of shop put together by a man in the 1950s rather than a man of more recent decades. It was neatly organized with mostly older tools. Sadly, many had a thin veneer of rust from disuse and neglect, though they could be cleaned up with a little work.

  There were several metal cabinets with tiny plastic drawers full of odd screws and hardware. Lines of Maxwell House coffee cans held larger bolts, nails, and screws. There were hand planes and Yankee twist drills. There was a large assortment of hammers of all shapes and sizes. Not just the more common sledgehammers and carpentry hammers but tiny tack hammers. There were ball peen hammers in a dozen sizes. There were cobblers’ hammers, brick hammers, and a variety of blacksmith hammers. This was the kind of workshop assembled by a man who had known the hard days of the Great Depression. A man who had known the deprivations of poverty. Someone who had learned a long time ago that sometimes a piece of repurposed trash could be useful when there was no money to spend.

  One of the things that fascinated Conor about these old-timers wasn't just the tools they owned but the tools they purpose-made to do a particular job. Most couldn't run out to the store to find what they needed and they certainly couldn’t go online to order specialty tools. They analyzed problems and made the appropriate tool if they were industrious enough. Over the years he’d seen many homemade tools designed for shucking corn, processing livestock, harvesting crops, and doing repetitive farm tasks like fencing.

  People didn't think the same way these days. They preferred to buy rather than to build. They saw “homemade” as equating to poverty instead of indicating initiative. Conor was the opposite. Even the things he did buy from the store were not so sacred that he wouldn't tear into them if he thought he could improve on them.

  Seeing nothing he wanted or needed he made note of several items that might benefit Wayne's people if they were short of tools. He backed out of the building and secured the door. When he returned to the front of the house he found Wayne and two of his men standing by Shuck's body with picks and shovels, starting to dig a grave.

  The waste of time irritated Conor. Without a word, he walked up to the body, grabbed Shuck by the pants leg, and dragged him out onto the swinging bridge. He cast a glance back to the men in the yard, their digging halted, their headlamps pointed at him. In the glare of their lights, he shoved Shuck’s body with his foot and unceremoniously dumped the bloody corpse off into the river.

  "We figured we needed to bury him," Wayne said when Conor rejoined them.

  “Why?” Conor asked.

  Wayne shrugged. “It’s what you do, I guess.”

  "Not that fucker. He didn’t deserve a proper burial. You didn't get a good look at that old lady. Thin as a pencil, one half of her face black from his fists. Hell, she still might die from the infection in her leg where he kept her chained up like an animal. I don't think Shuck Lampkins is worth the expenditure of a single calorie. He certainly didn't hesitate to drag Bernard’s body into the river and let him wash away. Let the turtles eat Shuck if they can tolerate the stench.”

  There was no protest. If anyone intended to voice one, they choked it down after bearing witness to the intensity with which Conor backed up his actions. He understood that the attempt to bury Shuck had likely arisen because the men didn't know what else to do with him and reverted back to custom. Conor knew exactly what to do with him. His beliefs, as well as his customs, lay somewhere in between karma and the Golden Rule. Shuck had reaped what he had sown.

  Noticing that the men were no longer ferrying loads to the horses he asked, "Have you got everything?"

  “We took as much as the horses can carry,” Wayne replied. “The body was pretty much the last loose end and you took care of that."

  Conor smiled at the comment. He was nothing if not decisive. "There's a few things in the toolshed your people might be able to use. Hammers, saws, fasteners. Stuff you can’t buy anymore."

  “We can’t haul another thing tonight. The horses aren’t happy with what we put on them already. We can come back for another trip tomorrow.”

  "Don’t bet on it," Conor said. "Once word spreads that Shuck is dead, people will hit this place out of curiosity. They’ll clean it out."

  Wayne's face crumpled in concentration. He was too tired to think clearly at this point. They all were. It had been a long, physically-demanding day.

  "You should send your guys on back," Conor said. "You and I can go through the house again. We can take our time and make certain there's nothing else you all need and we can cache it in the woods beside the road. That way you don’t have to cross back over here to get it. Even if someone moves into the house, you can slip in and retrieve the goods without anyone being the wiser."

  Wayne nodded. "I should've thought of that."

  “It’s the lack of sleep, man. Takes twice as many brains to figure out half the shit.”

  16

  Wayne sent his team back home with the horses and the tired men didn’t complain about the decision. Their horses bristling with loot, they would ride slowly and patiently back to the firehouse. There they could get help unloading the goods. Tomorrow they could be inventoried and stored once everyone had gotten some sleep. Conor resisted the impulse to give them a dozen warnings on safety before they left. He did that with his own family and they had to tolerate it. These guys did not. Besides, they hopefully knew the score by now. Be vigilant or die. It was that simple.

  Wayne and Conor set aside a couple more tarps and a sheet of black plastic they’d found in an outbuilding. Their plan was to use the tarps and plastic to shelter their loot, then use branche
s and leaves to camouflage it. Wayne would have liked to rescue some of the mattresses and beds for the firehouse since they didn’t have enough comfortable accommodations for everyone. However, transporting a mattress on horseback, even on a pack horse with no rider, was too challenging. Even if you could get the bulky, awkward load properly secured, it was unlikely the horse would cooperate with hauling it.

  The food had been the priority on the first pass. The second pass would focus more on housewares and comfort items. They would take tools, camping gear, toiletries, and anything that might make their stay more tolerable.

  Wayne was going through an end table with drawers, setting aside a half-empty box of light bulbs when he stopped in his tracks. "You know, those light bulbs reminded me of something. In all of the excitement, I forgot to mention that the coal plant we passed through upriver was definitely occupied. The residents ambushed me as I was passing through there."

  Conor was sorting through the contents of the hall closet, setting aside blankets and towels for the folks at the firehouse. He stopped and cocked his head at Wayne. "You got in a firefight and somehow forgot to mention that? I didn't even hear the shots."

  "It was no firefight. There was no time for a firefight. They totally got the jump on me. If there had been any shots it would've been them blasting my dumb ass into the next life. There wasn’t even a place for me to hide.”

  "And they just let you go?"

  "They did," Wayne replied. "They were just wondering who I was and what I was doing in their territory, which was an understandable reaction. That wasn't the interesting part. It’s a man and his two sons living there and they’re people after your own heart. What is it that you guys in the U.K. call people who can cobble a bunch of stuff together to make useful things?"

  "Bodgers.” Conor chuckled. “It’s not a compliment though. It's basically your equivalent of calling someone a hack or a butcher. It's a term of endearment when made from one bodger to another."

  "These guys are definitely bodgers. They came after me on these little mining buggies they called mantrips. They told me they were battery-powered and I asked them how they kept them charged. They said they'd converted an old coal boiler into a steam generator and were able to produce enough power for their own use.”

  Conor stood there dumbstruck. "That makes complete sense. For someone who knew what they were doing, it would be completely feasible. It’s not been a big issue for me because we have the solar power but it could be helpful for other folks. Of course, if you don't know what you're doing it's the same as building a bomb that will scald you to death when it blows up.”

  Wayne frowned. "That's...concerning."

  "The risk would be acceptable if you knew what you were doing. These guys live right there at that coal mine?"

  "Yeah,” Wayne replied. “The dad said he worked in the shop and his sons were miners there. They moved onto the property to have access to coal for heating over the winter."

  "I’d definitely like to meet them and see what they've got going. One of those battery-powered mantrips would be nice right now, wouldn’t it? I don’t know what the range is but it would make hauling this stuff back to your place a snap."

  "I guess we could go catch them tomorrow if you wanted," Wayne offered, shoving blankets and towels into a garbage bag.

  Conor considered the idea. “I’d better wait a day or two. I hadn’t expected to be away from home this long. I kind of feel like I need to get back there and check on things."

  "Everything okay on the home front?"

  Conor grinned. "Well, you may have noticed that daughter of mine is a bit temperamental. She’s been a real powder keg lately."

  "Yeah, I got that impression. Not sure the girl knows her own strength." He said it as an observation, not a judgment. Wayne didn’t appear to have any of the overt hostility toward Barb that a lot of people had right now. There may have even been a bit of begrudging respect in there.

  "I worry that she does know her own strength and has no qualms about using it. It’s my own fault, really. I’m afraid my parenting style has backfired on me. I raised her to be tough and to not take shit off anyone. I didn’t want her to ever have to be afraid.”

  “That’s good. Raising strong kids, especially daughters, is important.”

  “I know, but I always assumed her standard of what was insulting and inappropriate would be the same as mine but it's not. I'm realizing that, despite her age, she might not have the maturity to deal with the skills I've given her. It’s like putting nuclear weapons in the hands of some teenage dictator."

  Wayne smiled at the comparison. He crammed the loot down in the garbage bag and tied the top shut. He removed another bag from the box and shook it open. The bags had come from the firehouse. They’d figured out earlier that Shuck didn’t keep garbage bags. It appeared that he, and perhaps the generations of Lampkins before him, always threw their garbage into the river. Many of the houses along the river were known to discharge even their sewage directly into the river. Local fisherman knew to never stand in front of any pipe jutting from the bank for that very reason.

  "I wouldn’t worry about her too much. She's not a lost cause, she just has a little growing to do. If you’ve given her the basic tools, the right values, she’ll come out fine on the other end of this."

  “That’s assuming she doesn’t leave a trail of bodies behind her,” Conor mused.

  Wayne shrugged. “There is that possibility.”

  Conor hesitated to say anymore. He didn’t tend to process things out loud. He’d lost his wife early in their marriage and had gone so long without a partner that discussing the internal workings of his mind and heart was strange territory for him. This matter with Barb concerned him though, and he hadn’t arrived at a solution on his own. "I just worry about her. She's turned on nearly everyone in her sphere. She threatens someone nearly every day and a couple of times it’s gone beyond threats. I’ve had to pull her off several folks.”

  On a whim, Wayne pulled the cushions off the couch and searched beneath them, explaining, “I had a paranoid great uncle who always kept a gun under the couch cushions.” Sure enough, he found a .38 revolver that must have been fifty years old and had no bluing left on it. He held it up for Conor to see.

  “Maybe you and Shuck are related? A long-lost great-uncle?” Conor suggested.

  Wayne cringed at the thought. “Back to Barb, what little bit I know about you makes it clear you didn't have a normal upbringing. You may not understand this, but what Barb is going through is not a whole lot different than what I went through in high school. It’s a variation of what a lot of my friends went through. Your body is grown but your mind is still developing, then suddenly you’ve got all this freedom. You think you're Big Dick Willie from the south side of Philly.”

  Conor laughed. “I thought it was Big Dick Sammy from south Miami?”

  "When I was growing up, that summer after high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I got a job on the assembly line at GM making more money than I'd ever seen in my life. I was living at home with my parents and didn't have a lot of expenses. I bought a fancy Mustang and went out drinking with my high school buddies every night. I was fighting, raising hell, and chasing women. On top of it, I didn’t have any respect for anybody. I started getting in trouble. One thing led to another and I got locked up. Lost my job, my fancy car, and my dad booted me out. Told me I couldn’t live there with them and act the way I was acting."

  "So what did you do?"

  "Joined the military. That’s what you did in my day when you needed straightening out. If you couldn’t do it yourself, they would do it for you. And they did."

  "So, you think I need to send Barb off to the military?"

  It was Wayne's turn to laugh then. "I don’t think the U.S. military is ready for Barb. The Israelis possibly, but not ours."

  "Now that’s a thought. The Israelis.” In his weariness, with his filters dropped, Conor almost went on to mention tha
t he had contacts there who could make that happen but he caught himself.

  "My point is, this sounds to me like a classic case of someone struggling to find themselves. I think the only way you get over it is to be thrown out into the world to see if you sink or swim. When you're at home, everything in your life follows the same old patterns from when you were a kid growing up. Your interactions with family are following old patterns from your childhood. They always treat you the same way. It’s hard to figure out who you are because you’re stuck in a mold that was built over the course of your lifetime. The only way you ever escape that mold is to get out on your own and totally change your environment. That’s been my experience. With no one to prop you up if you fall, your own strengths and weaknesses become evident. You learn the truth of your character. The fluff burns away and what’s left is you."

  “You sure you’re not a therapist in disguise? You have a lot of insight.”

  “Doctorate from the school of hard knocks and bad decisions.”

  Conor smiled but what Wayne said made sense to him. The more time he spent with the man, the more he grew to respect him. Conor hadn’t gone through what Wayne described because his own childhood and teenage years had been so different. He’d matured early because he’d had to. While he’d been raised under the wing of a strong, stern mother, he’d also been influenced by the steady stream of organized crime figures that passed through their house. His childhood had been far from normal but he wouldn’t change a thing. It made him who he was and he was okay with that.

  The conversation with Wayne gave him a lot to think about. His job wasn't to fix Barb but to give her the opportunity to fix herself. He didn’t need to remind her of who he’d tried to make her into. He didn’t need to tell her who she was. What he needed to do was let her discover for herself who she was.

  17

  It took Conor and Wayne most of the night to construct their cache along the road. The easiest thing would have been to build one in the woods alongside the house, but if someone moved in it might be difficult to sneak over the bridge and ferry the mountain of goods back to the road.