The Jeep comes to a stop in front of a rusty padlocked gate on the perimeter of the property, dotted with dry shrubs and scraggly trees. At the end of a short driveway sits a tumble-down little shack.
The man they’ve come for lives inside.
Stuffing his Glock 19 into his belt behind his back, Stevie steps out of the Jeep first—and the blistering desert air hits him like a semi. Instantly he’s flooded with memories of the nighttime covert ops he ran in Desert Storm. But that was a distant land, where more than two decades earlier he served with honor and distinction.
Tonight, he’s in Scurry County, Texas. He doesn’t have an elite squad to back him up. Only his jumpy little brother.
And the stakes aren’t just higher. They’re personal. “Lay a hand on my gate, Rourke, I’ll blow it clean off.”
Old Abe McKinley is standing on his farmhouse porch, shakily aiming a giant wood-handled Colt Anaconda. With his wild mane of white hair and blackened teeth, he either looks awful for seventy-five, or like total shit for sixty.
But Stevie doesn’t scare easy—or back down.
“I want to talk to you, Abe. Nothing more.”
“Then tell your baby brother to be smart. And put down his toy.”
“If you tell your folks to do the same.”
Abe snorts. Not a chance.
Stevie shrugs. Worth a try. “Then at least tell ’em,” he says, “to quit pretending to hide.”
After a reluctant nod from the old man, Hank tosses his pump-action Remington back into the Jeep. Simultaneously, fourteen of McKinley’s goons, hidden all around the compound, slowly step out of the shadows. Some were crouched behind bushes. Others, trees. A few were lying prone in the knee-high grass that covers most of McKinley’s two dozen acres.
Each man is wearing full hunting camo and a ski mask, and clutching a semiautomatic weapon.
Stevie was right. The bastard sure did know they’d be coming around here.
“Now, then.” Stevie clears his throat. “As I was saying—”
“Sorry to hear about your sister’s boy.” McKinley interrupts. Not one for small talk. He spits a thick squirt of tobacco juice into the dirt. “Tragedy.”
Stevie swallows his rage at the intentional sign of complete disrespect. “You sound real cut up about it. About losing a first-time customer.”
McKinley betrays nothing. “I don’t know what you mean by that. If you’re implying I had anything to do with—”
Hank’s the one who interrupts now. Can’t keep his cool like his brother.
“You got four counties hooked on the crystal you cook!” he shouts, taking a step forward. McKinley’s men raise their guns, but Hank doesn’t flinch.
“You’re the biggest player from here to Lubbock, and everybody knows it. Means one of y’all”—Hank glares at each of the armed men, one by one, their fingers tickling their triggers—“sold our nephew the shit that killed him. Put a live grenade in the hand of a child!”
McKinley just snarls. Then turns and starts heading back inside his house.
“Stevie, Hank, thanks for stopping by. But don’t do it again. Or I’ll bury you out back with the dogs.”
Like a shot from a rifle—crack!—the screen door slams shut behind him.
TOMORROW MARKS TEN weeks to the day my son Alex died before my eyes.
I can’t believe it. It feels like barely ten minutes.
I can still remember so clearly the pair of fresh-faced paramedics who rushed into the hallway and lifted him onto a gurney. I remember the breakneck ambulance ride to the county hospital, all those machines he was hooked up to, clicking and beeping, me clutching his clammy hand, urging him to hang on to his life just as tight.
I remember when we arrived and the EMTs slid out his stretcher, I saw the comic book Alex had in his back pocket. It got jostled and fluttered to the ground. As he was wheeled away into the ER, I stopped to scoop it up, and then frantically ran after them.
I screamed and waved it in the air like a madman, as if they were army medics carrying a blast victim off a battlefield and had left behind his missing limb. Of course I wasn’t thinking straight. How could any mother at a time like that? I kept wailing and bawling until finally one of the nurses took hold of those few dozen colorful pages and promised to give them to my son.
“When he wakes up!” I said, both my hands on her shoulders. “Please!”
The nurse nodded. And smiled sadly. “Of course, ma’am. When he wakes up.”
Two days later, that crinkled comic book was returned to me.
It came in a sealed plastic bag that also held my son’s wallet, cell phone, and the clothes he was wearing when he was admitted, including his Converses wrapped in duct tape and his old pair of Levi’s.
Alex never woke up.
My brother Hank suddenly jars me out of my dazed memory—by punching the kitchen wall with his meaty fist so hard, the framed pictures and hanging decorative plates all rattle. He’s always been the hotheaded one. The firecracker in the family. Tonight is no different.
“The Rourkes have owned this land for three generations!” he shouts. “No goddamn way we’re gonna lose it to the bank in three months!”
Before any of us can respond, he punches the wall again—even harder—and an antique piece of china that belonged to our late grandmother Esther Rourke slips off its holder and smashes into pieces.
Debbie, Hank’s bubbly blond wife, gasps in horror. But I couldn’t care less. It’s just a thing. An object. Sure, it had been in our family for years, but today our family itself is shattered. My heart is shattered. Who cares if some stupid old plate is, too? In fact, I’m happy to clean it up. Happy for a distraction from all the yelling and cursing and arguing of the past hour—which I hope we can wrap up in a few more minutes.
But before I can fetch a broom, Stevie takes my shoulder.
“Walk us through it one more time, Molly,” he says. “It’s one hell of a plan.”
I can’t deny that. On the surface, it sounds reckless. Crazy. Nearly impossible.
But I’ve had plenty of time to think over every last detail. And I believe with every piece of my broken heart that we can do it.
We have to do it.
See, well before Alex passed, the bank had been calling—sometimes twice, three times a day. The notices were piling up. Stevie, Hank, their wives, and me, we all scrimped as best we could. Even Alex, my big man, my baby, had been handing over the crumpled five-dollar bills he earned mowing Mrs. Baker’s lawn down the road.
But it wasn’t enough. The payments, the interest—I knew we’d never be able to cover it all. We’d keep slipping further and further behind. I knew it was only a matter of time before we lost our home for good.
And then, we were faced with a totally unexpected additional expense, which sped the process up even more.
The cost of my only child’s funeral.
So now, in just ninety days, the ten-acre farm our family has called home for so long will become the legal property of First Texas Credit Union. Unless we put my “hell of a plan,” the one I’d been mulling over for months, into action.
And, by the grace of God, pull it off.
“Save your breath,” Hank says to me. “It’s madness, Molly. Pure and simple.”
Again I can’t deny that. At least under normal circumstances, I can’t.
“Desperate times,” says Stevie’s wife, Kim, with a quiet intensity. A military daughter and spouse, she’s a wise brunette beauty, no stranger to hard choices. Over the last twelve years that she’s been married to my oldest brother, she’s become the sister I never had. When it became clear that children of their own weren’t in the cards, she could have gotten resentful. Bitter. Instead, Kim directed all that excess love toward Alex. She was the only one of us, for example, who had the patience to teach him to ride a bike, a hobby he kept up until his last days.
“I wanna know what he thinks,” Hank fires back, pointing at the man who’s been sitting in t
he adjacent dining room, sipping iced sweet tea with lemon, listening patiently this whole time, barely uttering a word. “If he says it’s crazy, you know it’s gotta be—”
“Doesn’t matter,” I say. “This is family-only. Either we’re all in, or we’re all out. Right on our asses, too.”
My brothers and sisters-in-law chew on that. So do Nick and J.D., two retired Marines Stevie served with in the Middle East so long ago, who became as close as blood. Especially in recent years, they’d become like big brothers to Alex, taking him on hunting and fishing trips for some critical male bonding. They were in the second row at his funeral, two burly ex-soldiers dabbing at their eyes.
I explain one final time exactly what I’m proposing. My plan is a long haul with short odds. It might cost us everything. But doing nothing definitely would.
After a tense silence that feels like it goes on forever . . .
“In,” Stevie says simply. Marines don’t mince their words.
“Semper fi,” says Nick, stepping forward. He and J.D. both give stiff salutes.
Kim clasps her husband’s hand. “That makes four, then.”
Debbie nervously twirls her yellow locks, blinking, unsure. I like Debbie—or, should I say, I’ve grown to like her. We probably wouldn’t be friends if she weren’t married to my brother. Debbie’s sweet, but timid. Tries a little too hard to please. She’d rather go with the flow than rock the boat, especially when her husband’s in it. She looks to Hank for guidance; she doesn’t get it. So she does something surprising. She goes with her gut.
“This place, after all these years . . . it’s become my home, too. I’ll do it.”
Hank throws up his hands. He’s the final holdout.
“You’re asking me to pick my family or my conscience. You understand that?”
My eyes flutter to a framed, faded photograph on the wall of Alex at age six. He’s sitting in a tire swing hanging from the branch of a giant oak tree on our farm, smiling a gap-toothed grin. He looks so little. So happy. So innocent.
So alive.
“Sounds like an easy choice to me,” I say.
At last, with a heavy sigh, Hank nods. He’s in, too.
And so the vote is unanimous. My plan is a go.
“Just one little problem,” Debbie says nervously, bending down now to pick up the pieces of the antique plate her husband broke.
“Where are we gonna get seventy-five grand to pull this thing off?”
STORIES AT THE SPEED OF LIFE
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First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Bookshots
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The Verdict: BookShots (A Jon Roscoe Thriller) Page 9
