“Nash says somebody has to watch the puppies until they’re old enough to start training and take care of the bait.”
“Bait?” Preacher echoed before he could stop himself.
The boy just looked toward the shed where the dogs had been kept before turning away. Pam looked down at the boy’s shackle. “Preacher, can I talk to you alone for a moment?”
Preacher handed the puppy back to the boy. “We’re just going to be right over here.”
Knox just shrugged like he didn’t care, but Preacher could feel the boy’s eyes on him as they walked.
“We need to call the police. They were clearly holding that boy hostage. This is kidnapping or, at the very least, massive abuse and neglect,” Pam said.
Preacher nodded. “One of ‘em ran off when I showed up. The boy called him Nash.”
Pam’s lip curled in a sneer. “That boy’s about twenty pounds underweight, and I’m betting there are probably some more signs of abuse under those clothes. He needs a hospital.”
“How are the animals?” Preacher asked, shading his eyes to look in the direction of the shed.
“About how you’d expect from years of torture and abuse. Some will probably have to be put down, but I have hopes we can rehab and rehome most of them. I’m going to get Nick on the phone and have him track down some more info on these guys. We gotta find out if this kid has a mom and dad that aren’t living in a shack in the middle of the sticks, and if so, how did he end up out here?”
Preacher shook his head. “You call the cops. I’ll call Nicky. I’m not supposed to be here, and I’m definitely not supposed to be armed.”
Pam took the gun from Preacher, checking the safety before she slid it into place under her shirt. “Deal.”
Preacher pulled his cell phone free of his jeans and dialed one of three numbers stored on his phone. “This is Webster,” Nicky said. He still went by his old last name to everybody but the guys he’d gone to prison with, even though his married name was now Whitaker. It was still weird as fuck to him that Cyrus and Nicky had become a couple in prison, but they were both good guys.
“Hey, it’s Preacher.”
“Preacher? Is Cy okay?” Nicky asked, panic creeping into his voice.
“Yeah, Cy’s fine. The same pain-in-the-ass bleeding heart he always is. I need you to give me everything you can on whoever owns this property. 3849 Crawfish Drive. Rexford, California.”
There was the sound of typing. “The deed says the property belongs to Keith Camden… Keith Camden is… Oh, shit. Ol’ Keith, aka Tennessee, is currently being held without bail on a drug trafficking charge in Arizona.”
“Anything else?”
“He’s apparently the head of the Devil’s Crew motorcycle club. They sound like lovely people. Just your average gun-running, drug dealing band of murderers.”
Preacher shook his head. “Fantastic. Don’t suppose there’s anything in there about somebody named Nash?”
Once more, he listened as Nicky typed frantically. “Nash. Nash,” he muttered absently. “Got it,” he cried. “Nash, as in Nashville Carter Camden, age thirty-three. One of three sons born to Keith Camden. The others being a twenty-six-year-old son named Memphis Daniel and an almost twelve-year-old son named Knoxville Coe. Nash, like his father, has a long list of felonies that he has somehow never served time for. The little one seems to have disappeared off the radar after first grade.”
Preacher glanced over to where Cabot was working to get the cuff off the boy’s ankle. “Yeah, we found him here. He says he wasn’t allowed to go to school. What does it say about the middle son? Is he a scumbag, too?”
“Hold, please,” Nicky said, clacking away rapid-fire. “No. Memphis Camden works at a flower shop here in Los Angeles. As far as I can tell, he’s never been in any trouble. Lives in a studio apartment over said flower shop. Why?”
“You might want to try to get him on the phone. If the oldest one’s in the wind and the dad’s a piece of shit, somebody’s going to have to take guardianship of the kid. Pam says we gotta get the kid to the hospital to get looked over. They’ll probably want to keep him at least overnight.”
“Yeah, alright. I’ll see about getting in touch with him. You just bring my husband home in one piece.”
Preacher’s gaze fell to Cy, whose knee was firmly planted in the back of one of the men from the house. “I think he’ll be just fine.”
Preacher found himself looking at the small boy once more. He wasn’t sure the same could be said for Knox. As the ambulance pulled up, he disconnected, jogging back towards the boy. “Hold up. I’m riding with him.”
Memphis couldn’t stop shaking. Part of it was from rage—at himself and Tennessee. Another, far more prominent part, was shaking from fear. A fear so embedded into his core it was impossible to fight. A fear that had wrapped itself around his lungs and strangled the breath from him the moment he’d answered his phone. He’d worked so hard to put his old life behind him. He’d had to train himself not to think about Rexford or Keith Camden, had to remind himself that his father probably hadn’t given Memphis a thought in years. He’d fought hard to carve out a life for himself—a small, quiet life where he could appreciate the simple beauty of things like flowers and quiet.
Ten years. A whole decade. That was how long it had taken for Memphis to find some inner peace. A place where he didn’t wake up shaking in a cold sweat, a place where he wasn’t constantly looking over his shoulder, where he didn’t jump at the sound of every revved motorcycle engine and his scars didn’t pull and burn every time he smelled gasoline or cigarette smoke. But, in just one phone call, all that work had unraveled. He was unraveling.
Even with Knox in the hospital, battered, bruised, and malnourished, it was impossible not to be afraid of the man who put him there, and that fear made Memphis feel like his insides were shriveled and rotting, like at his very core he was rotten, too. He was an adult, nearly twenty-six years old, and he was still scared, still weighing whether he was strong enough to fight for a child he barely remembered. Maybe that made him worse than his father thought. Maybe the last thing Knox needed in his hospital room was a headcase like Memphis.
