“What?” Brady asked.
“Coyote. He wasverysurprised.” He handed Brady a tablet with a 360 night-vision view of the camper, and Brady nodded.
“I may sleep alittle,” he confessed. “But I think we should start moving long before morning.”
“Agreed,” Eric said softly. “I’m going to text Jai for some details about our friend the ugly flower before I go to sleep. I’d like to know who found us.”
“Hopefully he took a picture,” Brady said, but he felt a moment of squeamishness. He may not havelikedmost of his coworkers, but he hadn’t wanted to see themdead.
But then, that hadn’t been his choice, had it?
Still, as Eric sat in bed, Brady wrapped around him to keep him warm while he texted Jai. His phone on a battery, he steeled himself for the picture Eric showed him.
“Shit,” he said, scrambling to sit up.
“Shit, what? And go back to where you were.” Eric’s voice took on an injured tone. “I, uhm, liked having you there.”
“Okay,” Brady muttered. “Fine. Have it your way. But you guys should know, that’snota deputy of the Southern California Sheriff’s office.”
“He doesn’t look like a professional,” Eric said contemplatively.
Brady eyed the corpse—and there was no doubt it was a corpse, since its neck was very much… askew. “Not a professional law officer,” Brady muttered. “But heisa professional meth dealer. Not a manufacturer—one of those guys that’s smart enough to sell other people’s product, because he likes—erm,liked—his skin unbarbecued. Arlen claimed we could never get enough evidence against him to bring to the DA, but….”
He paused as the implications of this guy trying to kill him aligned themselves on his mental railroad track, along with fourfuckers who had met a guy in a bar and taken a side gig to their planned bank robbery.
“Arlen’s obviously crooked,” Eric said.
“Well, yes,” Brady said. “But not just on the take from the people on the phone, whoever they are. He’s on the take from the drug dealers in the town, and probably from the thieves and the mobsters and all the other people Ace and company have been picking off.”
“And now,” Eric said, obviously making the same connections, “he’s calling in markers.”
“Great,” Brady muttered. “We’re not only being chased down by crookedcops, we’re being chased down by all the scumbags they’ve been on the take from. That’sawesome.”
“Well, it’s something everybody else should know,” Eric muttered, typing quickly. He pressed Send and then added more to it and pressed Send again.
In less than a second, his phone started to buzz—repeatedly.
Eric stared at it, replying where he could, and finally slumped back against the pillows. “Shit,” he said, his voice rusty.
“Shit what?” Oh, Brady didn’t like what this said atall.
“Well, tonight after we all left, a guy approached Ace from the desert side of the house—somebody Ace had apparently let go when he could have killed the guy. The guy said Ace’s garage was being watched from the freeway. Ace said okay and then proceeded to rewrite the plan. It’s better,” he admitted, “but we’re moving out an hour before dawn.”
“That’s it?” Brady blurted. “They’re not… I don’t know, running?”
Eric let out a sigh. “You grew up around working people, Brady. What do you suggest they do?”
Brady wanted to cry. He got it. The house, the garage—they were… well, home. Everything he knew about Ace and Sonny told him that they wouldn’t run unless the place was on fire, andeven then, they’d come out shooting to get as many fuckers as they could.
“I didn’t want this to happen,” he whispered. “I—our plan was so simple. Go in, steal the phone, drive to LA. But we’ve got the entire departmentandthe people they should be putting in jail trying to kill us, and people I’m starting to care about are going to get hurt!”
Eric wrapped his arm around Brady’s shoulder and squeezed. “Brady, you took an oath, you believe in law and order and in helping people. I get it. But just because these people haven’t gone through channels doesn’t mean they don’t feel the same way. You know this already. We’ve all got a personal stake in not letting that phone go free. In not letting Arlen Cuthbert get away with whatever he’s doing. In not letting child-exploiting monsters get away with it. So don’t worry about Ace and Sonny. The thing about this group of people helping us? They’re all volunteers. They wouldn’t be involved if they didn’t want to be. You probably think that taking you to bed made me feel obligated. You couldn’t be more wrong. I’vekilledlovers, Brady, do you get that? I found out my last lover took on a contract to kill good people—people fighting the good fight, if you know what I mean, and doing it on the side of the law, mostly. Ihadto kill him. He wouldn’t have stopped until they were dead. So being in my bed doesn’t guarantee my help. Being on the side of the innocent—that’ll do it.”
Brady knew he was staring and couldn’t stop.
“You… you, uhm… what?”
Eric swallowed. “He was going to kill them. I told him not to take the contract, because if nothing else taking it after I said no would make me fair game to our entire community. He said, ‘We all have to die, darling,’ and as it turns out, he was fucking right.”
