I think about Lockhart's face on Earl's porch.
The patience. The smile. The polite, careful, dangerous man who called me sweetheart and told me I wasn't family.
He's about to find out exactly how much family I have.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Banshee
Church runs long.
Full table. Every patched member in his seat, Phantom at the head, the gavel down and the room sealed.
The chapel smells the way it always does—leather, smoke, the faint ghost of a hundred closed-door conversations soaked into the wood.
I’m in my chair on the right side, Road Captain’s position, and I’ve got a folder in front of me that’s been keeping me up for the past three nights.
Lockhart’s paper trail.
I lay it out for the table.
Methodical. Clean.
The Road Captain in me has always been good at routes—not just the ones on asphalt, but the ones through information.
The ones that show you where someone’s been and where they’re heading.
And Lockhart has been heading the same direction for twenty years.
Fourteen properties acquired across the county since 2004.
Seven of them formerly owned by ranchers over sixty.
Three purchased during medical crises—cancer, a stroke, a husband’s death.
In every case, the pattern is identical: a polite offer, a refusal, then a slow escalation of bureaucratic pressure—tax assessments, water disputes, zoning challenges, code enforcement complaints—until the owner broke or died or simply ran out of money to fight.
Then Lockhart swooped in with a revised offer at half the original price and bought the land for pennies on the dollar.
The county inspector who showed up at our compound last week?
His wife’s brother works for Lockhart’s ranch.
The zoning complaint about Bex’s farrier operation?
Filed by a shell company that traces back to Lockhart’s family trust.
I close the folder. “He’s not a neighbor making offers. He’s a predator running a playbook. And now he’s running it on us.”
Phantom is quiet for a long moment.
The room waits.
When Phantom thinks, the club thinks with him—that’s the kind of president he is.
Not loud, not reactive.
The kind of man who holds a problem up to the light and turns it until he finds the fracture.
