“No problem.”
“You’re family, kid,” Archer said in his gruff way. “Feel like we’ve sucked ass at making you feel that way.”
“We have sucked ass at it,” Rush said dourly.
Archer grunted.
“Guys, it’s cool,” I said and both of them looked at me.
“No, it ain’t,” Archer said simply. “Which is why we’re going with you all the way on this.”
“Merry fuckin’ ho, ho,” Rush said, and I laughed and shook my head.
“Appreciate it,” I said dryly, and I did.
Rush and I sat our asses in one of Point Nowhere’s standby vehicles on the side of the road, just up the street from the registered owner’s place of the truck that’d hit Eedee. We had the old Jeep turned off, freezing our nuts off watching and waiting. The truck was parked out front in plain sight facing us, and after a few hours this shit was getting old.
Thoughts of Eedee, tear-stained and terrified kept me rooted to the spot.
“You know, I’m getting too old for this,” Rush declared with an explosive sigh.
“Stakeout type shit?” I asked, taking a drink of the now ice-cold coffee I’d picked up hot from Eedee’s stand before I’d picked Rush up.
“Yeah, that, and running my woodshop by myself.”
“Thought you had Chandler around helping you out.”
“Yeah, his walking sticks are selling pretty good,” he said with a nod. “Got him hooked up with whatchamacallit, itsy or whatever, online.”
“Yeah?”
“Kid could go to college on bank like that.”
“Yeah? Good for you guys.”
“That’s not the point I’m making, though.”
I looked over at him and he was eying me. “You had the bug pretty good before you took off to the Marine Corps with Slice. Any interest in maybe coming back to it?”
I thought about it. “Be a hell of a lot better than fuckin’ contracting and remodeling rich motherfucker’s houses around here,” I said.
“Less steady in some ways,” Rush said, frowning to himself.
“Not like remodel work is the steadiest there ever was,” I said dryly.
“Split the difference?” he asked, and I tilted my head.
“There’s an idea,” I said. “As long as you’re cool with it.”
“Fuck yeah,” he said. “Gotta get it while the gettin’ is good.”
I nodded.
“Not like I’m hurting for money, yo. I could probably buy a house outright around here if I wanted to at this point. Living at the club is cheap and Slice and I didn’t live extravagantly or nothin’ while we were away – usually in the barracks, on base. We rented a shithole apartment on the cheap while we were in Chicago.”
“Smart,” Rush said nodding.
“Yeah, well, I learned a lot from Nox. He didn’t think I was listening, but I was,” I said, shifting uncomfortably.
Rush looked at me, met my eyes and nodded.
“He knew you were listening,” he said. “He was proud of you.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that, and Rush didn’t have anything to offer. We sat in a comfortable silence and kept watching for any signs of life out of the mobile home up the street.
“Hey,” Rush said, slapping me in the chest. It was late afternoon, getting on toward evening.
“Oh, now he is one methed-out motherfucker,” I said, getting a look at the dude heading right for the truck. It had some front-end damage, a busted headlight and some of Eedee’s car’s dark blue paint on the fender. This was for sure the dude.
“I think it’s pretty fuckin’ safe to say, this was the dude driving,” Rush said, putting his seatbelt on.
“Yeah,” I said. “I think you’re right.”
“Think he’s looking to score?” Rush asked.
“I think so.”
“Two birds, one stone, maybe. You gotta like that.”
“Here’s to hoping,” I agreed.
We held still and waited for the dude to pass us. He didn’t even look our way.
“Let the games begin,” Rush muttered, and I turned on the old mid-nineties Jeep Cherokee that we were in. The damn thing was barely road sound and had stolen plates, completely untraceable back to the club. Rush and I both had latex gloves on under our winter ones. Insurance against leaving any trace behind.
Rush called Dray from a burner and filled him in. We were to follow, but Dray was on the fence about the potential meth angle.
“If you got an opportunity,” Rush said, “Dray says to take it. He doesn’t want this slippery fuck getting away a second time, and the meth ain’t exactly going to dry up overnight. There’ll be other opportunities to deal with that shit when the weather is warmer.”
“Copy that,” I muttered as we pulled out onto the two-lane country road that served as a highway around these parts.
“I really hope we can take this motherfucker out,” I grumbled as we crawled over icy patches on the highway.
The storm had blown itself out days ago. We’d lost power at the club and had to run on generators for a few days, but everyone was safe, warm, fed, and happy to be there. The quarters were a bit tight, but that was what it was. I had my room and my woman to myself for the most part, so that was all that mattered to me.
I was sad to see her go back to normal life after the cleanup began. The roads were plowed, and the weather warmed just enough to melt some of this shit off. Of course, it froze back down and now everything was a goddamn ice rink. That might be to our benefit, however.
“Is he about to go over the Sandy River Bridge?” I asked.
“Looks like it,” Rush said with a savage grin.
There is a fucking god, and he was being pretty damn good to me right this minute. Of course, it’d been his angel that this asshole had hurt, so it stood to reason.
“Pull off there, wait for him to come back this way,” Rush said.
“That could be fucking hours,” I warned, and he shook his head.
“Nah, I think he’s going to fuckin’ score.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. He’ll be back this way in no time.”
“I hope you’re fucking right, man.”
“Nothing but backwoods hillbillies up this way,” Rush said with a sniff. “Ain’t nothin’ but moonshine, weed, and drugs up there.”
“How do you know?” I asked, grinning.
“It’s where I score my weed and shine, how the fuck you think I know?” he asked and I laughed. “They got some good shit up that way, sticky icky you can throw at the ceiling and it’ll fuckin’ stick. Come on, now, man.”
I laughed and pulled off, but left the Jeep running this time to keep warm.
It got dark, but pretty soon, here came the one-eyed cyclops of a truck. We made sure, though, Rush raising the night vision scope to his eye.
“That’s him, alright.”
“What do you think?” I asked.
“You pull out just right and play bumper cars, he’ll go right off the edge just before the bridge and down the bank.”