“If he’s a piece-of-shit racist, I do,” Val said.
“Maybe you should try that dance with me.” Bracken took a step toward Val, but Gareth put a hand between them. “Enough,” he said, and turned to Wilcombe. “Is this going to be a problem?”
“Mr. Burroughs, I’m going to need you to explain to my associate what took place here, so we can move past it.”
“Fair enough,” Gareth said. “Your man there, Pinky, wasn’t none too happy with my friend being in his bar. Called him a gorilla. Called him his boy. Three times, if I remember correctly. Val don’t like that shit. Neither do I. I gave him a chance to make nice, but he thought he would get all Ty Cobb and try to swing that bat over there at my friend’s head.” Gareth pointed to the Louisville Slugger on the floor. “My friend took offense.”
Bracken and Val stood close enough to kiss.
“Well, then, no, Mr. Burroughs, we don’t have a problem. Rodd, will you and Jeremy assist Pinkerton with resetting his nose? Clean him up and take care of the mess behind the bar.” Again they waited for Bracken to approve. He backed out of Val’s face and picked up the bat, then tossed it to Pinky, and the three bikers disappeared through the back door. Bracken poured himself a whiskey.
“My apologies, Mr. Burroughs. If I’d known you’d have a colored gentleman with you, I would have given some warning.”
“But seeing that we’re from Georgia, you just assumed we all run around with white hoods on, right?”
Wilcombe smiled slightly and held his hands up in a shrug, then motioned to the booth behind him. “Shall we?”
“Right,” Gareth said. Val retook his seat at the bar.
The little man sat down and pushed his glasses up on his nose. “Now, what is it I can do for you?”
6.
“I need to be able to protect my family’s interests. I understand you can help me with that.”
“And by ‘interests,’ you mean the marijuana business your family has cultivated for itself?” Wilcombe talked matter-of-factly, like he was discussing the weather. Gareth studied the little man’s face. “I guess Jimbo has been talking out of school,” he said.
“Mr. Cartwright has kept me apprised of your family’s business dealings, yes.”
“If by ‘business’ you mean three thousand acres of the finest bud in the Southeast, then yeah, you have a good grasp on what we’re doing up there.”
“We have access to product here in Florida, if we so desired,” Wilcombe said. His voice was flat—uninterested and unimpressed.
“I’m not here selling,” Gareth said. “But if I was, no one around here could compete. Not for the price, and not with so little hassle. I bet the Cubanos down here are always shuffling to hide product and transport from the feds. Am I right? Ask me how we’ve been steady growing for more than two decades without a single federal intrusion.”
“Okay, I’ll bite. How are you keeping it from the feds? That’s a lot of land to hide from DEA helicopters.”
“Geography,” Gareth said, and smiled wide.
“Geography,” Wilcombe repeated.
“Yup. You see, my father built our entire family fortune on his ability to hide things in the woods. Back in the day, the stills had to run twenty-four-seven if they were going to generate enough shine to get us into the big leagues. We couldn’t afford to have any of them found. Not one. And we didn’t. Knowing the lay of the land was essential to that fact. He got extremely good at it. Good enough to outsell those cousin-fuckers up in Virginia without taking any of the heat.”
“But three thousand acres is a little more difficult to conceal than an average whiskey distiller, correct?”
“Yes, it is, but my father, the crafty sum’ bitch that he was, figured out that our mountain has some unique geographical positioning along the northern face. He cleared the forestry out in strips in a way that creates blind spots from the air. We can work those fields all day every day and wave at the federals flying overhead. Dumb bastards are none the wiser.”
Wilcombe looked genuinely impressed. “That is indeed something to be proud of. How did you explain what you were doing to the contractors? How did you get the permits?”
Gareth scratched at his beard and sat back in the booth. “Contractors? We didn’t have no contractors. We had six men, myself included. And hell, I was just a boy. We cleared, primed, and planted that land, working from plans my deddy drew out with a pencil and a slide rule.”
“That’s impressive, Mr. Burroughs.”
“I know.”
“And the processing of said product?”
“Is done completely in-house by men I’ve known my whole life. We grow it, cure it, dry it, bale it, and package it out all ourselves. No outside help.”
“Yet here you are, looking for outside help.”