“You’re Rabbit, right? Holland’s boy?”
“Yessir.”
“How long you been workin’ for me, son?” Halford picked up the blued steel barrel of the 12-gauge, looked down it, then blew through it.
“Going on my first year, I reckon.”
“You reckon, or you know?”
The boy was nervous. He was aware of his hands shaking so he kept them out of sight, but he couldn’t keep his knee from bouncing spastically under the table. “I know, sir. Next month will be a year.”
“And how long you been on the shit?”
The boy said nothing. His throat was suddenly frozen shut.
“Did you hear what I asked you, Rabbit?” Halford took a long hooked piece of wire from the table, attached a bit of oiled cloth to the tip, and fished it down the gun barrel.
“Yessir.”
“Then answer me.”
“I . . . I . . .”
“You know the rules around here, don’tcha, boy?”
“Yessir . . . I . . .”
“I consider that anyone doing my crank, on my time, is stealing from me. You know how I feel about stealing, right, Rabbit?”
The young man found his voice. “I swear I ain’t stealing, Mr. Burroughs, sir. I ain’t. A few fellas and me just like to party sometimes, but it’s always on our own dimes. I would never take from you, sir. Everybody knows that would be . . .”
Halford looked up from the gun parts. His eyes were almost black in the low light seeping through the canvas-covered windows. “That would be what, exactly?”
The young man choked out the rest. “That would be . . . crazy.” The roar of multiple Harleys pulling up outside filled the air. Halford looked to the window, and the scruffy kid caught his breath. Halford swiftly assembled the gun and wiped oil off his hands with a paper towel. “I’m going to have a talk with your deddy, see how he wants to handle it. Holland is Scabby Mike’s second cousin. Am I right about that?”
“Yessir.”
“That makes you kin. It’s also the only reason you’re still breathing right now. You get me?”
“Yessir. Thank you, sir.”
“Don’t thank me yet. Your deddy might still kill you once he gets word.”
Rabbit looked down at his bouncing knee.
“But today is the last time you show up anywhere near here with that shit in your system. I find out you even dipped the butt of your smoke in that shit before you come to work and it won’t be up to your deddy what gets done. You understand that, Rabbit?”
“Yessir.”
“Good. Let your fellas know the good word, too.”
“Yessir, I will. I promise.”
“Now get out.”
The young man nearly fell and broke his neck trying to get his ass out of that seat and get outside. He managed to reach the door without having a full-on heart attack. Once Rabbit was out, Halford laughed a little to himself. He rose from the table and stretched his bones before following Rabbit through the screen door with a recently cleaned Mossberg over his shoulder.
2.
“Goddamn, Bracken, what the hell happened to you?” Halford ran his hand over the damage done to Bracken’s bike.
“We got jacked right outside Broadwater.”
“By who?”
“No idea. I was hoping you could tell me.” Bracken took off his helmet, hung it on the handlebar of his battle-scarred Heritage. His passenger, Moe, stepped off the bike, and when Bracken followed, it was clear from his careful manner the big biker was feeling the effects of laying his bike down at forty miles an hour. Romeo and Tilmon got off the second bike and crowded behind Bracken.
“You think it was mountain folk?” Halford asked.
“No, I don’t think so. Ex-or current military would be my guess.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Something about the way they talked to each other. The lingo. The vibe was professional. They were equipped with pro gear, too, but nothing like our hardware. They had all their bases covered, too. Massive intel, like they didn’t have a care in the world that we were on the side of a public highway. They knew we’d be alone out there.”
“Where’s the truck?”
“We had to wipe it and leave it. Don’t worry, it’s clean.”
Halford looked at the three tarped pallets of pot with no truck to be loaded into. He scratched at his mammoth beard. “What did they get?”
Bracken unzipped his leather cut. “They got it all.”
“All what?”
“All the money, Hal. They took it all. Let’s go in and talk about it.”
The little bit of skin that showed through Halford’s mane flushed red. “What the fuck is there to talk about? You lost my money. You need to get out there and find it.”
Bracken flicked his eyes to his men and then back at Halford. “We didn’t lose shit. We got jacked. What we need to do now is sit down and try to figure all this out. These guys were prepared. They had information. It’s a very short list of people who knew we were gonna be out here and knew they could work without the law showing up.”