“Miah—”
He began walking again. “Come with me and you’ll find out.”
“Just don’t get yourself shot or thrown in prison for the rest of your life, man. Your mom needs you.” Hell, fucking Fortuity needed him. Needed the ranch. Vince needed him. “You got too much riding on your shoulders to fuck this up, Miah.”
“You come, you better keep out of my way,” he said again.
And what choice did Casey have, really?
Chapter 27
It wasn’t a long drive—just to the other end of Fortuity, barely twenty minutes at the clip Miah was going. He turned them off the main road just before the railroad tracks and down a cracked and faded residential road, all the way to its end. It was one of the town’s more depressing corners, dotted with small houses and trailers, a good quarter of them looking abandoned or at the very least terminally neglected.
The sun was just rising and Miah squinted at the various shitboxes they passed.
“What number?” Casey asked.
“Can’t remember, but it was a single-wide, with an old-school laundry line beside it. Dad insisted on cutting him a final paycheck. I insisted on delivering it, so Bean wouldn’t get a chance to play the pity card and try to win himself any more chances. I remember there were about six cars parked out front. Just what you’d expect from a load of—”
He went silent and eased them to a halt along the roadside, approaching a trailer. There were two cars and three trucks sprawled half on the patchy front lawn like beached whales.
“Motherfucker,” Casey breathed. The far pickup was navy blue, and a good fifteen, twenty years old to judge by the headlights’ glaucoma. “Could that be the truck?”
“One way to know for sure.” Miah got out and pulled the rifle from behind his seat. Fuck, that wasn’t a good sign. Still, Casey secured the pistol at his own back and followed, jogging to keep up.
Miah wasn’t discreet. He circled the truck, boots crunching on the gravel shoulder. The bed was loaded with crap—a shitty old chair and cardboard boxes, trash bags that looked to be maybe stuffed with clothes, like somebody was planning on moving out, and in a hurry. Crouching, Miah inspected the plate, and Casey did the same. Though he couldn’t say it was a shock, he still got chills when he saw the dirt clinging to it, in the perfect outline to mark where a sticky length of duct tape had once been pressed.
Miah stared at it for a long breath, then murmured, “I’m gonna fucking kill him.”
“Dude—”
He was up, striding toward the house. Casey dashed behind to catch up, just as the door to the trailer popped open.
A slender pale man of thirty or so stood on the threshold, keys dangling from one hand, an army green frame pack in the other. He had a narrow face and stood about Casey’s height. Bundled up and wearing a balaclava, he could easily have been taken for James Ware, if that was who you’d been expecting. He got one foot on the cinder block standing in for a front step and froze, eyes growing wide.
Miah kept on marching, the rifle swinging right along like an extension of his arm. “And just where the fuck do you think you’re off to?” he shouted.
“Fuck,” was all Chris Bean said before dropping his pack and hitting the dirt, running at full-tilt for Christ knew where, aimed at the badlands.
Miah was a dozen paces behind him and gaining. “You stop or I will fucking shoot you in the back!”
Casey got his own weapon drawn but kept the safety on. He hoped to hell Miah had the sense to have done the same.
He found out only seconds later that the answer was no.
The shot rang out in the still morning air, and an instant later Bean went loping off on long, splayed steps, one leg seeming to give out on him as he tumbled headlong into the scrub grass. Miah tackled him as he tried to stand, the impact of his body snapping through Bean’s and knocking his face against the earth.