Dirty South Drug Wars (10 page)

“I want my plant. Can’t I take the plant, Rue?”

“It’s not your plant, Lucy. That plant belongs in the sex den. It probably has ten different diseases on it. You’re taking a bleach bath when we get home.” I scowled, dragging her protesting body to the stairs.

It was hard as hell getting her up the stairs, but somehow we did it. We were just about halfway down the driveway when she started babbling.

“That’s Jay’s car. My purse is in Jay’s car. Get my purse, Sissy.”

Whenever Lucy called me “Sissy” it did strange things to me. It reminded me of our childhood and the desire to always defend and protect her from anything life threw her way. When I spotted Jay’s car parked precariously in the driveway, something snapped inside me. I pushed Lucy into Josie’s arms and yanked the handle of the car with no luck. The other doors didn’t budge either.

Near the drive sat a flowerbed. Huge white rocks lined the borders. I walked over and picked one up. The weight of the rock practically brought me to my knees. A handsome, slightly familiar-looking blond-haired guy stood a few feet away beside a truck, keys in hand.

“Is there a problem?” I asked, tilting my head to the side. He shook his head. “Good.”

I swung my arms and released the rock. It sailed a short distance, cutting through the air and smashing into the passenger window. Shattered glass sprinkled the driveway, catching glints of the moon as it fell to the ground.

The guy cringed, but I ignored him. I reached inside the broken window and pulled up the manual lock. Lucy’s purse lay abandoned in the backseat and I grabbed it, shutting the car door behind me. Josie groaned, struggling to hold Lucy up, so I slung the purse over one shoulder and helped her.

“Do y’all need some help gettin’ her in the car?” the blond guy asked.

I’d already forgotten he was there. Josie and I exchanged looks and shrugged. He walked with us to the truck, a worried expression on his face as he watched my sister. He did look familiar, so he must have known her.

I kept watching him in my peripheral, trying to figure out where I’d seen him before. He was good-looking, with a friendly smile and sparkling eyes. He had that typical shaggy, unkempt hair, curled up at the base of his neck like most country boys. A plain, black tee and somewhat worn, faded jeans graced his lean, slightly athletic body. The brown leather boots on his feet were scuffed and cracked. I searched my brain for where I recognized him from but came up with nothing.

We reached the truck and the guy took Josie’s place holding Lucy. Josie unlocked the truck and pulled the cab door open. All three of us struggled to put her in the backseat.

Eventually, the guy gently placed her over his shoulder, grabbed the truck handle, and hoisted himself and Lucy inside the cab. He carefully laid her in the backseat. Lucy’s eyes fluttered open as he caught her head with his fingers and laid it down against the soft leather. She stared up at him, a beautiful smile adorning her face.

“There you are,” she whispered, reaching up and cupping her small hands on his cheeks. “I knew you’d find me.”

He stiffened, his mouth falling open a bit. “I’m … I’m sorry,” he stuttered, placing his hands on her wrists and removing hers from his face. “I don’t think I know you. You must have me mixed up with someone else.”

Lucy frowned, shook her head, and said, “No, it’s you. You don’t know me? You haven’t seen me before?”

“No. Like I said, I’m sorry.” His face paled as he backed off and eased out of the cab.

“Well, I’ve seen you. In my dreams. I’ve seen you a million times.”

She began to sob, and the guy stiffened again before taking a step toward my sister. Lucy dropped her face in her hands, her body shuddering as she cried.

Embarrassed by her actions, it was the perfect time to interrupt.

“My sister is drunk.” Wedging myself between them, I shut the back cab door.

The action snapped Lucy from her sobs and she threw herself against the window. She slammed her fists on the tinted glass. When Lucy spouted about her erratic dreams, she freaked me out, mostly because they sometimes came true. Josie and I exchanged a knowing glance. Josie ran around the truck, jumped behind the wheel, and fired it up as I pulled myself inside.

“Wait,” the guy said. He ran his fingers through his hair as he stared at the dark window my sister was trapped behind. The guy had this torn look about him, as though he wanted to say something but was unsure of himself.

I remedied the situation by slamming the door of the truck as Josie backed up the driveway.

“What’s your name?” he yelled at Lucy’s window, snapping out of his trance.

Lucy popped open the window of the cab, pressing her mouth near the tiny opening, screaming, “Lucy Monroe! What’s yours?”

The guy paled further and said, “Chance. Chance Hayes.”

He stood in the driveway for a moment before backing up, turning, and darting to the gray pickup truck he’d stood at when he spotted me with the rock.

“Damn, I think he’s gonna follow us,” Josie said.

She pulled onto the road and stomped the gas, terrorizing a few of the party stragglers into a nearby ditch. She grinned and flipped them off as we peeled down the road, slinging rocks behind us.

“Don’t talk your crazy talk to strangers, Lucy,” Josie scolded. “It freaks people out.”

“He’s not a stranger.” Lucy glared at Josie. “I’ve seen him a million times, just like I said. That’s the guy of my dreams. And he’s coming for me … and a storm is coming with him.”

Lucy’s strange words hung thick in the air. The truck was quiet for a while. Josie stared ahead, concentrating on flying down the road without getting us killed. My mind was busy trying to place that boy. It was somewhere recent, his face still fresh in my mind. When I remembered where I’d seen him, it hit me like a tornado, the memory swirling around inside my head, bringing hell with it.

“What is it?” Josie asked, side-eyeing me.

In the backseat, Lucy was caught up in her own little world. With her face plastered against the back glass, she searched behind us for any sign of the guy we’d left behind.

Tanner had walked into the party in Birchwood with two other guys. The three of them had looked like rock stars as girls drooled over them and guys stared, impressed by them.

“That guy,” I whispered. “He was with Tanner and Bryce at the party.”

Josie’s eyes widened.

An ear-splitting squeal caused me to jump in my seat a little. The truck swerved slightly and a low curse escaped Josie’s mouth.

“Lucy, what the …” I turned in my seat to scold my little sister, but my sentence trailed away. A set of headlights behind us were quickly gaining speed.

“I told you he’d come for me.” Lucy sighed, leaning against the seat, a whimsical look on her face. “It’s the storm I’m worried about. It started with y’all. What did y’all do? You did something really stupid, didn’t you? Rue, you’re not supposed to do stupid stuff. When the storm comes, everything is gonna go to hell, and it’s all your fault.” She had an eerie edge to her voice, giving me chills.

I gulped and avoided Josie’s wide-eyed gaze. Josie pursed her lips, hit the gas, and left the headlights far behind.

Lucy was right. A storm was brewing. And it wouldn’t be long before it hit us like a tornado.

“Put it in your mouth, Rue.”

“No, Brodie. It smells funny …”

“You’ll love it. Just give it a try.”

“It looks strange,” I said.

“Come on.” Brodie grinned. “Don’t be such a girl. Put it in your mouth and just let the juices flow, baby. Swallow it down. Be a trooper.”

“I’ve never seen meat that dark.”

Brodie chuckled. “Don’t be scared of the dark meat. It’s the best kind. You know what they say … the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice.”

“As a black woman, I’m offended by that remark,” my friend Mia joked, mock-glaring at Brodie.

“Fine … I’ll do it,” I relented with a heavy sigh, taking a delicate bite of the sandwich Brodie handed me.

It looked like a regular barbeque sandwich, aside from the strange color of the meat. Brodie stared at me with a mixture of wide-eyed wonder and seriousness. But who could take a person who wore camouflage pants and a shirt that read “When the zombies come I’m so tripping you” seriously?

“It’s gamey.” I groaned, wrinkling my face in disgust. “And not a good gamey. It’s a
disgusting
gamey. What
is
this?”

“Barbequed raccoon,” Brodie boasted, standing tall over where I sat on the front deck of our house facing the lake. “Made by yours truly.” He pointed his thumb at his massive, muscled chest as my face paled, a lump of thick barbeque wedged in my throat.

Gagging, I flew from my chair, ran across the deck, and leaned over the wooden rail. My stomach rolled as I spit and retched. Brodie, Lucy, and Mia howled with laughter. I cursed and heaved before grabbing someone’s forgotten beer sitting on the deck rail, swishing some in my mouth and spitting it out.

“I’m gonna kill you, Brodie.”

Jumping on his back, I beat him with my fists. Easily three times my size, Brodie smoothly removed me from his back and sat me down in my chair, laughing at my feeble attempt at an attack. I glared at him and huffed, but my anger ebbed away at the sight of my sister’s laughing face.

A week had passed since searching for and finding my sister at the party in Oak Bluff. Once Josie had outdriven the blond guy from the party, Lucy fell asleep with no more strange ranting and raving. Josie had helped me put her to bed. When Lucy had woken up the next morning, it was as though nothing had taken place. I’d been too scared to bring it up again. Visions of the blond boy trailing us still flashed in my mind from time to time. It was best Lucy didn’t know he was friends with the Montgomerys.

I was pretty impartial when it came to the Montgomerys. I wasn’t sure who to blame for my father’s death anymore, but Lucy was different. She blamed them all … with gusto. The mere mention of the Montgomery name sent her into a frenzy. Lucy hated them not only for our father’s demise, but for our mother’s departure as well.

Other than two parties we’d attended, the week had gone by relatively smoothly. There had been no more random phone calls from Bryce to “Cassie,” which seemed to have disappointed Josie judging by the way she moped around the cake shop. And fretting over our missing money had been in vain. After calling the Social Security office, I had spoken with a representative who promised to work everything out. The money had been deposited into someone else’s account. My missing money had appeared in my account by Wednesday. I’d paid all the bills right on time, taking some of life’s heavy weight off my shoulders. Nana felt so much better that she’d come back to work on Tuesday with a big grin on her face. She continued to refuse to discuss the matter of the safe she’d forced upon me.

I’d found the perfect place to hide Nana’s safe, although it was somewhat of a struggle. After racking my brain, I had wrapped the safe in several garbage bags and buried it underneath a huge white oak near a stream in one corner of our property. An old, rusty barbed wire fence marked our property line. I’d tied a small, pink ribbon on the wire next to the tree to remind myself of the safe’s location.

Friday night rolled around, and we were all hanging out on the deck of our house, an old ritual we hadn’t practiced in a while. Brodie declared it a night of debauchery with underage drinking and gratuitous drug use. Nothing heavy, of course. Just a little weed courtesy of Peyton who was passed out on a lounge chair.

Lucy had the brilliant idea to draw on his face while he was unconscious. She was sitting on his lap with a black liquid eyeliner pen in her hand. A Hitler-type mustache was drawn above his upper lip. Mia was snapping photos and posting them online as she chuckled below her breath. To put it simply, we were having an amazing Friday night.

Until the raccoon incident.

“Don’t be mad at me, Rue.” Brodie laughed at my scowl. “Those raccoons are mean as hell. They deserved to die. They were eating the vegetables out of Nana’s garden so I set up a live trap and put them out of their misery. It was very humanitarian, really.” Brodie punctuated his declaration with a disgusting belch.

“I hear they’re very clean animals.” Lucy smirked at my perturbed look. She was drawing an intricate spider web-like tattoo on Peyton’s neck as he snored.

“I think they eat shit. How is that clean?” I snatched up my red cup and took a swig.

Lucy finished her artwork and climbed off Peyton’s lap. She joined Mia and me at the table.

Brodie leaned against the deck rail, grinning like an opossum. “Mia, put on some of that old school hippity hop music,” he bellowed, removing his shirt to reveal his huge chest. “Get your phones ready, girls. I’m fixin’ to show y’all something epic.”

Mia rolled her eyes but did as he asked. She strolled inside through the sliding glass doors. The outside speakers began booming, the sound reverberating over the still lake and filling the deep, dark woods with the lyrics of an old hip hop song.

Laughing, I grabbed my phone and began recording. Brodie sauntered seductively to where Peyton sat sprawled out in the lounge chair with his head tipped sideways. His mouth was hanging open and he snored loudly. A trail of drool trickled from one corner of his mouth.

Brodie straddled his legs, swaying his hips from side to side with the rhythm of the music. Grabbing a handful of Peyton’s hair, he began thrusting toward Peyton’s sleeping face. The unconscious boy never woke up. Brodie slung his black zombie shirt helicopter-style over his head as he twerked to the beat.

“YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, this is going everywhere!” Lucy laughed, holding her phone in the air.

After the song ended, Brodie grabbed the eyeliner pen from the table and wrote on one of Peyton’s bare cheeks before he was satisfied with our cousin’s inevitable humiliation.

“Let’s put him in one of the skids and see how long it takes him to wake up and realize he’s in the middle of the lake,” Brodie suggested, smirking.

“Um, what if he wakes up, falls in the lake, and drowns, Brodie?” I asked, as I seemed to be the only voice of reason.

Brodie glared at me. “You’re such a buzz kill, man.”

“Dude, why? Because I don’t want my cousin to drown?”

“Maybe he’s already dead,” Mia said. “I haven’t seen him breathe in a hot minute.”

We all stopped what we were doing to stare at Peyton who, eventually, let out a grizzly-like snore.

“Nah, he’s good,” I said.

“Okay, how about we put him in the blow-up raft and push him in the pool?” Brodie asked. “That way if he falls in we’ll get to him in time.”

He shot us all a perverse grin as he pulled on his shirt. We sat for a moment and exchanged thoughtful glances before I spoke up.

“That’ll work.”

Brodie let out a war cry as he picked Peyton up and threw him over his shoulder. Peyton never flinched.

We followed Brodie down to the small, rectangular pool near the lake, snickering as he laid Peyton in the raft, cradling his head so as not to hurt him. Brodie and I shoved him off the edge of the pool into the water, giggling as Peyton snored louder.

Lucy and Mia continued to record him as he drifted below the fat, white, Mississippi moon. The raft cast small ripples over the surface of the water.

We sat around the pool for a while, dangling our naked feet in the cool water while chatting and waiting in anticipation for Peyton to wake up and have his inevitable freak-out.

Lucy and Mia uploaded their videos online. I didn’t because I was a firm believer that any form of social media was the devil, thanks to Lucy. Watching her stalk people on different mobile apps for hours on end was enough to make a person yank their hair out in frustration.

All became quiet for a while as I stared up at the blanket of stars hanging above me. I began identifying my favorite constellations, which reminded me of Tanner. Pushing his face from my mind, I refocused on the twinkling above.

My sister’s sudden movement snapped me out of my thoughts. Lucy jumped up from where she’d been perched near the pool, pulling her feet from the water as she stood to her full height with the moon directly behind her. Her body was a mere silhouette framed in the middle of the giant glowing orb.

A wild, chillingly-familiar look flashed across her face, causing me to shiver. Mia noticed as well and shot me a worried look. Mia and I screamed as a sudden flash of lightning streaked across the sky, illuminating us all in a brilliant white light before fading away. It was followed by an ear-popping clap of thunder that quaked the earth around us. Lucy remained still, staring into space.

“It’s here … the storm’s here.” Lucy’s eyes were fixed on nothing.

I grabbed Lucy’s hand, shaking her slightly and trying to bring her back from whatever planet she was on. Snapping out of it, she abruptly peered down at me.

“What?” She huffed and crossed her arms over her chest.

I didn’t get a chance to respond because her phone started chirping, alerting her of an incoming text. Lucy darted to the table, grabbed her phone, and plopped down on a chair. Brodie and I exchanged concerned glances. He shrugged, turning his head to the sky with his brow wrinkled, and watched as storm clouds drifted across the moon.

“Oh, shit!” Lucy hissed, glaring down at her phone. “Jeremy Stone just sent a group message telling everyone that some Birchwood kids are in Mayhaw trying to start some trouble …”

Lucy’s voice trailed off as Brodie and I stood and walked over to her. Her face turned red, illuminated by the tiny lights surrounding the pool.

“Including the Montgomerys,” she finished, staring at me. Her lips were drawn into a frown and her small features looked entirely too menacing.

Lucy’s words soaked in and my body froze, the blood in my veins becoming ice water. The Montgomerys were in Mayhaw? Could …
he
be in Mayhaw? And if he was there, was it because of
me
?

I tried to discretely catch Mia’s attention, but she was so absorbed with the look on Lucy’s face that she never looked my way. Besides Josie, Mia was the only one I’d confessed my secret attraction to.

“The Montgomerys are in Mayhaw? Hell, yeah! That’s all I need to make my night freaking
perfect
!” Brodie declared with a grin.

It didn’t take much to get Brodie riled up. A little weed and a lot of beer and he was down for whatever, including a good fight. I avoided fighting at all costs. I couldn’t blame him for his way of thinking, not really. Living in a small, Southern town, there wasn’t much else to do besides kiss, cuss, drink, smoke, and fight. And Brodie did it all. He reveled in it.

It was my phone to ring next. I snatched it from my pocket and Josie’s fishy-mouth expression glowed in my hand.

“Hey.” My mind reeled over the fact the Montgomerys were in Mayhaw.

“Rue, where are you? Are Brodie and Peyton with you?” Josie’s voice sounded nervous and close to tears.

I sat up straight in my chair and caught Brodie’s attention. “I’m at home. Yeah, they’re here, but Peyton’s currently indisposed.”

Josie began murmuring and crying before a childlike squeal left her mouth with the distinct sound of a struggle in the background. Horror washed over me, causing me to shoot up to my feet. Blood drained from my face. I clenched the phone in my hand and began to pace back and forth as everyone stared at me.

“Hello?” an unfamiliar male voice said.

“Who is this? Where’s Josie? Put her on the phone now!”

“Pffftttt. Josie’s fine. She just didn’t wanna let go of the phone,” the voice said, laughing and sounding slightly drunk.

His words caused me to slow my pacing until I found myself at a standstill, my heart hammering away at my chest.

“You best not hurt Josie,” I hissed, my forehead breaking into a cold sweat. Wiping the wetness from my face with the back of my hand, I turned away from the prying eyes of my relatives and waited for a response.

The male voice ignored my demand. “Tell Brodie and Peyton to meet us at the old train station. We have some business to discuss. And make sure you come with them, that is if you want to see your cousin again.”

With that, he ended the call, leaving me standing there with my mouth gaping. I pressed Josie’s name on the phone screen with my thumb, waiting impatiently for her or the male voice to answer, but it went straight to voicemail each time. The desire to scream in frustration was overwhelming, but I tried to remain calm.