Stay Vertical (23 page)

Ford nodded down at him. “Get up.”

Figuring that now they could get down to brass tacks, Lytton stood, but Ford flattened him again before he even saw the fist coming. Lytton skidded on his ass until he was stopped by a glass case displaying bongs.

What the fuck?
Oh, it was
on
, all right! Ford may have been a graduate of many a backyard fight club, but Lytton knew Brazilian jiu-jitsu. He sprung up like a jack-in-the-box, taking Ford so by surprise that he was able to get in a few frontal jabs to the face before landing a solid left, then a right hook to the jaw.

Ford stumbled backward into his wall of men, his nose trickling blood. Tuzigoot and Turk caught him lovingly, cradling him protectively like a baby until Ford shook them off. Fire was in Ford’s eyes, his nostrils flaring angrily. “Motherfucker! You bust into my world and get my sister-in-law almost
killed
with your fucking backstabbing games?” Ford feinted and ducked, connecting another uppercut to Lytton’s solar plexus.

All the air was socked out of Lytton’s lungs, but he managed to breathe in enough ragged air to give him strength. A few rapid fire karate chops to Ford’s throat and again Ford was against the ropes of his brothers’ arms, his brow knitted with rage.

Lytton held his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Listen, Ford. I’m here to tell you that at three o’clock an inspector from the Department of Health Services is arriving to make a surprise inspection. That’s all I want to warn you about. Now I’m here to tell you, I can call him off—”

Oof!
A massive head butt to the stomach again had all the air expressed from Lytton’s lungs. This time he really did crash backward into the bong case, prompting Turk to shout, “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” while a glass hookah with several plastic hoses smashed onto Lytton’s head.

With the upper hand, Ford executed an admirable takedown of Lytton. The two men wound up grappling on the tiles. They seemed to be equally matched. They tumbled and pummeled each other, when they could get an arm free. They were in a solid clinch. One more shift of power, and Lytton had Ford in a decent half nelson, grinding his face into the tiles.

“All right! Enough!”

Strong hands grabbed Lytton’s collar, wrenching him to his feet, panting. A couple of other men wrestled Ford to his feet too. The two brothers stood glaring and huffing at each other, all pumped up like shapeshifters on steroids. Lytton shook off his referees, surprised to see one of them was the lawyer, Slushy.

“E-fucking-nough, all right?” cried Slushy. “It’s bad enough you two keep trying to ruin each other’s next reincarnation, but sending more people to the ER isn’t what we need right now.”

Lytton finger-combed his hair, panting on Slushy. “You know about the ER?”

“I just came from there. Madison said to tell you June’s resting fine and she’ll definitely spend the night, maybe two. But she’s out of the woods.” Slushy brushed off his own starched lavender shirt as though he had been the one fighting, giving Lytton the once-over. “You
do
look a lot like your brother. Knock it off with this Edmund and Edgar rivalry. There are enough other enemies in the world without creating them inside your own family, begorra. Now listen. I sent a guy to your ranch to deal with that engineer in the greenhouse, but since you reset the security system before you left and we didn’t know the code, he had to break in, basically. So if you check your phone, there might be a call from your security firm—no, don’t check it now! We don’t have time for fun and games. I need to see what can be done without our clubs going to the mattresses. I don’t feature being stuck in this pot-infused closet for the next week, on lockdown while you guys pick each other off while hiding behind marijuana bales. Driving Hawk, be straight with us. What’s happening at three? That’s less than half an hour since you two turds decided to go all MMA.”

Lytton looked at the faces of the other men. Their anger had been replaced by a curiosity, an eagerness to do what was required of them. “Well, as I tried to say, a health inspector is coming here at three. He’s going to find some nearly empty bottles of poison in the trash bins out back that someone—”

Ford grunted. “Someone.”

“—planted there, and those bottles will accurately portray the sort of banned pesticides that have been sprayed all over the shipment of weed you’ve got coming from Sinaloa, also expected to arrive around three.”

“Those fucking Dotards!” shouted Turk. “I fucking
asked
Truitt if that was the same stuff we smoked the other day, and he said yes, exact same batch! That stuff was good.”

Lytton said, “Well, this stuff isn’t. It’s drenched in paraquat and DDT, and I can’t even in good conscience give that to my enemies, you know what I mean?”

“
You
were about to,” Ford seethed. His anger was defrosting, but he would probably have a lingering grudge against Lytton for a while to come.

Lytton sliced the air with his hand. “Whatever. Right now my immediate goal is to get the inspector off our backs
and
take down Iso Weaver at the same time.”

“Those are all good goals,” said Turk, the Vice President of The Bare Bones. “Let’s hear your plan.”

Everything was executed in the twinkling of an eye. Lytton was impressed with the way the men worked together as a team, seamlessly. They’d obviously been accustomed to operating like a well-oiled machine for quite a long time now. The departure of several of them was key to the plan. It couldn’t look as if they had
expected
the surprise inspection, after all. By three o’clock, the only men remaining were Turk, August, Slushy, Tobiah, Ford, and Lytton. Tobiah was posing as their IT guy, his back to the store in case Saul recognized him from Leaves of Grass. He really needed to reinstate the corrupted files on their computer system, so he was working like a pit crew at the desk. Slushy wanted to oversee how everything went down, so he was posing as a customer.

“How’s this thing work?” asked Slushy, holding a glass vapor bubbler. “I can’t say as I see the attraction to this stuff. I have sort of the opposite reaction to it than most people. I wind up sitting in the corner babbling like a goon. Once I got stuck in the back of one of Ochoa’s weed trucks—a box truck, like the Staples one you jacked from Ford. Thought I was back in the seventies with all the Jefferson Starship tunes coming at me. Starship, mind you, not even Airplane.”

“Yeah, about that truck,” said Ford, “I’d kind of like my share of the payback pie too, if you don’t mind, Driving Hawk. That Ochoa driver was an old-timer, worked with us for ten years, and you say Weaver just popped him off like he was a used scratcher.”

“Yeah. Fucking unbelievable. He said it was because he had a Jesus candle on the dashboard.”

“He had a Tweety sticker on his window,” Tobiah filled in from the other room.

Turk glowered. “Iso’s been a ticking time bomb for a long time. As much as we hate Zelov, I’ve got to say his sergeant-at-arms has been a worse bee in our bonnet forever. I’d like to see him in the rearview, too.”

“Where
is
that fucking truck, anyway?” Toby bellowed from the office.

“Good point,” said Lytton. “I’d better go sit with Iso at the coffee shop next door.”

“Don’t let anyone in,” Ford yelled to the security guard. Yet another pot seeker was pounding on the locked door, but this one was persuasive.

“Department of Health Services!” shouted Saul Goldblum, corrupt inspector of marijuana operations.

Ford yelled, “Tell him to hang on a second!”

Lytton said, “I guess he hasn’t received the call from Madison yet.”

Now Slushy had a ceramic grim reaper bong in his hand. “I thought you got Madison to pretend to be an ER nurse, telling him his wife just got hit by a car.”

“I did.” The men spoke in stage whispers. “I gave her his direct dial cell number! She must not have gotten through to him yet.”

Slushy declared, “Or he doesn’t care much about his wife. Begorra! If I ever get crotch crickets, I’ll know what to name them. Ford and Lytton Illuminati.”

Lytton said, “You’re cool. I’ll make sure he gets her call any second now. He’ll never see that Sinaloa truck. The poison bottles are gone. Faux Pas took them with him. I’ll just slip out the back to the coffee shop.”

“Yeah,” whispered Turk, “we just don’t have much medicine left for him to inspect, seeing as how our delivery truck was jacked.”

“Take this,” said Ford, handing Lytton a Sig Sauer he’d taken from a safe. There was a little tug-of-war with the piece before Ford surrendered it. Ford added, “You do this, and we’re even. Anyone will welcome you as a Prospect in our club.”

Ford waved to the security guard to let Saul in while Lytton slid out the back. He nestled Ford’s piece next to his Glock in his waistband, and yanked on some black leather gloves. Saul would find no poison bottles in the trash bin, but that stupid Sinaloa truck could still blunder in there while Saul was conducting his inspection. A seasoned inspector could taste, touch, and smell pesticide, but Saul also carried a microscope. Lytton had already tipped him off to inspect the Sinaloa medicine at a microscopic level, assuring him he’d find enough banned poison back at his “pot lab” to shut the place down.

Lytton just had to prevent that truck from arriving.

Entering through the coffee shop’s back door, Iso was nowhere to be seen, so Lytton called him from out front. Iso ignorantly answered his cell. He obviously had no clue that Lytton would be even slightly miffed at him for any events of the past two days.

“I’m out in the back alley,” Iso drawled. “The inspector’s car is back here. Got front row seats for the show, my man.”

“Who the fuck says ‘my man’ anymore?” Lytton fumed to himself as he darted down the narrow walkway that led to the back alley. Anything that Iso would say now would set Lytton off on a deadly rampage. He couldn’t show his hand until everything was lined up exactly right.

Just hearing that depraved psycho’s voice put Lytton into a blind, murderous rage. He now fully understood how Ford had felt when he’d realized what their father had done to Maddy. It was something primal, a protective instinct in a man, to seek out and destroy anyone who had harmed a beloved. Maybe it was hanging around the gritty world of biker clubs, but Lytton had developed a lean and mean approach, a take-no-prisoners outlook. Life was just too short and messy to leave loose ends hanging around, free agents that could just come back and bite you in the ass.

Peeking around the corner, Lytton saw Iso waiting impatiently for shit to hit the fan. He’d armed himself with a bottle of Jack Daniels and was restlessly chugging from it as he paced, the stupid chains at his waist jangling. Lytton ducked back into the walkway to punch Madison’s number.

“I left a voicemail,” Madison told Lytton, her voice tinged with worry. “I didn’t say any specifics, because the hospital would never leave a voicemail telling someone their spouse is in critical. That’s too important to say on a voicemail. I just gave the number of this burner for him to call back.”

“Okay. Keep trying. Thanks, Madison.”

Taking a deep breath, Lytton had no choice but to dive on into the scene. He hadn’t even really formulated a script, what he might say to Iso, how he could lure him into the quiet of the truck, if and when it arrived. For now, he had to act casual, an act that went against the grain of every single atom of his being. He just hoped Iso was too wasted to see the rage behind the fake pasted-on smile that he wore when he popped into the sunny back alley, waving as though they were butt brothers.

“Where’s the damned truck?” Lytton asked lightly.

Iso inhaled his cigarette smoke deeply. “I’m starting to fucking wonder that myself. I talked to Truitt an hour ago, he said he’d just turned off to Red Rock State Park. Should be here by now.”

Lytton had had a meeting with Truitt, Iso, and Zelov to pin down the details of the deal they would offer to Turk for the Sinaloa weed. Truitt wasn’t even an officer of the Dotards, just a hang-around who had the Mexican connection. He seemed like a low-level, small-time criminal just doing enough illegal work to get by, to feed his drug addiction. Lytton didn’t trust people like that, but at the time, their goal was just to funnel The Bare Bones some crappy product. He didn’t need elite personnel for that. “He’s driving the truck?”

“Yeah. I think he’s got a beaner with him so he can talk Mexican to the other netheads.”

“Did they disguise the product as barium sulfate?”

“Is that the white stuff looks like cocaine? Yeah, that’s what they’re using as a cover. Bags labeled barium whatever.”

Lytton could tolerate it no longer. “Tell me something, Iso. How’d you get my security code out of Helium Head? Was it before or after you bashed him over the head with the hammer?

“What?” Oh, Iso was good. He was probably so accustomed to lying that the innocent face was second nature to him. Now he laughed. “What, did something happen to Helium Head? Fucking hell, here’s the truck finally. I’m going to tell Zelov how long Truitt took. We’re not using this asshole again.”

This truck was a tractor trailer, and Truitt had a hell of a time even turning the front wheels into the alley. Lytton could see traffic was already backing up, drawing attention to them. Iso ran toward the truck, Lytton following.

Iso tore open the driver’s door. “Get the fuck out! I can drive this thing.”

Lytton did the same on the passenger’s door, yelling at the beaner to “
Bájese! Bájese!
” For once, things were going his way. This would work out perfectly.

He swung himself up into the seat as Truitt, down on the ground, cried, “I’m not used to these things! You wouldn’t believe how many cars were piled up behind me on one-seventy-nine!”

“Great,” fumed Lytton, channeling his rage onto Truitt. “Yet
more
attention drawn to this fucking shipment. And they had to pick a truck that says ‘Grass Magic Fertilizer’ on the outside?”

Iso frantically ground through several of the truck’s gears. “It’s a legitimate dispensary load. Nothing illegal about this weed, aside from the pesticides. Oh, and the pallet of heroin in the back.”