The Lonesome Young (24 page)

“Don’t talk to her like that,” Mickey said, and his voice was low and dangerous.

Without thinking, I tried to step between the two of them, but Mickey pulled me back. Ethan, standing across the barn from us, started laughing. “Problems?”

Mickey whirled to face him. “Let Melinda go.”

Ethan shrugged. “Sure. Anna Mae wants to have a little chat with everybody first, though.”

“Can’t you control your own kid in your own town,
Sheriff?
” My dad advanced on the sheriff and his wife, and she stumbled backward and fell, hitting her head on the edge of one of the crates. Blood started to run down the side of her face, and my mother cried out. She’d never been able to take the sight of blood, and I was afraid she’d pass out and I’d have two family members to rescue.

Mickey yanked his hand free of mine and ran to help his mom, getting between my dad and his parents. “Step away from my mother.”

My dad sneered at Mickey. “That’s your mother? How does she feel about getting leftovers from Anna Mae’s table?”

I gasped. I’d never heard my dad say such vile things, and I’d heard a lot over the years. Something about the feud had driven him to such poisonous depths of anger that I was afraid he’d never come back.

Mickey’s face went dark, like it had in the cafeteria, but before I could say anything to stop him, he shoved my dad and knocked him back a step.

Dad almost fell down. I gasped and Mom screamed, a high, piercing sound that completely blocked the small, hurt noise I’d made when I saw the boy I’d just been kissing shove my father.

Mickey ripped his shirt off, balled it up, and held it to his mother’s face to stop the bleeding. I walked over to my dad in what felt like slow motion. He looked at Mickey with murder in his eyes, and I watched my future implode with devastating clarity. There could never be a hope of a relationship between me and Mickey now.

“Richard!” My mother pulled Melinda with her. “Are you okay?”

“Oh, shut the hell up,” Dad said, glaring at her as he stood up. He started to go after Mickey, but then thought better of it as we all heard the ratcheting noise of a shotgun from behind us.

“Maybe you should stay away from my brother,
Dick
,” Ethan said, waving the gun in the air.

“We need to get out of here,” Mom moaned, but Dad didn’t even look at her.

He was too busy staring at Mickey.

“Did you touch my daughter?”

Mickey glanced at me, but I was frozen, shaking. Unable to think. I slowly shook my head.

“Maybe you should ask yourself if she touched
him
,” Ethan said, laughing.

“Shut up, Ethan,” Mickey snapped. “I’m taking Mom out of here. Move or we’re going to have this out right now.”

“I don’t think so,” Ethan drawled. “You’re not the only one who wants to have something out.”

Dad swung around and stared at me before pointing at Mickey, who was still next to his parents. “Did this Rhodale shit lay a hand on you? I’ll kill him if he did.”

I was cold, wet, and maybe even starting to go into shock, because I realized that while my father and everybody else waited for me to answer, I was looking at my hand. The hand that Mickey had dropped so readily to go stand with his family—and attack mine.

Nobody was standing with
me
. Nobody at all.

“Well? Did he touch you?”

“No, he didn’t. Let’s go home,” I said, suddenly more exhausted than I’d ever been in my life.

“Not just yet,” a new voice said, and I turned to see the woman who must be Anna Mae Rhodale standing just behind me, all in black like a spider from a children’s story.

“Hello, Richard,” she purred. “Glad to see me?”

Two things happened simultaneously: All the blood drained out of my father’s face, and Melinda passed out.

Chapter 34

Mickey

I
’ve noticed, looking back at moments of extreme stress in my life, that I tend to fixate on something trivial and unimportant and let it occupy the entirety of my consciousness like a Holy Grail. For example, when I was six and smashed my thumb with a hammer, I focused so intently on the spreading snowflake pattern of the blood on the wood grain beneath my hand that it took way longer than it should have for me to feel the screaming pain.

Right now, I was focused on Anna Mae Rhodale’s shoes.

Pink and high-heeled, with bows on the tops, they were like a caricature of women’s shoes, purchased by someone who had no idea what fashion was. She wore them with a giant black sweep of a cape, a black dress, and a string of pearls that hung halfway down the jutting prow of her front. The entire effect was hideous beyond the sum of its parts, and we all stared at her for several long moments.

“Hello, Anna Mae,” my mom finally said. “Isn’t this a little bit over the top, even for you? If I’d known you were hosting a costume party and a kidnapping, I’d have dressed differently.”

The Whitfields stared at Mom in shock, and I felt a burst of pride shoot through me. Mom had been dealing with Anna Mae and her crap for a long time. She might be the only person here who could manage her now.

And I’d rather think about anything else—even women’s shoes—instead of the look on Victoria’s face after I’d pushed her father.

Anna Mae sneered at her. “Shut up, Julia. Let the grownups talk.”

I started toward her, but Ethan raised the shotgun. “Let it be, little brother. She has a thing to say, and then you can all go home.”

“First, your girl there called my boy for drugs. Weren’t no kidnapping involved at all,” Anna Mae said.

Victoria’s dad rolled his eyes. “Since when did you sound like a character out of a hillbilly comic strip? What happened to you? You were headed for college.”

“
You
happened to me, you son of a bitch,” she snarled. “And yes, I know your mother, so the expression holds doubly true. She paid me off to leave you alone. There, is that grammar appropriate enough for you?”

“What is this all about? You need to leave the Whitfields alone. Both of you,” Pa said, looking back and forth between her and Ethan. “We’ve got enough trouble since they moved back without you starting up the feud again.”

Anna Mae laughed. “Me? I didn’t start anything, but I’m going to end it. My way.”

She turned to Whitfield. “We took your poor, addled girl there to teach you a lesson about firing our kin. Maybe next time you want to pull shit like that you’ll remember we can get to those pretty little girls of yours anytime we want.”

“You’re going to keep your lowlife sons away from my daughters, Sheriff, or I’ll have the FBI and the U.S. Marshals in here, and anybody else I can find with a badge that can’t be bought,” Whitfield said, and he stared a hole in Victoria. “
Both
of my daughters.”

“You’d better shut up, Whitfield,” Pa said hotly. “Who the hell do you think you are, that you can come back here and stir things up like you did? Firing a bunch of good people who did nothing to deserve it. You ought to be shot.”

“So now we get to it,” Whitfield shouted. “You’re as gun-happy as your loser kid the drug dealer. Go ahead. Shoot me. Your aim is probably as bad as everything else you do.”

I’d had enough. “Mom, I need to get you out of here.”

“I’m not going anywhere without your father,” she said stubbornly. “It was just a scratch.”

She lowered my shirt, and I could see that it was true. There was only a graze on the side of her forehead, but scalp wounds bled a lot, so I wanted to take her to the hospital.

She put a hand on my arm. “Don’t think we’re not going to talk about you shoving Mr. Whitfield,” she warned.

“Dick Whitfield can kiss my ass,” I said flatly.

Mom flinched, and I felt a momentary twinge of guilt, but I needed to salvage the other relationship in my life I’d ruined before I could deal with this.

“Well if you won’t come, I’m taking Victoria out of here,” I told her, and I headed across the barn toward Victoria, who was standing alone, so pale I was almost afraid that she’d pass out like her sister had.

I ignored our fathers, who were shouting at each other, and took Victoria’s hand. It was icy and almost limp, and she stared at me through dull eyes.

“Go back to your family,” she said, almost indifferently, and my gut clenched.

“Victoria—”

“No.” She pulled away, and her eyes were still so lifeless and distant that I wanted to howl. “You left me standing here alone, after you promised we’d face this together. That’s fine. I understand. She’s your mom. But you
attacked
my
father
. I can’t forget that.”

“Victoria, I—”

“No. You pushed my father. We’re done. I can’t keep pretending I can count on anybody else when it’s never true.”

Everybody else was shouting at each other, stuff about way back when Pa was in high school with Whitfield and Anna Mae, but I didn’t care about any of it. I wanted my mom out of danger, and I wanted to get Victoria away from here and someplace alone with me, so I could find a way to fix what I’d broken between us.

Suddenly, a shotgun blast tore through the noise, and everybody flinched or ducked until we realized that Anna Mae had fired a warning shot into the air over our heads.

I had Jeb’s gun in my hands before I even realized I’d grabbed it from my waistband, but only Victoria saw it before I hid it again. Her eyes widened, and she took a shaky step away from me.

“Here are my terms,” Anna Mae said calmly, as if we were sitting around a negotiating table instead of in the middle of an old barn.

“First, my boys will run their business without interference from you,” she said, pointing at Pa.

“Second, you will quit trying to turn our half of this county into a damn suburban country club estate,” she said, pointing at Whitfield.

Victoria’s mom finally spoke up, and she had the iciest voice I’d ever heard in my life. “I don’t know who you think you are, but we are taking my daughters and leaving. If you try to stop us, you will be very sorry. If you think you have any say at all over how we live our lives, you are very mistaken.”

With that, she and Whitfield lifted Melinda between them and headed for the door.

Anna Mae stopped them with a voice like a whiplash. “Who do I think I am? Well, I’ll tell you, sweetheart. I’m the woman who loaned your husband the cash to start up his finance business in the city, with my
illegal drug money
. And he’s the man who never paid me back.”

Chapter 35

Victoria

A
nna Mae had loaned money to my father? No. It wasn’t possible. I felt like I’d fallen through some kind of hillbilly looking glass, where toothless men with shotguns determined my freedom, and a boy who’d promised we’d find a way to end a feud—together—abandoned me at the first sign of a problem.

I looked at Melinda hanging unconscious between my parents, and I kind of envied her.

“I paid you back every cent of that money,” my dad told Anna Mae, clenching his fists.

His face was turning an ugly purple color, and I was suddenly terrified that this evening was going to go from awful to fatal if we didn’t get out of there. Dad’s colleague, who’d been the same age as Dad, had died of a heart attack in the spring.

“You didn’t pay me the interest,” Anna Mae said silkily. Apparently she was trying to be seductive, given her history with both my dad and Mickey’s dad.

I suddenly wanted to throw up. Mickey moved closer to me and reached for my hand, but I yanked it away. I couldn’t risk my heart with this person who resorted to violence so casually—against my own father, no matter that Dad had been acting like an ass.

“I paid you a fair rate of interest,” Dad shouted.

My mom was looking at him like he was something she’d scraped off the bottom of her high-heeled pumps.

Mickey’s dad broke into the conversation. “I don’t give a damn what the two of you have going between you, but I’m the sheriff here, Anna Mae, and you will not pull this crap on me. You definitely will not dictate terms about what I will or will not do, and if you think Ethan is going to run a drug ring in my county, unhampered, you’re out of your tiny little mind.”

She swung her reptilian gaze to him. “Do you know whose trailer that was that blew up? There was skinhead cartel money backing that operation. Founders’ Brotherhood. It wasn’t a cooking lab; it was distribution. The skinheads have a better product, and they can sell it cheaper. We were at two hundred fifty dollars a gram, and they’re distributing for ninety bucks a gram. What do you think that means?”

“It sounds like you’re finally admitting that you’re the brains behind the operation,” Mickey’s mom said, throwing a glance at her son and husband that I didn’t understand.

Mickey took my hand in his and wouldn’t let me pull away this time, and I didn’t have the energy to make a scene. I knew he was trouble, but my heart didn’t always listen to my head, and so the touch of his hand comforted me a little bit in spite of everything. I was shaking a little bit, and Mickey must have realized it, because he pulled me closer, against the warmth of his body. It felt so good, and maybe I was being weak, but I let him do it, though I swore to myself that it would be for the last time.

Anna Mae started laughing. “Brains? Yeah, I’ve always been the brains around here. It’s not like anybody else could volunteer for the job.”

Ethan, standing just outside the loose circle of people in the barn, shot his mother a look of such fierce hatred I was surprised she didn’t burn up on the spot—but I didn’t think anyone but me saw it. I was suddenly glad that he hadn’t looked at me like that—it was an expression that promised very bad things.

And she was his
mother
.

I almost laughed at myself. Considering my own mother, Ethan and I were zero for two on the maternal excellence scale. The thought made me realize why Mickey had been so quick to leave me to go protect
his
mom. I guess if I had a mom like that, I’d do the same thing.

But I wouldn’t push his father in the process. I wrenched away from Mickey. Just then Ethan glanced over and caught me looking his way, and his face changed. Anger turned to something harder to define. The moment caught and held between us, and I had to struggle to escape his hypnotic gaze.