Through a Glass, Darkly (Assassins of Youth MC #1) (7 page)

“I have to find a way out of this,” I whispered between clenched teeth.

But I had no goddamned way out of it. If I left Cornucopia, Allred would send Parley Pipkin and his henchmen to track me down. I’d known a couple of women who had tried it. Not only had they been tracked down and hauled back in embarrassing fashion—literally paraded around the square in the center of town while wearing nothing but long johns—they had been made to scrub floors like some latter day Cinderella for years and years. True, it was illegal to drag resistant women back to Cornucopia. But who had money for a lawyer? And according to rumor every local law enforcement officer was in Allred’s pocket.

I believed it. I sobbed for maybe a minute and a half. Those was all the tears I had left inside of me. Vonda was still a BIA Maid, a girl of the Beneficial Improvement Association, and would be for another nine months until she turned sixteen, when she’d advance into the Garland class. It wasn’t until age eighteen when she’d even join my Relief Society, but I was planning to advance her sooner due to her maturity. Now? Now she’d be too pregnant with that goddamned peckerhead’s babies to drive with me to St. George and Cedar City on missions! The thought of Orson Ream lying with my precious daughter was enough to make the bile rise in my throat.

So I sobbed, I pounded the counter until my fist was as blue as my bottom, and then, as was usual for me, I gathered myself and finished cleaning up. I was practical. I had no inkling that anything better would befall my only child. Had anyone ever given me any encouragement, given me a shred of hope that Vonda’s fate would be merrier than mine? No. Not one person.

A few days later I was in my office finishing a profit and loss statement that had perplexed me. My net operating profit was out of whack. It was probably more my own self that was out of whack, to be honest. I hadn’t eaten in three days. Visions of Mr. Gideon Fortunati had been scouring away at my brain cells eternally by that time. I just could not shut them out, unlike the gruesome images of Allred Chiles and his narrow Johnny one-eye poking away so eagerly at me. No, I had already glimpsed what the kids called Mr. Fortunati’s “package” all full and juicy, his jeans so tight they left nothing to the imagination. I could come up with all sorts of euphemisms for that thick serpent that lay nestled beneath his hip pocket, a chain that probably held his wallet and keys draped across it.
Unchain my love
, I liked to think. Gideon Fortunati was the only man who was capable of that.

The front door opened quietly, and I suspected it was Kimball. She’d been sticking close to me like a tick on a beagle ever since she heard the news of Vonda. Vonda was only maybe five years younger than Kimball. They had more in common with their girlish ways, their concerns about their hair, their figures, their need to “jump on a computer and surf the net.” Kimball was almost as concerned as I was with the turn of events.

The man startled me so, I made a smudge with my pen across the paper.

“Oh!” I gasped, but he looked harmless enough. I know now that danger comes in the most innocent of forms, but back then I was more trusting.

“Sorry, sorry,” he said hurriedly, handing me a business card, then shaking my hand. I barely had time to read it. Something about appliances. “Bronson Carradine, at your service. Only”—he looked from side to side, crouching over a plastic chair—“may I be so bold as to take a seat?”

“Of course,” I said. Maybe Allred had sent him to chat me up about…appliances?

“Is there no one else in the office?” he asked in a husky voice.

“No, just me. Why? What is this?”

“You’re a wife of Allred Chiles, correct?”

“Yes…”

“I heard your name mentioned as one who might not be, shall we say, thoroughly enamored of this place. There was some dissatisfaction.”

At that, a creepy feeling snaked its way into my entrails. “How did you get in? Who was your appointment with?”

“Let’s just say I don’t think Reed Smoot is ever coming back.”

I shut up then. I had to listen to this strange refrigerator salesman. How in blue blazes did he know Reed was never coming back? Did he have something to do with his disappearance? I nodded to indicate he could talk.

He leaned forward and talked in hushed tones like a cop. Which, in retrospect, I guess he was. “Listen, Mahalia. I’m an ATF agent. That stands for Alcohol, Tobacco—”

“I know what it means.” I’d been privy to enough meetings in Allred’s office where that subject came up. The ATF was the most hated enemy of the Church of Good Fortune. Why, I had no idea. We drank alcohol and smoked tobacco. Maybe we weren’t paying taxes on them.

“I’ve heard tell that you might be disaffected. You might be willing to work with me.”

I drew myself up stiff as a board. “Why should I trust you? What makes you think I’m disaffected? The same person who told you about Reed Smoot?” It could’ve been anyone, really, but more and more I was getting a feeling that Gideon Fortunati had run into Bronson Carradine somewhere along the line. “Have you met Mr. Fortunati? He’s a biker.”
A very sexy biker. Sex on a stick biker. He’s so sexy he turns straight guys gay
, as I’d heard Vonda describe a rock singer once.

“Yes, yes, I’ve met Gideon Fortunati. He’s going to be managing Chiles’ Altar of Sacrifice Mine for him.”

I sniffed snobbily. “Then why don’t you ask Mr. Fortunati what you need to know? He seems to have all the answers.”

“Well, I’d like to hear things from a
female
point of view, if you know what I mean.”

“No, I do not. I don’t think women know terribly much about alcohol, tobacco, and firearms—”

Carradine crouched over when a couple figures walked by my front window. “It’s not the alcohol and tobacco I’m so concerned with, Miss. We never are. You see, we’ve got intel that Chiles has been stockpiling arms for some kind of Waco showdown.”

I’d heard of Waco before, of course. The government wound up making an even bigger ass of themselves with their trigger-happy, explosive standoff. “That’s preposterous. A showdown against who?”

“It might come as a surprise to you that you have many enemies on the outside. Listen. I’m also interested in the plight of women here on the compound. Underage girls being married off, women ‘assigned’ to men they barely know, basic human rights violations.”

Oh, I had heard of things that would make this man’s toes curl. Surrogate stud men were assigned when men became impotent. The husbands would be forced to watch while the stud men humped their wives. All completely unsavory. I had to at least trust this man in order to draw him out. I admitted, “Yes, some men have been vanishing lately under odd circumstances. Reed Smoot, for one.”

“As I suspected.”

“He vanished a few months ago. Many ‘surplus’ men have been disappearing, I think when they displease Allred. I’m worried about this Mr. Fortunati if he’s going to start doing business with Allred. Maybe we could arrange a meet—”

As though they’d been hiding behind the front door, three men burst through now. They flashed their weapons, sawed-off shotguns and handguns. They fanned out, pointing their weapons every which way. As though Bronson Carradine was some kind of threat!

I rolled back in my chair while Bronson pressed his finger to his lips in the universal “be quiet” gesture. He stood, already defeated, hands in the air.

“All right! What’s going on here?” Parley Pipkin drawled.

“Nothing! He’s just an appliance salesman.” I slid the business card into my dress pocket.

“Yeah, well,” said Parley, “he’s been sneaking into the compound lately trying to talk to people about—well, about various stuff. If you see this bastard around again, Mahalia, call us immediately!”

Although two men had him by the arms and were dragging him out the door of the Relief Society office, Bronson dared to look me pointedly in the eye and make motions like wiggling a phone receiver by his ear.

But the whole thing unsettled me. The way Parley had given Bronson the bum’s rush must mean he was onto something. When the coast was clear, I looked at the business card. Of course, it didn’t say “Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms” on it. It claimed that Bronson Carradine—a made-up name if I ever heard one—was an appliance salesman. I didn’t dare dial the phone number yet, for fear he had the ringer turned up, and Parley would know it was me. But it must be a real number, or he wouldn’t have given me the card.

Amazingly, the second I went back to my spreadsheet, it all became clear. Bing, bam, boom, it balanced like a charm, and relief washed through me. Did the visit of the mysterious dishwasher salesman somehow unclog my energy channels? The spreadsheet I’d been laboring over for hours suddenly all fell together perfectly like a lock and key. I now actually had a few spare hours to myself.

I grabbed my purse and went back home, one of those long saltbox houses built twenty years ago on crescent-shaped streets that all hugged the center town square. Kimball lived with me, and of course Vonda, as well as sister wives Emersyn, Aunistee, Tazmin, and Sarah. I had lost count of their children long ago.

I did something I had never once dared to do. I stripped off my long johns and put my red dress back on again over only a bra and granny panties. I also took a forbidden case of eyebrow powder from a lower vanity drawer and drew my eyebrows in more artistically. Nobody knew that I already waxed them.

And I wafted a scent into the air that in my dreams Gideon Fortunati would approve of—Pine Forest—and walked through it, like Marilyn Monroe in one of her movies. There. That would be subtle enough that no Cornucopian would smell it on me, but if Gideon were to get close enough to—

“Listen to me!” I cried. I stuck out my lower lip at my mirror reflection. I was seeing through the glass darkly, not clearly. Even
if
Gideon saw me, even
if
Gideon were single, even
if
we hit it off…What scrud was I thinking?

What in the name of a motherless goat was I thinking?

I wasn’t thinking. That was the beauty of it.

I grabbed my purse again and left.

GIDEON

O
nce Skippy Cavanaugh
got to know who I was, that I worked for Allred Lee Chiles, he relaxed around me. The bartender at the High Dive was obviously on Chiles’ payroll, and he admitted as much to me.

“I was just passing through town without much to do. My wife had just died, and I was aimlessly wandering. Parley Pipkin asked if I wanted to tend bar here, and the rest is history.”

It wasn’t really all that historical, but now that Skippy knew I worked for Chiles, he let me in on a few more secrets. He had a sneaking suspicion that Bronson Carradine worked for the feds, for example. He claimed it was just a feeling—the mirrored shades he wore, the government plates on his car, the way he didn’t know anything about French door refrigerators or tempered glass shelves.

“He’d have to know about humidity-controlled crispers, for instance,” said Skippy.

Also, he let on that Mahalia had been married to a man on the outside near Salt Lake. He’d died in a construction accident, and Chiles had moved in for the kill. With supernatural powers, he got wind that she was a freshly minted widow. He sent men to her condo to pack everything up, and basically dragged her kicking and screaming.

Only, Skippy didn’t say that part. Dingo did.

“She was dragged kicking and screaming in the dead of night, Mahalia and her daughter Vonda.” Dingo apparently had sort of a crush on Vonda, a girl about three years younger than him. He’d been naively admitting all sorts of things to me, like the fact that he was a virgin. He was so self-effacing, so lacking in ego, that he wasn’t even aware that this was the sort of thing he should be embarrassed by. “At first, they were both kept in lockup, because Chiles knew she’d run away. He needed to steep her in his Stockholm Syndrome so he could mold her to his ways. He likes to keep them living in a fundamentalist bubble.”

“Who would run away from him?” Skippy snorted. “He provides her with everything her husband couldn’t.”

Dingo frowned. “But one day someone left the front door open. She got a ride here into town and went to an old phone booth.” His voice turned mysterious, full of Rod Serling foreboding. “No one knows who the two women were who came to this very bar, but they talked a few hours, then left. Mahalia went back to Cornucopia, but from then on they allowed her to live freely.”

I said, “It’s not such a wonder that they have to drag women by force, what with all the men constantly disappearing.”

“Not a big mystery,” said Skippy, “when they keep sending the real qualified men to the Texas compound.”

“Yeah,” I said, “where
is
that compound, anyway? People keep just saying ‘Texas.’”

“No one seems to know,” said Dingo, the light from my laptop screen lighting up his face as we sat at the bar. I’d been letting him use mine but had plans to buy him his own. I’d even found an adult ed class, some community college satellite that was on my way to the mine. He could start in a few days. It was a whole new world for Dingo, a place where he could see galaxies, extraterrestrial planets, papers that some astronomer named Neil DeGrassse Tyson had written. He was quite intelligent, with a good mind for math. It made me wonder what talents the other Lost Boys were squandering. Contrary to Dingo’s protests, I knew that at least some of them lived in squalor, with no tools to live in the outside world. I would know. I’d been there in my youth too. If it wasn’t for the Assassins of Youth picking me up off the ground, literally some of the time, I would not be sitting here writing this now. In many ways, I’d been a lost boy myself. That was probably why I had such empathy for Dingo. “It’s all very mysterious.”