Soulless (Lawless #2)(49)

I laughed but talk of a battle had my mind going somewhere else. Somewhere not too far off. “We got three days before the war. A fourth of the soldiers that they have. You think we stand a shot?” I asked King, knowing he’d give it to me straight.

“I don’t know,” King said, tapping his gun into a small plastic container of black ink. “But if we don’t do something, the threat never goes away.”

“Ain’t that the f*cking truth,” I agreed. “I don’t wanna be looking over my shoulder, or Ti’s shoulder, for the rest of my f*cking life.” I paused, taking another hit. I held it in as long as I could and released it with a small cough as my lungs fought to push the smoke back out. “You gotta do me a favor though, brother,” I said. “If nothing else, you gotta do this one f*cking thing for me.”

“Anything,” King said, pressing on the foot peddle that brought his gun to life, buzzing louder and louder as he brought it to the spot behind my right ear.

“If I lose. If I… if he wins,” I said. I dug out the cash I had buried on the island. “I need you to use it to make sure Ti is taken care of.”

“Ain’t nothing gonna happen,” King said, pushing the ink into my skin.

“I hope not, but you gotta promise me,” I insisted, King needed to know how serious I was about this. If something did happen to me I needed to know that my girl was still be okay.

“I promise. She’ll be taken care of,” King said, “but you talk like I’m not going in with you.”

“You’re not,” I spat.

“Like f*ck I’m not,” King argued, pressing the needle in harder to punctuate his point.

“Fucker,” I said. “I just mean that I need you to hang back a bit. We can’t both be six feet under.”

King dipped the gun back into the ink and wiped at the spot he’d just finished with a paper towel. “Ray knows everything. We have a contingency plan if something happens to me. Shit’s in place. Don’t worry about me or Ray or the kids or even Thia. Do you, man, and I’ll be there to watch your f*cking back.” He held the side of my head down with his forearm. “Now sit f*cking still or your girl is going to think I’m shit at this.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, mockingly, staring back up at the plastic hog’s head. I let the pain from the sting of the needle envelope me as I remembered a better time. Less threats. More fun.

More plastic hog’s heads.

“I still can’t believe she’s f*cking gone,” I said, saying the same thing to King that I’d said to Ti after the funeral.

“I can’t either,” King said. “But what I really can’t believe is that she put up with shits like us.”

“Aint’ that the f*cking truth. There was this one time, when I got suspended from school, just shortly before I dropped out entirely, the guidance counselor scheduled all the parent teacher conferences. When my time slot came up I knew it would be just me and the guidance counselor because I hadn’t even told my old man about it, not like he’d f*cking show up if I had. But the second my ass hit the seat in his office, Grace burst through the door wearing her church clothes.”

“I didn’t know that,” King said, concentrating on my new ink.

I smiled, recalling the memory. “Yeah, and the cool part was that when he asked her who she was she looked at him like he should’ve already known. ‘I’m Mama Grace, of course,’” I said, mimicking Grace’s voice. “The thing about her that I always liked was that no one questioned her. She really hadn’t told the counselor shit, but he told her to take a seat anyways and off they went, talking about my f*cking grades and shit like she was always meant to be the one there.”

King paused his gun. “Probably because she was.”

“Yeah man. She was.”





CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN




Bear

Eighteen years old…


“You know, you should just give back your name now. Just hand it over. ’Cause with a name like Bear, you should be f*cking happy to be in the woods. You should be rubbing your cock up against a f*cking tree or something. Humping the dirt. Getting off on the wilderness or some shit, not moping around like I just f*cked your golden retriever. So change your name to like…Ralph or something, and just be done with it. Embrace your inner vagina,” Preppy said, waving his hand around dismissively before laying on the ground with his ear to the dirt like he probably saw someone do in a movie.

Or YouTube.

That’s it. I made up my mind right then to destroy his f*cking computer when the day was over. Sleep first. Destroy computer second. Then maybe he won’t be able to search for new ways to torment us and besides, a little less porn wouldn’t hurt the kid.

“It’s not the outdoors that’s pissing me off. It’s the f*cking cunt of an hour,” I muttered, running my hand through my hair. Preppy rolled his eyes and parted the leaves of a tree that didn’t need to be parted with the machete he insisted on bringing.

“So why do they call you Bear?” Preppy asked. Grabbing a handful of dirt, he tossed it into the breeze and sniffed it before the wind blew it right in King’s face.

I was also canceling the Discovery Channel.