Bull Mountain(78)

“You make sure you tell him this mountain belongs to me now, big brother. You tell him it belongs to Marion’s boy.”

Clayton choked out a cough that could have been a laugh and looked at the sky.

“You tell him, brother.” Holly rolled over onto his back. “You tell him . . .”

Clayton struggled for air and bled into the dirt less than a quarter mile from the buried bones of his great-uncle Riley. He could hear Holly talking but could only see Kate lifting yellow caution tape and walking away.

Holly gripped a hand over his breast pocket—the pocket that held the tattered photo of him as a boy sitting in the grass with his mother at a small carnival back in Mobile. He closed his eyes and listened to the sounds of the amusement park rides. The organ music. He smelled the thick aroma of fried dough in the air mixed with his mother’s lavender perfume. He didn’t remember much more about that day, but he’d committed every detail of the photo to memory. “It’s done, Mama,” he said to himself. “I got every last one of them.”

4.

“Are you all right, Simon?” Agent Jessup asked, and helped Holly to his feet.

“Yeah, I am, now. None of this blood is mine. It belongs to the poor bastard inside. The good sheriff here blew his head off with the shotgun you’ll find inside the cabin.”

Jessup looked down at the field medics assessing Clayton’s wounds. “Nothing worse than a dirty cop,” he said.

Holly agreed.





CHAPTER





25




OSCAR WILCOMBE

JACKSONVILLE, FLORIDA

2015

Full black was beginning to give way to pinhole stars and flashes of light from the corners of Oscar Wilcombe’s eyes. His head was pounding, a crushing throb in time with his revved-up heart rate. Thick blood and dehydration—it felt like waking up after a night of heavy drinking. He tried to lift his arms to rub the dry sleep from his eyes, but they were made of wet sand. All his efforts resulted in a small shrug of his shoulder. He could hear the chatter of other people around him, but it came in waves crashing over his returning senses. He was trying to think—to remember. He’d been sitting at his desk, going over Bianca’s ledger. He remembered her leaving, and then a sharp pain in his neck—a needle, maybe—then nothing. He’d been drugged. That had to be it. His awareness was flooding back and he made another attempt to reach up and probe his neck. He couldn’t move. It wasn’t just whatever he was injected with, though. His arms were stuck on something—stuck in something. Someone had taken him from his office, drugged him, and put him in something.

“Wake up.” There was a blurred outline of someone in front of him. A flash of intense heat stung his face, and his sight sharpened. His face didn’t burn. It wasn’t heat. It was water. Ice water. He shook his head, crushed his eyes shut, and opened them again.

“Bracken? Bracken, is that you? What’s the meaning of this? Where am I?”

“Welcome back, Oscar.” Bracken stood in front of his captive, holding a lit cigarette in one hand, and a now empty Big Gulp cup in the other. He took a long drag on the butt as Wilcombe took in his surroundings.

“Bracken, what is going on here?” He swiveled his head back and forth, freed from his temporary blindness to see the huge tin-framed facade of Warehouse One. He knew the place well. He had had it built. The warehouse was a place the club used to do the kind of business that needed seclusion. Business Wilcombe never did himself. Primer-gray Harley frames in various degrees of disrepair and stacks of used tires in all shapes and sizes were scattered about the yard. Everything was rusted and choked out by overgrown grass and weeds. It had been a long time since this place had been used. Behind Bracken and the other members of the Jacksonville Jackals’ inner circle loomed a massive airbrushed club insignia painted on the side of the building: an eight-foot cartoon jackal wearing crisscross bandoliers, holding twin .45s, under a scrolling banner spelling out the MC’s name in Old English.

“We need to have a conversation,” Bracken said.

“Whatever this is about, Bracken, I demand you untie me and get me out of whatever this is you have me in.”

Bracken crushed his cigarette out on Wilcombe’s cheek. The pain shot through him like a blade. He screamed. He was wide awake now.

“You don’t make demands, Oscar. Not anymore.”

“Jesus, Bracken,” the old man shouted, frantically shaking from side to side, struggling to free himself. “Let me out of here this instant,” he said.

“We had a couple of the prospects come out here a few years back and bolt together a couple stacks of truck tires for situations like this one. We had to take two of them off of the one you’re in, just so I could talk to you face-to-face.”

Wilcombe shook about, slightly rocking the steel-belted cocoon back and forth.

“It took Moe nearly an hour to break off the rusted bolts to get it to fit a tiny little man your size.” Bracken called back over his shoulder, “What do you say, Moe? About an hour?”

Moe looked up from the concrete picnic table he was sitting on and nodded. “Yup, about that.”

“As you can see, we went through a lot of trouble to accommodate you, so I’m hoping to have an open, honest discussion here. Can we do that, Oscar?”