Leave a Trail (Signal Bend #7)(134)

“We’ll get home, brother. We’ll get it back.”

“Yeah.” He sighed again, deeper this time. “Sorry. Got the holiday blues. I’m gonna sweat ‘em out.” He stood and left. Knowing he was headed to the cell to change into the approved sweats for the weight room, Isaac put the game away and made some aimless chat with some other inmates in the room before he went back himself. He and Len were lucky to be able to share a cell together. But the quarters were close, and they gave each other the space they could.



oOo



“COUNT!”

Stretched out to the extent he could be in a bunk that was not as long as he was, Isaac looked up from the new Patrick Rothfuss novel that had been part of Lilli’s Christmas gift to him. He tucked her most recent letter into the book as a bookmark and rolled to his feet, just as Len came through the open cell door. He was running sweat; his short, grey hair—he’d let it grow a little after bitching the first few weeks about the impossibility of a satisfyingly close prison shave—glistened with it. His prison-issued sweatshirt was sodden.

“You reek.”

“Yeah. Had some shit to work out, I guess. I’ll hose off fast before meal time.”

The guards walked by and peered in. One of them had become Isaac’s nemesis. At least eight inches shorter and probably a hundred pounds lighter than he, Walker had some kind of hornet up his ass over him. So far, it just seemed random hostility. His last volley had been a baton shoved hard into Isaac’s spine, out of f*cking nowhere. It had driven him to his knees in the lunch line—three weeks ago, and his lower back and right leg still tingled in a hauntingly familiar way. Both Len and he had considered whether this was another move on him in retaliation for Santaveria.

There had been two so far. Both thwarted—in one case, by Len, and in the other, by some men who’d become friends because Santaveria had been their enemy. Not the kind of friends who made Isaac comfortable, but they were useful. They’d sure been useful that day.

Lilli didn’t know. Hopefully, she would never know. Nobody in Signal Bend knew. Len and he had fought that out—Len thought the Horde should know. He thought so vehemently. And he was right. But Isaac didn’t want the club to feel the need to retaliate outside. They were legit now, free and clear of cartels, and Feds, and Sheriffs, and he wanted them to stay that way. That was why the f*ck he was in here. He wanted his family safe.

Moreover, he simply didn’t want Show to know. Because Show had a very hard time not telling Lilli things, even when Isaac told him not to. Lilli had a way about her, a way of seeing the truth or at least knowing there was one being hidden, and Show was a f*cking awful liar when he had to lie to somebody he cared about. Lilli would see that something was being kept from her, and she would dig, and Show would fold like a cheap suit.

So nobody outside the prison walls knew that there had been attempts made on Isaac’s life. Whether Walker’s little-man games were part of another or just an * with a God complex, Isaac didn’t know yet. But when the guards paused at their cell and did the count, Walker smirked in a way that made Isaac’s hands twitch with the longing to become fists.

They walked on, and Len muttered, “That son of a bitch is bad news, boss. Bad news.”

“Yeah.”



oOo



After the sad thing the prison cook called a Christmas dinner, Isaac skipped the sad thing that they were calling a Christmas party in the rec room and went back to his bunk. Len, knowing that Isaac needed some space, and also needing some alone time, went off and found it who knew where. Very rarely, during the precious times in which their hours were their own, Len would seem to disappear. He was always back for the count, and Isaac had never asked where he went off to. For as long as he known him, Len had been a loner.

Isaac was sure, too, that Len had his back even during times like this, when he went off somewhere.

The first attack had happened during such a time, and still Len had been right there, pulling the guy off Isaac and breaking the shank in two right in the guy’s hand. He was like Batman or something. They’d never seen the attacker in their block before, and, though they’d left him breathing, they had not seen him since.

It had been more than a year since an attack, though. Unless they counted Wee Willy Walker and his baton.

Shoving all that noise in his head to the side, Isaac lay in his bunk with his new book. He didn’t open it right away. Instead, he took in the photos and drawings that filled the wall space between his bunk and Len’s. Drawings from his kids—horses and flowers and dogs and bikes and people from Gia, mostly mazes and patterns from Bo. Handmade cards. Photos of his family. Gia, seven years old now, riding horses and taking archery lessons. Bo, now five, struggling a already in school, even though he was only in kindergarten. He wasn’t much of a talker, his boy, and apparently his teacher thought there was some cause for concern. Lilli didn’t agree. He would hate to be the teacher in that disagreement. But he’d love to be able to watch the fireworks.

He smiled at a photo of Gia on Matilda, her Welsh pony—a new addition since he’d been inside. Lilli sat astride Flash, horse and pony side by side. His girls were wearing matching cowboy hats and wide smiles.

That photo made his heart ache ferociously. It was good to see his Sport smile like that. He never saw that smile when she came here. The smile he got was tinged with loss.