Stay Vertical (The Bare Bones MC #2)(54)
“All right! Enough!”
Strong hands grabbed Lytton’s collar, wrenching him to his feet, panting. A couple of other men wrestled Ford to his feet too. The two brothers stood glaring and huffing at each other, all pumped up like shapeshifters on steroids. Lytton shook off his referees, surprised to see one of them was the lawyer, Slushy.
“E-f*cking-nough, all right?” cried Slushy. “It’s bad enough you two keep trying to ruin each other’s next reincarnation, but sending more people to the ER isn’t what we need right now.”
Lytton finger-combed his hair, panting on Slushy. “You know about the ER?”
“I just came from there. Madison said to tell you June’s resting fine and she’ll definitely spend the night, maybe two. But she’s out of the woods.” Slushy brushed off his own starched lavender shirt as though he had been the one fighting, giving Lytton the once-over. “You do look a lot like your brother. Knock it off with this Edmund and Edgar rivalry. There are enough other enemies in the world without creating them inside your own family, begorra. Now listen. I sent a guy to your ranch to deal with that engineer in the greenhouse, but since you reset the security system before you left and we didn’t know the code, he had to break in, basically. So if you check your phone, there might be a call from your security firm—no, don’t check it now! We don’t have time for fun and games. I need to see what can be done without our clubs going to the mattresses. I don’t feature being stuck in this pot-infused closet for the next week, on lockdown while you guys pick each other off while hiding behind marijuana bales. Driving Hawk, be straight with us. What’s happening at three? That’s less than half an hour since you two turds decided to go all MMA.”
Lytton looked at the faces of the other men. Their anger had been replaced by a curiosity, an eagerness to do what was required of them. “Well, as I tried to say, a health inspector is coming here at three. He’s going to find some nearly empty bottles of poison in the trash bins out back that someone—”
Ford grunted. “Someone.”
“—planted there, and those bottles will accurately portray the sort of banned pesticides that have been sprayed all over the shipment of weed you’ve got coming from Sinaloa, also expected to arrive around three.”
“Those f*cking Dotards!” shouted Turk. “I f*cking asked Truitt if that was the same stuff we smoked the other day, and he said yes, exact same batch! That stuff was good.”
Lytton said, “Well, this stuff isn’t. It’s drenched in paraquat and DDT, and I can’t even in good conscience give that to my enemies, you know what I mean?”
“You were about to,” Ford seethed. His anger was defrosting, but he would probably have a lingering grudge against Lytton for a while to come.
Lytton sliced the air with his hand. “Whatever. Right now my immediate goal is to get the inspector off our backs and take down Iso Weaver at the same time.”
“Those are all good goals,” said Turk, the Vice President of The Bare Bones. “Let’s hear your plan.”
Everything was executed in the twinkling of an eye. Lytton was impressed with the way the men worked together as a team, seamlessly. They’d obviously been accustomed to operating like a well-oiled machine for quite a long time now. The departure of several of them was key to the plan. It couldn’t look as if they had expected the surprise inspection, after all. By three o’clock, the only men remaining were Turk, August, Slushy, Tobiah, Ford, and Lytton. Tobiah was posing as their IT guy, his back to the store in case Saul recognized him from Leaves of Grass. He really needed to reinstate the corrupted files on their computer system, so he was working like a pit crew at the desk. Slushy wanted to oversee how everything went down, so he was posing as a customer.
“How’s this thing work?” asked Slushy, holding a glass vapor bubbler. “I can’t say as I see the attraction to this stuff. I have sort of the opposite reaction to it than most people. I wind up sitting in the corner babbling like a goon. Once I got stuck in the back of one of Ochoa’s weed trucks—a box truck, like the Staples one you jacked from Ford. Thought I was back in the seventies with all the Jefferson Starship tunes coming at me. Starship, mind you, not even Airplane.”
“Yeah, about that truck,” said Ford, “I’d kind of like my share of the payback pie too, if you don’t mind, Driving Hawk. That Ochoa driver was an old-timer, worked with us for ten years, and you say Weaver just popped him off like he was a used scratcher.”
“Yeah. Fucking unbelievable. He said it was because he had a Jesus candle on the dashboard.”
“He had a Tweety sticker on his window,” Tobiah filled in from the other room.
Turk glowered. “Iso’s been a ticking time bomb for a long time. As much as we hate Zelov, I’ve got to say his sergeant-at-arms has been a worse bee in our bonnet forever. I’d like to see him in the rearview, too.”
“Where is that f*cking truck, anyway?” Toby bellowed from the office.
“Good point,” said Lytton. “I’d better go sit with Iso at the coffee shop next door.”
“Don’t let anyone in,” Ford yelled to the security guard. Yet another pot seeker was pounding on the locked door, but this one was persuasive.
“Department of Health Services!” shouted Saul Goldblum, corrupt inspector of marijuana operations.