Stay Vertical (The Bare Bones MC #2)(7)

“And some Eminence Front,” Iso added, hopping around on his one good foot.

Zelov waved his piece. “Forget the Eminence Front. We wanted to see if our chemist could duplicate it, Driving Hawk. We’re thinking of setting up a pot dispensary in Pure and Easy.” Zelov was sure being palsy-walsy, calling Lytton by his surname.

“We’ve already got a cool name for the store,” said Iso. “The Strain Train.”

“I thought we were going with Pipe Dreams.”

“The Strain Train rhymes.”

Lytton was skeptical. “Why didn’t you just ask me for my secret?”

Zelov looked at a light bank, his face screwed up. “Didn’t occur to us to ask?” Serious again, he waved his Sig Sauer as though it were a fairy’s wand. “Now take that piece out of my man’s brain or I’m going to bring this whole smelly warehouse down around your head. It’s going to be biblical.”

“I don’t think so. I let you go, every epic asshat between here and Juarez is going to be sashaying into my farm and walking out with weed. I’ve got all day. I’ll just stand here waiting for the cops.”

Zelov rolled his eyes. “Well, we ain’t got all day, you savvy, Scoobie Doobie?”

Iso finally yanked himself away from Lytton. Like a snobby waiter, he straightened out the bottom hem of his cut and glared at Lytton. “Besides, you don’t want to kill me. I’m your f*cking new best friend, with the information I’ve got.”

“Iso,” Zelov said warningly.

Apparently whatever information Iso had was more important than a shootout in a pot greenhouse, so of course Lytton’s curiosity was piqued. Lytton looked from Iso to Zelov, from Zelov to Iso. “Holster your weapon too,” he growled.

Both men did so, Lytton sticking his in his jeans waistband at the small of his back. Iso staggered a few steps off and had to grab onto a pot plant to stay upright, his lower jaw jutting angrily.

Lytton lifted his chin at Iso. “Talk. What do you know that makes you my new best friend?”

“Whoa,” whined Iso. “I’m weak from blood loss.”

“See?” Lytton heard the faraway whine of a cop’s siren over the nearby whine of the Cutlass sergeant-at-arms. Lytton didn’t bid on sports memorabilia at the Pure and Easy annual policeman’s benefit dinner for nothing. Those guys knew which side their bread was buttered on. “Doesn’t take them long to get here. Now speak.”

“Ah,” said Zelov, “why don’t you just let us leave the way we came in and we’ll call it even? Iso doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s delirious from blood loss.”

“I’ll let you go if you tell me what’s so damned important.” Lytton made as if to reach for his piece again, and Iso cracked.

“It’s about your dad!” Iso held like a monkey to the trunk of the plant, swaying back and forth.

Zelov rolled his eyes again and stepped away, as if washing his hands of the entire affair. Lytton’s heart near about stopped.

My dad. For the first twenty-five years of his life, he had thought his father was Kino Driving Hawk, upstanding member of the White Mountain Apache Tribal council. “What about him? He owns the land you just trespassed on.”

Iso shook his head and chortled evilly, like some cartoon moustache-twirler. “No. It’s not about that redskin. It’s about your real dad.”

Lytton actually went weak in the knees. Since that awful day five years ago, he’d been living in mortal terror that someone would talk like this. The MIT scholarship committee had discovered that Kino wasn’t Lytton’s real dad when his mother had finally sent them his birth certificate. She had sobbed and torn her hair out apologizing to Lytton, but the damage was done.

She had lied to protect him, and Kino was game to go along with it, being a nice guy. As for who Lytton’s real father was—clearly not a tribal member, but someone of dark countenance—Sadie never let on. She claimed not to know who he was, claiming to have been gang-banged by some out-of-town bikers.

The story had never set well with Lytton, for some reason. Now he cautiously asked Iso, “What are you talking about?”

Iso’s nostrils flared nastily. “You know. You know that redskin’s not your real dad. You know you’re a f*cking half-breed.”

“Leave it alone, Iso,” warned Zelov from a safe distance. “You’re just opening up a can of worms.”

Now Lytton did remove his Glock from his waistband, although he allowed it to dangle at his side until he heard Iso out. “No, I want to hear this shit. What’re you rattling on and on about?”

Iso jutted his jaw triumphantly, although he still clung to the feeble plant. “Your mom. That slutty squaw. Went and spread her dirty slutty legs thirty years ago for Cropper Illuminati. Yeah, that Cropper. You’ve heard of him, maybe?”

The cops had reached Lytton’s front gate a quarter mile away. It sounded like two cop cars in tandem wailing away, suddenly not a salvation, but another new threat.

Zelov yanked Iso away from the pot tree. “Cumon, let’s go. We’ll discuss this later. Right, Driving Hawk? We’ll talk about the pot dispensary, Pipe Dreams? We could really use a top scientist like you to help us out with all the tagging and labeling and shit like that.” Zelov pushed a button on a radio attached to his cut. “Toddler Tyke, Toddler Tyke, this is Big Kahuna, do you copy? What’s your location? We need to make like a baby and head out.”