Through A Glass, Darkly (The Assassins of Youth MC #1)(15)
I believed it. I sobbed for maybe a minute and a half. Those was all the tears I had left inside of me. Vonda was still a BIA Maid, a girl of the Beneficial Improvement Association, and would be for another nine months until she turned sixteen, when she’d advance into the Garland class. It wasn’t until age eighteen when she’d even join my Relief Society, but I was planning to advance her sooner due to her maturity. Now? Now she’d be too pregnant with that goddamned peckerhead’s babies to drive with me to St. George and Cedar City on missions! The thought of Orson Ream lying with my precious daughter was enough to make the bile rise in my throat.
So I sobbed, I pounded the counter until my fist was as blue as my bottom, and then, as was usual for me, I gathered myself and finished cleaning up. I was practical. I had no inkling that anything better would befall my only child. Had anyone ever given me any encouragement, given me a shred of hope that Vonda’s fate would be merrier than mine? No. Not one person.
A few days later I was in my office finishing a profit and loss statement that had perplexed me. My net operating profit was out of whack. It was probably more my own self that was out of whack, to be honest. I hadn’t eaten in three days. Visions of Mr. Gideon Fortunati had been scouring away at my brain cells eternally by that time. I just could not shut them out, unlike the gruesome images of Allred Chiles and his narrow Johnny one-eye poking away so eagerly at me. No, I had already glimpsed what the kids called Mr. Fortunati’s “package” all full and juicy, his jeans so tight they left nothing to the imagination. I could come up with all sorts of euphemisms for that thick serpent that lay nestled beneath his hip pocket, a chain that probably held his wallet and keys draped across it. Unchain my love, I liked to think. Gideon Fortunati was the only man who was capable of that.
The front door opened quietly, and I suspected it was Kimball. She’d been sticking close to me like a tick on a beagle ever since she heard the news of Vonda. Vonda was only maybe five years younger than Kimball. They had more in common with their girlish ways, their concerns about their hair, their figures, their need to “jump on a computer and surf the net.” Kimball was almost as concerned as I was with the turn of events.
The man startled me so, I made a smudge with my pen across the paper.
“Oh!” I gasped, but he looked harmless enough. I know now that danger comes in the most innocent of forms, but back then I was more trusting.
“Sorry, sorry,” he said hurriedly, handing me a business card, then shaking my hand. I barely had time to read it. Something about appliances. “Bronson Carradine, at your service. Only”—he looked from side to side, crouching over a plastic chair—“may I be so bold as to take a seat?”
“Of course,” I said. Maybe Allred had sent him to chat me up about…appliances?
“Is there no one else in the office?” he asked in a husky voice.
“No, just me. Why? What is this?”
“You’re a wife of Allred Chiles, correct?”
“Yes…”
“I heard your name mentioned as one who might not be, shall we say, thoroughly enamored of this place. There was some dissatisfaction.”
At that, a creepy feeling snaked its way into my entrails. “How did you get in? Who was your appointment with?”
“Let’s just say I don’t think Reed Smoot is ever coming back.”
I shut up then. I had to listen to this strange refrigerator salesman. How in blue blazes did he know Reed was never coming back? Did he have something to do with his disappearance? I nodded to indicate he could talk.
He leaned forward and talked in hushed tones like a cop. Which, in retrospect, I guess he was. “Listen, Mahalia. I’m an ATF agent. That stands for Alcohol, Tobacco—”
“I know what it means.” I’d been privy to enough meetings in Allred’s office where that subject came up. The ATF was the most hated enemy of the Church of Good Fortune. Why, I had no idea. We drank alcohol and smoked tobacco. Maybe we weren’t paying taxes on them.
“I’ve heard tell that you might be disaffected. You might be willing to work with me.”
I drew myself up stiff as a board. “Why should I trust you? What makes you think I’m disaffected? The same person who told you about Reed Smoot?” It could’ve been anyone, really, but more and more I was getting a feeling that Gideon Fortunati had run into Bronson Carradine somewhere along the line. “Have you met Mr. Fortunati? He’s a biker.” A very sexy biker. Sex on a stick biker. He’s so sexy he turns straight guys gay, as I’d heard Vonda describe a rock singer once.
“Yes, yes, I’ve met Gideon Fortunati. He’s going to be managing Chiles’ Altar of Sacrifice Mine for him.”
I sniffed snobbily. “Then why don’t you ask Mr. Fortunati what you need to know? He seems to have all the answers.”
“Well, I’d like to hear things from a female point of view, if you know what I mean.”
“No, I do not. I don’t think women know terribly much about alcohol, tobacco, and firearms—”
Carradine crouched over when a couple figures walked by my front window. “It’s not the alcohol and tobacco I’m so concerned with, Miss. We never are. You see, we’ve got intel that Chiles has been stockpiling arms for some kind of Waco showdown.”
I’d heard of Waco before, of course. The government wound up making an even bigger ass of themselves with their trigger-happy, explosive standoff. “That’s preposterous. A showdown against who?”