Through A Glass, Darkly (The Assassins of Youth MC #1)(16)

“It might come as a surprise to you that you have many enemies on the outside. Listen. I’m also interested in the plight of women here on the compound. Underage girls being married off, women ‘assigned’ to men they barely know, basic human rights violations.”

Oh, I had heard of things that would make this man’s toes curl. Surrogate stud men were assigned when men became impotent. The husbands would be forced to watch while the stud men humped their wives. All completely unsavory. I had to at least trust this man in order to draw him out. I admitted, “Yes, some men have been vanishing lately under odd circumstances. Reed Smoot, for one.”

“As I suspected.”

“He vanished a few months ago. Many ‘surplus’ men have been disappearing, I think when they displease Allred. I’m worried about this Mr. Fortunati if he’s going to start doing business with Allred. Maybe we could arrange a meet—”

As though they’d been hiding behind the front door, three men burst through now. They flashed their weapons, sawed-off shotguns and handguns. They fanned out, pointing their weapons every which way. As though Bronson Carradine was some kind of threat!

I rolled back in my chair while Bronson pressed his finger to his lips in the universal “be quiet” gesture. He stood, already defeated, hands in the air.

“All right! What’s going on here?” Parley Pipkin drawled.

“Nothing! He’s just an appliance salesman.” I slid the business card into my dress pocket.

“Yeah, well,” said Parley, “he’s been sneaking into the compound lately trying to talk to people about—well, about various stuff. If you see this bastard around again, Mahalia, call us immediately!”

Although two men had him by the arms and were dragging him out the door of the Relief Society office, Bronson dared to look me pointedly in the eye and make motions like wiggling a phone receiver by his ear.

But the whole thing unsettled me. The way Parley had given Bronson the bum’s rush must mean he was onto something. When the coast was clear, I looked at the business card. Of course, it didn’t say “Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms” on it. It claimed that Bronson Carradine—a made-up name if I ever heard one—was an appliance salesman. I didn’t dare dial the phone number yet, for fear he had the ringer turned up, and Parley would know it was me. But it must be a real number, or he wouldn’t have given me the card.

Amazingly, the second I went back to my spreadsheet, it all became clear. Bing, bam, boom, it balanced like a charm, and relief washed through me. Did the visit of the mysterious dishwasher salesman somehow unclog my energy channels? The spreadsheet I’d been laboring over for hours suddenly all fell together perfectly like a lock and key. I now actually had a few spare hours to myself.

I grabbed my purse and went back home, one of those long saltbox houses built twenty years ago on crescent-shaped streets that all hugged the center town square. Kimball lived with me, and of course Vonda, as well as sister wives Emersyn, Aunistee, Tazmin, and Sarah. I had lost count of their children long ago.

I did something I had never once dared to do. I stripped off my long johns and put my red dress back on again over only a bra and granny panties. I also took a forbidden case of eyebrow powder from a lower vanity drawer and drew my eyebrows in more artistically. Nobody knew that I already waxed them.

And I wafted a scent into the air that in my dreams Gideon Fortunati would approve of—Pine Forest—and walked through it, like Marilyn Monroe in one of her movies. There. That would be subtle enough that no Cornucopian would smell it on me, but if Gideon were to get close enough to—

“Listen to me!” I cried. I stuck out my lower lip at my mirror reflection. I was seeing through the glass darkly, not clearly. Even if Gideon saw me, even if Gideon were single, even if we hit it off…What scrud was I thinking?

What in the name of a motherless goat was I thinking?

I wasn’t thinking. That was the beauty of it.

I grabbed my purse again and left.





CHAPTER SIX




GIDEON


Once Skippy Cavanaugh got to know who I was, that I worked for Allred Lee Chiles, he relaxed around me. The bartender at the High Dive was obviously on Chiles’ payroll, and he admitted as much to me.

“I was just passing through town without much to do. My wife had just died, and I was aimlessly wandering. Parley Pipkin asked if I wanted to tend bar here, and the rest is history.”

It wasn’t really all that historical, but now that Skippy knew I worked for Chiles, he let me in on a few more secrets. He had a sneaking suspicion that Bronson Carradine worked for the feds, for example. He claimed it was just a feeling—the mirrored shades he wore, the government plates on his car, the way he didn’t know anything about French door refrigerators or tempered glass shelves.

“He’d have to know about humidity-controlled crispers, for instance,” said Skippy.

Also, he let on that Mahalia had been married to a man on the outside near Salt Lake. He’d died in a construction accident, and Chiles had moved in for the kill. With supernatural powers, he got wind that she was a freshly minted widow. He sent men to her condo to pack everything up, and basically dragged her kicking and screaming.

Only, Skippy didn’t say that part. Dingo did.

“She was dragged kicking and screaming in the dead of night, Mahalia and her daughter Vonda.” Dingo apparently had sort of a crush on Vonda, a girl about three years younger than him. He’d been naively admitting all sorts of things to me, like the fact that he was a virgin. He was so self-effacing, so lacking in ego, that he wasn’t even aware that this was the sort of thing he should be embarrassed by. “At first, they were both kept in lockup, because Chiles knew she’d run away. He needed to steep her in his Stockholm Syndrome so he could mold her to his ways. He likes to keep them living in a fundamentalist bubble.”