Page 42 of Overkill

UNKNOWN NUMBER: Marcus and Miriam will be better off without you. Give them to their uncle, and you can be free. You can be safe.

UNKNOWN NUMBER: You know it’s the right thing to do.

Chapter 13

A Punchable Face

Vedder

It’d been a couple days since I’d last seen Melody. Taz had turned on the cameras she’d installed around Mel’s property when she’d rented a small plot of land and parked her trailer there. With eyes on Mel’s farm, and some of Mack’s own security able to reach out towards her house with some adjustments we’d made under the cover of darkness, I knew she was alright.

She hadn’t called me, so I gave her space and went about the rest of the job I was supposed to be doing for Braun.

I had dressed for the firehouse cookout in my volunteer firefighter shirt, one of my nicer and less hole-riddled jeans, and some vintage jump boots I’d fished from a dumpster some years back. I had been on a vow of poverty to rediscover who I was, but dumpster diving had not been my best moment. I learned a lot about what I could live without…and what I needed to live with.

A good pair of boots, a pair of jeans, and access to running water. Maybe a poncho, for when it rained. A good sleeping bag, too. And something to do with my day. Something purposeful with immediate feedback was great. Rebuilding a barn, for example. Putting up a fence. Laying down concrete was also a good one.

So, coming here to interview this guy was not high on the list of things I wanted to do.

With my truck out of commission and sitting on jack stands at the barn, ready for me to salvage what I needed to fix all of it, I was driving one of Braun’s refurbished Dodge Charger Pursuits—a former police car complete with the police department scratched off the blue-and-white paint job. At least the siren lights on the roof had been changed to feature different colors. Not a bad ride. But when I backed into a parking spot flanked by a Ferrari and a Bentley, I felt like I’d been tossed off the back of a turnip truck.

The holes on the knees of my worn jeans didn’t help. My work boots also clunked on their pristine drive—that wasn’t made of pebbles or concrete. It had been paved by gray stones with a cream border that matched the manor that looked newly remodeled in the farmhouse chic aesthetic, complete with a western theme that I thought was out of place in upstate New York.

“I know she did something to him.” Turner Gray leaned forward in the buck skin seat, his slicked-back hair and too-wide smile giving me the impression of a cartoon frog. “We’ve been swimming since before we could walk, and there is no way that my brother”—he took a shuttering breath that sounded less than genuine—“drowned.”

He was trying to play me. And I could do nothing but sit here and let him get it all out.

“That girl…” He shook his head. “That girl charmed my brother, and I don’t know how. He was smitten with her and her mother since the beginning.”

“By that girl, do you mean…”

“Melody Gray.” He had to have been a handsome man at one time. I could see it in the cut of his jaw and his cheeks. But frowning and depravity had soured him like a rotten grape. “She and her mother…I don’t know what they did to make my brother fall head over heels. I don’t know what games they played. But they had a hold on him that was fucked up, you understand my meaning?”

I did not. Not that I couldn’t figure out the allure of my sweet Melody…but there was a certain acidity in his voice that made me wary. The kind of acid that

“Hell, my own boy, Ian, was smitten with that girl for a while, too. Until I got him over that nonsense.” He looked smug as hell, like a self-righteous prick doing the lord’s work. I’d seen that look on my mother many, many times when she’d convinced me that some person in town who was trying to help us was really an agent of the devil. “Let me guess…”

He looked me up and down.

“You got a thing for her, too, don’t you?”

I wanted to punch him in the throat.

“I don’t blame you. Everyone does. She’s pretty and charming. And hell, there’s something about those exotic looks, am I right?”

Christ, this guy was punchable.

“Like a flame to us decent folk, you know?”

He really did sound like my mom. It was always them trying to tempt us, the good folks. There were two kinds of people, those who believed like us, and all the devils who didn’t. There was no middle ground.

“It doesn’t help that she looks so damn young…”

I wanted to puke.

“But that’s how they get ya!”

What?