Page 16 of Patch

“I’m right here,” I said.

He didn’t care. He never cared. He wound through my ankles one more time and headed for the food bowl in the break room, his tail held high.

I locked the front door. Set the alarm. Walked to my car through gravel that had dried in the afternoon sun.

The card sat in my pocket. Heavy. Official. Unforgiving.

I had fourteen days. Maybe less. The decision to stay silent felt solid in the moment. Certainty that came from running every option and finding them all worse.

I knew it wouldn’t hold. But it would hold for now. And now was all I had.

Chapter Five

Patch

Church convened before noon. The doors pulled shut, the lock clicked, and the room went quiet.

I stood at the head of the table. Not because Fox put me there. I made the call, and everybody in the room knew it.

“County 47,” I said. “Mile marker 12. Brazil driving, Freak on the exchange. Two shooters came out of the east road on foot. No colors, no plates. Three rounds. One hit.”

“Whose exchange?” Fox said.

“Ours. Sort of.” I put both hands on the table. “Freak had a line on a bulk buy through a fella he knows at a feed supply outfit in Rolla. Antibiotics, mostly. Lidocaine. Stuff Dread goes through and can’t order in the quantity we use without somebody at a pharmacy writing it down.”

“So he was buying medical.”

“He was buying medical, cheap, off a legitimate account, from a man who’d done it twice before without a problem.” I let that sit. “He didn’t clear it. That’s on him and he knows it. But there was nothing about that meet that should have gotten anybody shot.”

“Then why did it?” Hornet asked.

“Because the seller wasn’t the only one who thought that shipment was his.” Brazil said it from the far end. “Two men came out of the dark and told him to step away from the truck, and Freak stepped in front of the man instead of away from him, because Freak is Freak. Somebody’s hand moved. I don’t know whose was first and I’m not going to sit here and tell you I do.”

“They weren’t there for us,” I said.

“They didn’t know who we were,” Brazil said. “That’s the part that’s been keeping me up. They weren’t watching for a cut. They were watching that shipment.”

“Then somebody else has been buying off that account,” Fox said.

“Somebody else has been buying off that account for a while,” Surge said. “I’ve had the Rolla supplier flagged since spring. Volume’s wrong. I told Freak it was wrong.”

Hornet looked down the table at him. “You told Freak.”

“I told Freak in April, and he said he’d be careful, and I’m going to have to live with the fact that I let that be the end of the conversation.”

“How bad?” Fox asked.

“Through-and-through, right shoulder. Missed the subclavian by half an inch.”

“Half a fucking inch.” Hornet sat back. “Somebody up there likes him.”

“Somebody up there’s got shit taste,” Brazil said.

That got a laugh out of two men and nothing out of Gunner, who was leaning against the wall by the door the way he did in every room that had chairs in it.

“Dread?” Fox asked.

“Unreachable. Honeymoon.”