Page 21 of Deacon

“I’ll try not to,” I said.

Smoke snorted into his coffee and I glared at him.

“One more thing.” Preacher sat back and looked at me. “You and Laine’s girl.”

Every head at the table turned my way.

“No point hiding it now,” I said. “I stood in her shop and told Tomas’s man what happens if he goes near her again. They know exactly whose she is.” I looked around the table, one man at a time. “She’s mine. Anybody’s got a problem with that, say it now.”

Havoc grinned like Christmas had come early. “Called it. I fucking called it.”

“Everybody called it,” Lock said.

It was the most he’d said at a table in a month. Even Gage laughed.

Preacher let it run for a second, then brought it back down. “Understand me. We’re doing this because Tomas has had his hands in this town for two years, and Laine’s buildings are the last good foothold he’s got. We’re doing it for the club.”

“I know why we’re doing it,” I said.

The club was doing it for the club. I was doing it for her. For once in my life, those two lined up exactly.

For the next week, the club watched, and made sure everybody saw it.

There was a bike parked outside the ice house gate every morning, a prospect beside it in his cut with a thermos and a crossword. Switch rode the rail spur road after dark with his headlight sweeping the fence line. Havoc and Lock worked their way along Harry’s strip of storefronts on Main, stopping outside each one long enough for the whole street to notice.

Nobody came near any of it.

Tito called at the end of the week. Nobody had called him for a shift since the ice house emptied out, and the Deming crew who used to drink at the roadhouse after a load hadn’t been in since. Wherever they’d gone, it wasn’t anywhere Harry Laine owned.

I told him to come by the garage Monday. Switch could always use a kid who knew how to load a truck and keep his mouth shut.

Harry Laine’s arrangement came apart the way it had been built. Quietly.

We went to see him that Saturday.

His office was the same as ever, nicotine ceiling and dirty windows. I noticed a spider plant on his filing cabinet that seemed to have given up entirely. Harry sat behind his desk with his reading glasses perched on top of his head and watched us come in like a man who’d been expecting the bailiffs.

Preacher took the chair across from him. I stayed by the door.

“Your tenants moved out,” Preacher said.

“So I gathered.”

“They won’t be back.”

“You seem very sure,” he replied, as if he weren’t rattled by us showing up.

“I know they won’t be back to anything of yours,” Preacher said, “because you’ve seen us outside every building you own this week, and so have they. We’ll be outside them a long time.”

Harry absorbed that. “You have no right… That was good money.”

“It was their money,” I said. “And it’s gone. We don’t want their dirty money in this town.”

Then he turned his eyes on me. He had his daughter’s eyes. That caught me off guard, and I hated it. Then he took the glasses off and pinched the bridge of his nose, and pulled a legal pad toward him, and started writing numbers.

I watched him do it. All week I’d pictured putting this man on the floor of his own office. Instead I stood there and watched him work out how much his buildings had lost, now the cartel money was gone and the whole town was talking.

“Ice house was eleven thousand,” he said, to nobody in particular. “Nine, now. Maybe eight and a half.” He tapped the pen on the pad. “I’ve had a man asking after the rail spur lot. Farmer from Hatch.”