Page 122 of Then You Happened
My only goal is to stop this bullshit once and for all.
“Tatum Knox.”
Those two words are all I have to say for him to know what the punch was for.
“So?” The asshole smirks, so I swing for the softness of his gut. My fist lands with a thud, and I can feel the whoosh of air come out of his chest in reflex.
I can smell the alcohol on his breath, the marijuana on his clothes, and I know that in and of itself is the only reason he isn’t fighting back.
Thank fuck for that because I have a feeling all it would take is a whistle from him to get his customers in the bar out here . . . and then I’d be a dead man.
“Do you think the bets her husband made in that stack of spreadsheets are going to scare someone off?” I growl, my face inches from his. People from the bar stare as they come out on their own accord, and I just give them a glare to tell them to leave us the fuck alone. “Do you think that pathetic fuck’s debts, which you let him run up only so you could nail him to a wall and try to get him to leverage his land, are hers to pay?” I slam him against his car again. “She is not selling. You are not going to run her off. And if you ever so much as say Tate’s name again, let alone try to badmouth her or her business again, I’ll kill you.”
“Try it,” he grits out, the blood pouring from his nose spraying me as he speaks.
“Give me a reason, and I will.” My chuckle is long and loud and manic enough that, when I look in his eyes, I don’t think he wants to find out if it’s true or not.
He believes me.
Though, technically, I wouldn’t kill him, but I’m the fucking great white in his goldfish bowl. There wouldn’t be a minute of sleep lost if I used the ranch I inherited and my connections to swallow his whole operation.
And for some reason, a puzzle that had been mostly dismissed as unsolvable becomes clear. Tate’s accident. Sylvester’s comments about the dark sedan that ran her off the road in front of the ranch.
Perhaps the same dark sedan that I have this asshole pressed against.
Makes sense now why it seemed like no one looked all that hard for the person who ran Tate off the road. Perhaps it was because he was one of their own.
I look at this pathetic fuck and know exactly how to play this.
I’m going to call his bluff.
I’m going to scare the fuck out of him with lies upon lies so that he’ll never know if they are true or not, because he’d never dare to flesh them out.
“You know Fletcher was an avid hunter right? He was a paranoid fuck, but an avid hunter nonetheless.” I smile as I draw a connection between two things that have no connection, hoping the certainty in my voice convinces him. “He had trail cams everywhere on that property of his. All thirty acres of it.”
“Why the fuck do I care?” he snarls.
“The best part about those thirty acres is they lined the main road going toward town. He’d catch footage of deer on the road, of kids playing homerun derby with their bats to mailboxes, and of trivial shit that no one cares about.” I tsk. “Except, the one time it caught footage of a dark, four-door sedan.” I lean back and make a show of checking out his car as his body stills beneath my hands. Motherfucker, I think my hunch is right. Thank god for that. “Much like the one right here. In fact, that footage caught what looks like it purposely running another car off the road. Tatum Knox’s car to be exact.”
He sputters something that sounds like bullshit, but it doesn’t hide the sudden widening of his pupils or hitch of his breath.
“Who knew that footage was just sitting on Fletcher’s computer all this time under the file name “Proof”? I bet he held on to it as leverage in case he needed it.” I whistle. “You think it would cause a stir, Destin, if this security footage somehow ended up in the hands of the police?”
“You’re lying.”
“You’d like to think I was, but, hey”—I lean in closer—”I bet the police could zoom right in on that license plate too. Wouldn’t that be nice? It isn’t as if you were smart enough to cover it when you played chicken. I mean what do you think the charge would be? Hit and run? Reckless
driving? Attempted murder?”
“Fuck you,” he grits out.
“Ah, there’s that stellar vocabulary of yours again. No wonder you have to resort to illegal activities to make a living.” It takes everything I have not to plow my fist into his face again and make sure his nose is broken so badly that every fucking time he looks in the mirror and sees how crooked it is, he thinks of me. That he never forgets my threat.
Most of all, I want him to be a walking reminder to everyone in town not to ever fuck with her again.
“You’re full of shit. If you had video, why was it never given to the police, huh?”
“Because Fletcher was a low-life chicken shit who was lying to his wife about how upside down he was.” My fist pounds on the car. “If he turned it in, she would have found out all about his connection to you and the debts he owed. She would have made the connection that it was you who ran her off the road as a threat to get him to pay up.”
