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“The swamp. I stopped Rocko, now I’m going to stop Four Wheels from sending any more kin to upset Agnes.” He looked back at the house. “I think she’s really upset. She was ... different.”
“What about Casey Dean?” Carpenter looked as close to exasperated as Shane had ever seen him.
“Dean isn’t going to make his move until after the wedding,” Shane said, ignoring Carpenter’s real question, What about the mission?
“How do you know that?” Carpenter said. “Because he sent you a text message and you believe it?”
“Because the Don told him not to do anything until then.”
Carpenter’s face was as impassive as ever, but his eyes said, Uh-huh.
“Fine,” Shane said. “You observe the situation and develop a theory that will get me a line on Dean, I’ll go after him.”
“All right,” Carpenter said. “I’ll work on that. Does that mean you don’t want me with you going after Four Wheels?”
Shane nodded toward the house, where one of Thibault clan was spraying paint with abandon as he finished finishing the house at last. “I’m taking Garth. He knows the terrain.”
Carpenter looked even more doubtful. “I don’t think he’s going to be much help if you run into trouble.”
“I think I can handle one old man in the swamp, even if he is surrounded by his family.”
Carpenter shook his head. “So far we haven’t handled much of anything.”
Shane bristled. “I’m doing all right.”
“You’re not focused. You haven’t been since your uncle called you in Savannah. Have you tried to figure out the big picture in this mission? Because there’s something about this that I don’t like?—”
“Wilson’s given us an op to run,” Shane said, ignoring the instincts that were telling him the same thing. “Take out Casey Dean. I know I screwed up?—”
“Twice.”
“I know I screwed up twice,” Shane said, his voice tight, “but I will take out Casey Dean. I’m going after Four Wheels to close out the problems that have been distracting me.”
Carpenter glanced over the house. “You think Four Wheels Thibault is your distraction here? If you don’t get focused, you’re going to end up in a body bag. Casey Dean has also screwed up by not taking us out. There’s something wrong with this whole mission, and it’s going to come down to whichever side stops making mistakes and does the job right. Soon. Don’t forget that.”
“I’m not,” Shane said, not looking back at the house. “I’m closing out one loose end, finishing the job here. Then we take down Casey Dean and move on.”
Assuming we can convince the general population that there’s no five mil at Two Rivers, Joey didn’t kill Frankie, and I can leave Agnes.
Better not to share that with Carpenter.
He went to get Garth.
Lisa Livia was sitting on the counter stool, her feet on Rhett and her forehead on the counter, when Agnes got back to the kitchen.
“I was so sure she’d killed him,” she said into the counter as Agnes went around her to get the bourbon bottle out. “I was positive. I’d seen her driving the damn Caddy away that night. I knew she’d done it. That’s her damn frying pan down there.”
“Well, don’t give up.” Agnes grabbed a glass and poured Lisa Livia two fingers of bourbon and slid it across to her. “You haven’t thought this through. Just because the body wasn’t there today doesn’t mean it wasn’t there last week.”
“You think she could have gotten a twenty-five-year-dead body up that ladder and out through the gazebo?” Lisa Livia said, skepticism thick in her voice.
“I think she’s capable of chopping a twenty-five-year-dead body into paperweights, carting them out in a basket, and selling them to the Daughters of the Confederacy as memento mori.” Agnes poured herself a glass. “We’re talking Brenda here. Do not give up hope. It is still entirely possible that your mother bashed your rather with that frying pan twenty-five years ago, and that he’s still deader than a doornail today.”
Lisa Livia’s lips quirked as she straightened and picked up her glass. “Yeah. No point in hoping that my mother’s innocent and my father’s alive.”
“Exactly.” Agnes lifted her glass. “Why look for a silver lining when there might be a cloud? If South Carolina has the death penalty, there could be an orphanage in your future yet.” She clinked her glass with LL’s and drank, and Lisa Livia laughed shortly and drank, too.
“Okay,” she said when she’d drained her glass. “There’s still hope.”
