“He’s fast,” I say simply.
“He’s about ready to be retired,” he says.
“I plan on it.”
He looks up, face half shadowed. “One last ride, huh?”
I nod. “He’ll get us where we’re going. I trust him.”
Brothers smiles, but there’s something about him that unsettles me tonight. His shoulders sit lower, like he’s resigned. Considering we’re about to walk into a fight, I don’t like the aura of defeat around him. Thinking hard, I saddle up Godspeed and put him in the pen in the corner to wait. When I return, Brothers sits on a bench, smoking, his legs stretched out.
He’s sober. No jokes or digs tonight.
“Hey, you good?” I say.
He’s distant. “Kayleigh’s doing it for Della, not for me. She traded her cousin in return for Della and Landis going free, but she didn’t barter anybody else’s life.”
“So…what does that mean?” I ask.
He finally looks up. “It means, when I kill every person in her family I can get my hands on, we’re going to have a long, hard road to forgiveness.”
Dead silence. I clear my throat, still not following.
“Are you planning to do that tonight?” I ask.
He shakes his head, inhaling smoke deep. “We’ll see.”
“You can talk straight to me,” I say.
He leans against the wall, releasing a sigh. There’s a wet patch on his Sunday shirt.
“You know why they called me Brothers Boyd?” he says.
I shake my head. “Never thought you’d answer if I asked.”
“Jem commissioned the sign over the door of our first bookie business. It was supposed to sayTheBrothers Boyd, but they didn’t seal the paint correctly,” he drawls, eyes disconnected. “After a while, through time, the first word wore out, leaving it just Brothers Boyd. Jem was a slower moving kind of guy. He liked an easy life. See, back in the church, I was the eldest son. I had all the responsibility. The yoke, as it were, was thrust on my shoulders. But Jem…he just kinda ran to keep up, you know? I was moving, shaking, and Jem was fading out because he couldn’t keep up. Eventually, I become both halves of The Brothers Boyd.”
I study him. It’s hard to think of Brothers as anything but an adult man.
“Is that why you wanted to bring me on to replace Jem?” I ask.
“Yeah, Jem fell behind.” He points at me with the cigarette. “But Jensen Childress, he didn’t just catch up. He flew like a fucking arrow.”
I grunt, uncomfortable.
“It wasn’t hard work,” I say.
“It was. You were just good at it,” he says. “People called me Brothers for a good while. Then, I was at the races one day. You weren’t there, but you were working for me at the time, and one of the owners of the Derby winner that year saw me from across the room. He said Good God, it’s Boyd, and it came out so loud, the whole room laughed. He was a big guy, Scotch-Irish, booming voice. Now, down at the racetrack, they call me The Good God Boyd.”
I’m quiet. I’m not sure he wants me to answer. He’s just talking. I think people don’t listen to him talk very often, at least, not like this. He rolls his cigarette between his finger and thumb, brow creased.
“Kayleigh… When I met her, she thought that was so damn funny,” he drawls. “So I stopped minding it so much.”
He falls quiet, smoking, thinking. Finally, he clears his throat.
“I’ve been called near everything but my own name,” he says. “I like that just fine, but I like it better when Kayleigh says my name, my real one.”
I don’t ask him what that is—he won’t tell me anyway.
