“Who’s this?” asks a man I’ve never seen before. Even with the locals being sporadic around these parts, I’m confident we’ve never met. You can’t mistake a face as ugly as his.
“None of your business,” Cecil replies before pulling me behind him like I can’t protect myself. I guess his logic makes sense. I did arrive on his doorstep with a broken wrist, multiple fractured ribs, several contusions, and one hell of a bruised face.
I was unrecognizable.
“None of my business?” the man replies with a mocking laugh. “That’s funny consideringeverythinghere ismybusiness.” After dragging his eyes across the overflowing vegetable patch, a whistle blows through his chipped front teeth. “Wow. You have quite the setup, old man. I’m impressed.”
Although the stranger with a thick gold chain around his neck and an arrogant swagger appears to be praising Cecil, neither Cecil nor I take it that way. You can’t praise someone while destroying something that took them months to achieve.
While stomping across a bed of carrots almost ready for harvesting, the man with an ugly sneer gestures for two men in a blacked-out SUV to join us in the recently restored shade house. “But I still don’t understand what you’re doing here. This isn’t your land, so you have no right to farm it.”
“You know that’s a lie, Roderick. The planning and land registration has been over this a dozen times the past ten years. From the roadside to the quarry belongs to me. Everything from the quarry and beyond is your grandfather’s.”
“My grandfather’s?” Roderick spits out, his tone as pompous as his shiny shirt. “My grandfather is dead… becauseyoukilled him.”
My eyes shoot to Cecil as fast as spit lodges in his throat. “No,” he gabbers out through the chunk of saliva breaking up his short reply. “Memphis’s death was an accident. No one is responsible for it.”
“He wouldn’t have been driving without chains if it hadn’t been for you and that whore.”
Cecil is up in his face in an instant. “Talk about your grandmother like that one more time, and I’ll smack the arrogance off your face with my fists. She was a good woman who didn’t deserve to be lumped with a prick of a family like yours.”
Roderick acts like he isn’t scared by the threat in Cecil’s tone, but even someone who only met him two seconds ago couldn’t deny that fret is the main part of his expression when he replies, “Save that for the next time you visit the graveyouput her in.”
“Hey,” I shout when the clicking of Roderick’s fingers see one of the men lighting a rag similar to the one my father’s goon used to torch Ophelia’s car. “There’s n-no need for t-that.” When he acts as if he can’t understand my stuttered words, I try another tactic. “Unless you h-have a fucking death w-wish.” That stops him in his tracks as well as my anger ends my stuttering. “This land is riddled with chemicals needed to combat the loss of nutrients from the quarry draining the land of all its goodness.” He flicks his eyes to Roderick when I lie, “The natural gas seeping through the b-broken land is a ticking timebomb. One flame could cause a catastrophic blast.”
I soundlessly thank a goon’s disdain of all things logical when Roderick signals for him to distinguish the flame. “In a fuckin’ water bucket,” he shouts when the man’s wild flaps almost see his silky shirt go up in flames.
After watching the blond-haired man plunge the lit rag in and out of a water bucket more times than needed to extinguish the tiny flame, Roderick shifts his focus back to Cecil. “I’ll give you until the end of the month. If you’re not out by then, I’ll come remove you myself.”
He gives Cecil time to see the wish for anarchy brewing in his eyes before he gestures for his goons to enter the SUV with the same dismissive gesture he did earlier.
Once goon one has slid into the driver’s seat, he locks his eyes with mine. “Make sure you move on with him too. There’s nothing out here for you but trouble, and most of it will come from him.” He points at Cecil’s chest before he flips him the bird, spins on his heels, then stalks away.
I wait for his all-terrain vehicle to be lost in the rugged landscape before shifting on my feet to face Cecil. Before I can fire off one of the thousands of words swarming my head, he nudges his head to the tomato plants in desperate need of staking. “Better get a wiggle on. We only have an hour before the sun sets.” When I try to once again ask him what the fuck is going on, he cuts me off for the second time. “Then I need you to move on to chopping the firewood. You’ve let it get away on you the past couple of weeks—”
“Like the stale air between you and Roderick?”
The glare of a man nearing his eighties shouldn’t be able to pin a man in place, but Cecil pulls it off. He’s a hard-ass in all meanings of the word, but since that is part of his teachings to live a humble existence instead of a wish to rule the world, I don’t give it much attention.
“You don’t need to worry about Roderick. That boy has too much hot air in his lungs and no one to take it out on since the man responsible for his anger is no longer breathing.” He squeezes my shoulder, silently announcing the similarities between Roderick and me before he slowly shuffles toward the cabin, where he grumbles about how he doesn’t need to answer to a punk-ass weasel who thinks they know what’s best for him.
Since I’m unsure if his grumbles are about Roderick or me, I return to staking the tomato plants, conscious Cecil’s age has nothing on his ability to put me on my ass.
ChapterTwenty-Six
JR
“How are you even here? This is a secured area, Cedric.”
One name, and I’m onto my feet like I wasn’t taken down with a horse tranquilizer. My stumble to the glass window separating Jae and me is so perverse, even with Cedric’s lips fattened by my fists, I have a hard time reading his reply. “It’s amazing what you have access to when you’re seen as a valuable asset.”
Jae gags at his reply before knocking him down a peg or two. “Give them time. I’m sure it won’t take them long to realize howuselessyou are.”
She hits a nerve, and it has Cedric’s attitude backpedaling quick smart. He steps away from her with his hands held in the air like they will be when he’s arrested. “I just want to make sure you know what you’re getting yourself into. He isn’t who he says he is.”
“And neither are you,” Jae fires back, her voice surprisingly strong considering her gall has Cedric puffing out his chest to remind her about their contrasting sizes. “But that isn’t what this is about, is it? You lost, and everyone knows the Lancasters never lose.”
“Hey!”I try to shout when he grabs Jae’s arm, but no sounds come out of my mouth. I haven’t used my voice in years, and up until I had to use every muscle in my body to free Jae from the mangled remains of her car, I didn’t know I still had it in me.
