“Sammy,” I said and then turned from Knuckles to Baffle, and then across the room to seek out Glitch. “Sammy what? Do we know?”
“Samantha Morton,” Knuckles informed me, but the fucker laughed when he said it.
“What’s so fuckin’ funny?”
“She’s been right under our noses for a long time,” he answered cryptically. I turned to Baffle for an explanation, but he shrugged.
It was Glitch who finally filled me in. “You know Brady Morton?”
“Went to school with him. He owns the garage we use for the bikes,” I stated.
Glitch nodded and waited for me to catch up. Obviously, I was supposed to put something together there. Brady was too young to be Sammy’s dad. “She’s not married to him,” I growled as if saying it would make it not true. My brain felt like mush as I tried to piece everything together. She had been on a date. She wasn’t married.
“She’s Brady’s niece. Lives on the family land and handles their campground and store, plus she works on the RVs when they have issues,” Glitch informed me.
“No shit?” I asked as another round of pain meds was dispersed through my I.V. I grinned as the warmth hit my veins and a plan formed in my muddled mind.
“Why is my dad so happy?” My little man asked from the doorway where he stood with Dime.
“Your dad is going to get himself a girlfriend,” Knuckles answered with a little chuckle tacked on the end.
“Ew! Girls are gross!”
“You won’t think that in a few years, kid,” Grease informed my boy, and then my eyes drooped closed.
8.LIGHTS OUT
SAMMY
I drovepast the RV and trailer park near the hospital as I headed back to Main Street, and it reminded me of all the duties I’d neglected while I sat in the hospital waiting for a complete stranger to wake up. My family owned a huge chunk of property in Violence, New Mexico. It was not too far across the state line from Arizona, but it felt like a million miles away from where I’d been for the past three days.
Despite knowing that I needed to get back to work, exhaustion beat down on me and I didn’t think it was in me to go deal with the campground mess, the camp store, or any repairs that needed to be done to any RVs that were waiting to be serviced. I wasn’t sure who my Uncle Brady got to run things in my place. If he was smart, he made my dad and stepmom do something to contribute to the family businesses. My stepmom thought she was above having to work, especially since she had given birth to my baby brother four years ago. My dad had his own business setting up state-of-the-art security for some of the richer landowners and businesses in the state. He often traveled to do so. My stepmother had been a souvenir he brought back from one of those trips.
Since he made really good money with his own business, Dad didn’t think he owed any time to what he called the family’s “white trash” ventures. He never spoke about us, our family businesses, or land like that before he met Colleen. In fact, if my grandfather was still alive to hear it, he would have made damn sure my dad never saw a penny from the businesses and wouldn’t have been allowed to live on the land, either.
My biggest problem with my stepmother was that she kept insisting that she should be the one to move into my grandparent’s old house. I’ve avoided my dad for months because he kept pushing for it to make her happy. They had a perfectly good, three bedroom house for them. It had been just fine for Dad, me, and my mom when she was still alive. It was where I grew up, so I knew it wasn’t a hardship for Colleen and her son to live there, especially since she had insisted on completely remodeling it when she moved in with my father. When I first came back from the Army, I no longer recognized it as the house I grew up in.
Then, my grandfather died, and Colleen started her shit about moving into his house because it was bigger. The only problem was that he had left it to me, so that I would have a home to come back to that I could be comfortable with, since Colleen had changed everything about my family’s house. The woman had even gone so far as to burn all the pictures left there with my mother in them. I hated her. I tried for my dad’s sake when I first came back, but I hated his wife. The only reason I still bothered to force a relationship with any of them was because of my little brother.
It pissed them off that I hadn’t moved into the house my grandfather left me and refused to allow them to do so. I wasn’t ready to take over my grandparents’ house just yet, but that didn’t mean I didn’t want it. While I worked out what I wanted to do with the house, because it needed some updates, I lived in a cottage near the campground. It made the commute to work a two-minute walk. It also meant that I could take my time, save some money, and really upgrade the house that was meant to be mine without having to live in a perpetual construction zone.
It was almost as though I knew what would be waiting for me when I got home. The way my thoughts drifted to my dad and his new family when I had so many other things to worry about, should have been a sign. When I pulled my car around the dirt road that led up to the campground, I could see Colleen’s black Lexus in my driveway. I wanted to laugh because it was coated in a layer of dust again, and I knew that pissed her off. My uncles would not allow for the road into the property or the ones on the property to be paved, as my father’s wife continually demanded. They all agreed the upkeep would be too costly and that it wasn’t worth it, since the paved portion of the road would be full of dust and dirt after the next windstorm anyway.
I groaned when I realized that the bitch had been lying in wait for me, but I was also in no mood to put up with her shit. I dialed my uncle’s phone.
“Brady Morton,” he answered. I rolled my eyes, because he was probably too caught up in whatever he was working on to look at his phone before he answered.
“Hey, I need someone at my cabin ASAP.”
“Why?”
“The step monster is there waiting for me, and I’m too damn tired to deal with her on my own. Either come be my witness or bring a shovel and be prepared to dig a deep hole.”
“Shit. Be right there, kiddo. Take your time. I’ll cut across on the side-by-side and meet you there.”
“Will do.” I hung up and slowed from the seven miles per hour I was doing down to a crawl that didn’t even register on my speedometer. I waited until I saw the dust trail Uncle Brady kicked up as he crossed the open expanse of land between the garage where he worked on motorcycles and older cars to the cabin I lived in. Once I knew he would arrive before I did, I picked up my speed.
When I managed to get my truck parked, I could already hear my uncle going off on my stepmother.
