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“I may be the youngest one here and more out of the loop than anyone else in terms of trying to guess our financial predicament but if we vote on this, my vote will be this—push back and make it count.” Mason left the table. “And while you’re at it, why don’t you ask him how he heard about Momma’s death all the way down there in Mexico when the formal obituary wasn’t even in the papers here until yesterday. It’s odd to me that he contacted you today. Don’t cha think?”
Yeah, Liam thought so, too. In fact, he’d do a little checking and find out when Mr. Juan Jahno had arrived in East Tennessee. Something told him Mr. Juan Jahno had been around for at least a month or longer.
* * * *
Zak, Brandon, and Kurt were in the barn when Liam found them an hour later. Since their mother and brothers had been killed, he’d been troubled by their business, too aware of the death surrounding them, the deaths he feared they’d soon face.
“We need to talk,” Liam said. “I’ve been thinking about business lately. It’s time we go legal.”
Zak jerked, left the ATV where he was seated and grabbed the rake. Propping his chin up on the wooden end, he asked, “How do you propose we pay our bills if we ‘go legal’ as you’re suggesting?”
“We may need to get real jobs for a while if we pay off Juan Jahno. If we can avoid him, we have plenty to live on but something tells me we won’t avoid paying him off. Still, consider our lives now and the dangers we face every single day. Would it be so bad to have a nine-to-fiver and work for a living?” Liam asked. “I don’t know about you but I’d like to live another day and tomorrow, I’d like to start that day without looking over my shoulder.”
Kurt threw a bale of hay out of the loft, climbed down the ladder and took a seat. Working his gloves away from his fingers, he said, “Liam’s right. If we don’t back away from this life, one of these days, we’ll meet the same or similar deaths Mom, Nate, and the twins met.”
“You think I want that for us?” Brandon asked, pacing back and forth in front of a few stalls. “No!” He walked another pace or two. “Like you, Liam, getting out of the business is all I’ve thought about since they died.”
“Then let’s make it happen,” Liam said. “All we have to do is walk away.”
“You really think it’s that simple?” Brandon balked at that. “If it were that simple, I would’ve left home right after college and never returned here.”
“Don’t lie, man,” Zak said. “You and I both know why we’ve always stayed in. The money is hard to refuse. We had an ‘in’ and connections.”
“The kind of connections that can get a man killed,” Kurt reminded them.
“Easy money was the alluring quality, dude.” Zak swung the rake like a baton.
“Wonder if Nate thought of easy money when an automatic rifle was shoved down his throat?” Kurt asked.
“If we stay here, we’ll be under a microscope anyway.” Liam just threw that out there. Maybe if he could make his brothers believe the authorities would soon close in on them, perhaps they would be more fearful of life behind bars than facing a life without hundred dollar bills stuffed in their bulging wallets.
“What do you mean if we stay here?” Zak snorted at that. “This is our home. I’m not going anywhere. This land is owned free and clear. We were raised here.”
Liam crossed his arms over his chest. “Yes, we were raised here. Yes, I agree this is our home, but the way I see things now, the only way to keep our home is to make a name for ourselves in the farming business. Go straight. Become men with clean hands rather than ones with filthy hands covered in gun powder residue.”
“Zak, the free and clear land we’re standing on can be yanked out from under us and sold at auction, too.”
Liam breathed a huge sigh of relief. Brandon was talking sense.
Kurt’s mouth twisted. He shot Brandon a sideways glance and said, “Brandon, I care about Coco. I’m not telling you anything you didn’t already know. I’m not staying in the business because I don’t want to die like our family members. It won’t be easy getting away from the business but I want to start a life and—”
“And does that new start include Coco?”
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Kurt’s brows furrowed. “I want a good life here with my family and yes, Coco is included in the family I’m referencing.”
“So you’re getting out because of Coco?” Brandon asked, his cheeks flushed.
Kurt took a deep breath. “I’m getting out because this wasn’t the life I chose. It was a life chosen for me, for you, for all of us and we accepted what was handed to us. We never questioned it. As kids we didn’t have the balls to stand up to the adults pushing it on us and now? What’s our excuse now? Dealing in guns isn’t a legacy I want to leave behind.”
Liam agreed there. Most children in those parts were born and raised on the farm. They were taught to work the land, the cattle and other livestock. Other farmers left their sons the family farms in hopes that somewhere down the road they would continue to make an honest living the way their fathers had.
He and his brothers had been one of the exceptions. They had learned how to harvest marijuana at a young age. Later, when their business had moved in another direction, they’d been taught survival skills and learned how to buy and sell guns and ammunition while dealing with the world’s most wanted criminals without being marked as one such criminal, too.
“Zak, what say you?” Liam asked, noticing how he loitered off to the side.
“After everything that has happened here, I had already assumed we’d start moving out of guns, but going legal, dude? Problem I see is getting out before we’re sucked in deeper.”
