“To save your life, brother.” Bax grabbed Russell’s shoulder. “You and me, Russell, we all each other got since Mom passed.”
“Since my dad got killed.”
Bax chewed his lower lip. “He weren’t no kind of man for you to follow.”
Russell threw off Bax’s hand and started building up to something furious.
“No.” Bax pointed at the couch. “I’m full up to here listening to your bullshit about how great your daddy was. I’m sorry you only had our granny to show you how to be a man, because she didn’t have it left in her to tan your hide the way she did mine.” Bax continued pointing until Russell finally sat. “Once was all it took.”
“And look where you ended up.”
Bax enclosed his fury in the safe he’d learned to build in prison, the lockbox that earned him a little grudging respect from the guards and privileges in the library, the commissary. He slowly, quietly closed his office door and turned on his brother. “I did your bit so you could stay in school. I ended up finishing my diploma in prison. You couldn’t even finish your diploma in my old school. And when you started running with Ducornet’s crew instead, you fucked that up so bad that I ended up in a whole ’nother prison when I got outta the first one I went to for you.”
“Hey, Bax, I—”
“You shut the fuck up, boy, and you listen to me. Where I ended up is putting my life on the line to make sure you ain’t skinned alive by the most bloodthirsty savages since you pissed yourself when we watched that chainsaw movie.”
Russell looked out the window.
“So if I tell you I got to go back out and you got to choose where Ima lock you up, the only thing you say to me is here, alone, or in your room, with a babysitter.”
Russell dug at the carpet with his toe. “I got Xbox in my room.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Kline.” Another burner. “Since Russell introduced competing interests, I think we should keep you as far away from this transaction as possible.” Another boss. “Russell handed his party off to me, and if you’ll hand your party off to me, I’ve got a solution that will satisfy both.” Another deal. “But I’m moving the product to a third-party location to limit your exposure.”
Bax’s crew was used to overnight hours, and the chop suey followed by Krispy Kremes had left them feeling like they’d finished a Thanksgiving meal, maybe Friday leftovers, so the grumbling about breaking the container into two truckloads for staging across town was good-natured, and no one asked him why they had to rustle up the lumber to build as many empty crates as they had crates full of guns and then pack them with recycling scrap picked from the yard to match weight.
The warehouse wasn’t exactly abandoned, but the ownership had transitioned into the nether regions of not quite Southland Beverage’s and not quite Bank of America’s. The liquor distributor had built its warehouse across the state line. A single building that could ship into either state and comply with each state’s different regulations and taxes and laws about selling on Sundays. A single building with a concrete wall that sat atop the legal and geographic boundary between the big, mirrored loading bays facing northeast and southwest and overseen by a dispatch room that could look at both sides simultaneously even though neither side could see the other.
And later, at the pizza joint where he bought pitcher after pitcher of Captain Jack to cloud his crew’s faculties and memories, when a thick-necked, tatted-up crewcut set a burner on the counter between the bathroom sinks in which they were washing and said, “Your code is Queens,” Bax said, “Tell Parker I owe this to my brother.”
Bax hadn’t known how Reamer Kline would keep his finger on the deal’s pulse.
He’d known Mr. Kline would take his advice to stay away from any potential dispute between the Bandidos and the Cossacks, because they were as likely to set one another on fire as they were to rape the other’s women or blow up their clubhouses. He’d also known that Mr. Kline’s distance came with conditions, with remote sensors, that could get complicated.
So it was a relief, and some luck, when Kline sent only Owsley. Owsley alone probably was the best he could’ve hoped for. Just one extra guy would make everything easier to manage, but Bax knew Owsley only as a type — powerful, mean, not too smart, but singularly focused and therefore clever about what he applied his singular focus to.
As he had when he put Russell out of commission for five weeks to persuade Bax to fix for Mr. Kline.
Since then, Bax made a point of having as little to do with Owsley as possible. Bax figured that probably ended up as a wash: as much as he didn’t know Owsley, Owsley didn’t know him.
“We gonna be up here,” Bax told Owsley, pointing at the dispatch room on the diagram he’d drawn. “The glass ain’t bulletproof, but we laid a bunch of sheet steel on the floor and against the walls, so if anyone starts shooting, just get down. There’s a door to the outside, down a flight of stairs, and we already hid a car there. There’ll be plenty of concrete between us and the warehouse, and I’ve got a couple of guys watching it tonight to make sure no one scouts us before the deal goes down.”
“Clean getaway.” Owsley nodded. “Your guys strapped?”
“My guys are labor, not muscle.” Bax rotated the diagram. “I’ll have one on each side to meet the buyers. The Bandidos come in from the northeast side, the Cossacks from the southwest. Once my guys get them in the warehouse, you and me, we’ll take over from the dispatch office and my guys take off.”
Owsley nodded. “You strapped?”
“I’ll have a nine on my hip and a thirty-eight on my ankle. You?”
Owsley opened his jacket to show twin shoulder holsters. “I carry forty-fives here and a thirty-two in my crotch.” He grunted. “They never frisk your package.”
“Smart.” Bax had learned there weren’t many things a dumb guy liked more than to have someone tell him how smart he was.
“What about your idiot brother?”
“I don’t let him carry.”
“He just hurt himself.”
Bax forced himself to laugh along with Owsley. “You have no idea.”
Bax had braced Russell twice — once before Russell went to sleep, once after he woke up — to make it sink in.
“You got one job,” Bax told him the night before. “You stand behind me and look mean. The less you talk, the meaner you look.”
In the morning, over coffee in the kitchen, missing his eggs with bacon and jelly with toast and Venetta with him, Bax said, “What’s your one job?”
“Stand behind you and look mean.”
“Good. And how you look mean?”
“By not saying nothin’.”
“Very good. Now Ima tell you your second job.”
“All right.” Russell beamed. “What you—”
“Shut up.” Bax opened the cabinet above the refrigerator and lifted out a big round tin of Danish cookies that had gone stale and hard years before. He wiggled the lid off, lifted out the first layer of cookies, and removed a .38 pistol. “This a Ruger LCP.” He pointed it at the wall, at a framed poster he’d bought at Big Lots, a black-and-white photo of a coastline he didn’t know where. “When you squeeze the grip” — a red dot appeared on the poster — “it’s got a laser pointer. Now you do it.” Bax handed the gun to Russell. “And don’t point it at me.”
Russell squeezed and released the laser pointer a few times. “This my second job?”
“If anything goes down, you point this at Owsley and pull the trigger before he starts doing the same to you.”
“Wait — Owsley?”
“You keep pulling the trigger till ain’t nothin’ coming out of that gun.”