Page 70 of The Kings of Kearny

Chapter Seventeen

The rest of the driveto Kearny passed in silence. Because what the hell was I going to say, knowing that Liam might overhear every word? On that note,whymight Liam overhear every word? Was he just paranoid by nature? Was that where Jakob got it from? Admittedly, I’d just met Liam. I knew nothing about him besides what Jakob told me and what I’d seen with my own eyes. Liam seemed stable enough, but for all I knew, he was secretly a control freak who bugged all his vehicles because he wanted to hear every word spoken outside his hearing.

Oh, sweet Christ on a couch.Jakob got me off in the Mustang yesterday.

I started to turn toward him in horror but stopped myself. The Mustang didn’t even have automatic windows, let alone enough circuitry to support a complex bugging system. I hoped. And would Jakob have fingered me, knowing that his father would overhear every sound we made? I didn’t think so. Sure, he hadn’t given a shit about being seen in the Kings’ driveway last night, but being briefly glimpsed through tinted windows and eavesdropped on for a prolonged period were two totally different things. Plus he’d been much more talkative in the car, much more open with me—I mean, at least for Jakob he was—whereas he’d barely said two words since we’d climbed into the van.

I let out a shaky breath and tried to calm down. Okay, so Liam probably hadn’t heard his son get me off. But he still sent us out today in a vehicle that might be bugged. After suggesting that Jakob take some Specters with him.

I thought back to the tension of our discussion on the patio, the open worry on Liam’s face, knowing that his son might be heading into danger. Was Liam just an anxious father? Jakob was their only kid; I could understand him being overprotective. Or was something else going on?

Back in the cornfield, Jakob hadn’t been acting like Jakob. I thought of the near desperation of his kiss, the way he’d hauled me so far away before answering my questions, his hurry to get back in the van after mentioning his father might be looking at the GPS tracker. It all made it seem like Jakob was almost... afraid of his father, or at the very least, wary of him. He sure as shit didn’t want him to know who we were about to go visit.

I started to look back over the past few days and question my perception of everything that happened. While I’d been so focused on Daniel King and his mysterious buddy, Redding, should I have instead been thinking about Liam Larson?

I tried to remove myself from the situation and look at it from the perspective of an outsider. My dislike of Daniel King made mewantto think that he was up to no good. That he was the kind of man who would endanger innocent people like my grandmother just to get ahead in the world. And really, who could blame me for that? He’d thrown Jakob and me under the bus the day after learning about our fake relationship. He’d broken into Jakob’s apartment and then treated him like dog shit.

But now that I was thinking about it,reallythinking about it, I realized how much my own bias might have skewed my view of recent events.

As much as I disliked him, as much as it rankled, I knew that Daniel King was good for this town. That he cared about this town. Was he highly problematic? Yes. Was he a volatile megalomaniac that I would never, ever let myself be alone with? Also, yes. But again, not everything was black and white. The characters of most people I’d met were shaded in hues of gray, and as much as it pained me to admit it, that included Daniel King.

Not a single function happened in Kearny without him being involved in some way, whether that be by donating his time or his money. He was a judge at the annual 4-H fair. The Kings sponsored three of the local youth sports teams. They’d even started a summer camp for underprivileged children so they had someplace to go during vacation and their parents could keep working without having to worry about paying for two months of childcare. Daniel’s wife, Eva, sat on half the town boards, and where most of the folks in Kearny had a healthy fear of Daniel, they viewed Eva as a legitimate community leader. They trusted her opinions. They looked to her for guidance.

It made no sense that the Kings would do so much to keep this town safe and thriving just for Daniel to turn around and bring drugs into it, and the more I reexamined my original theory, the more I saw the gaping holes in it.

Because, really, what did Daniel King have to gain by destabilizing Kearny? How would a border war with a subchapter of the Bandits help him throw off the oversight of Liam Larson and the Specters?

Maybe I wasn’t devious enough, maybe I wasn’t good at thinking outside the box, but any way I came at that question, I still ended up in the same place. Even if Daniel was angling to start a war just to make it look like the Specters couldn’t protect their own people, Kearny and Daniel King would still suffer because of it. And a big ugly fight like that would draw national attention, something the Kings, the Jokers, the Specters, and the Bandits would want to avoid at all cost, because with national attention came federal focus, and no one wanted to give the FBI a reason to invade.

After poking at this problem for a solid ten minutes, I didn’t see any way that kind of tactic would work for Daniel or even be beneficial to him. And I’d bet good money that Daniel King didn’t do anything unless it benefited Daniel King in some way.

So what the hell was really going on here? Who had the most to gain from weakening his hold on the town? The head of the Jokers was a prime candidate. With Daniel out of the way, it would create a power vacuum in Kearny that they could try to slip in and fill. But they would never pull that off without one hell of a fight from the rest of the Kings. The clubshatedeach other. Their rivalry went too far back for the Kings to accept the yolk of leadership from the Jokers, and Lord knew the Specters would never let it happen without one hell of a fight. Which brought me back to no one wanting to bring the attention of the feds down on their heads.

Maybe the point wasn’t to take over the Kings territory. Maybe the Jokers only wanted to destabilize the Kings so they wouldn’t be competition anymore.

Or maybe it was something else.

I turned in my seat, looking at Jakob but thinking about his father. Liam Larson. A man who, from all appearances, loved his son more than almost anything else in the world. Worried about him. Was proud of him. Probably wanted the best for him. To see him rise to the same kind of influence and power that Liam had.

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