Page 94 of The Kings of Kearny

I stopped again and leaned against the side of a chocolate shop. Just like that, he gave in, admitting he was wrong. It was hard to stay mad at him when he was this self-aware, when he apologized so readily and seemed to really want to make things better.

“I’m pulling over now,” he added.

“You don’t need to pull over. You need to turn around.”

“No.”

I opened my mouth to argue with him, but now it was his turn to cut me off.

“I’m not close enough to downtown Hermannsburg for the feds to see me. No one will know I’m here. I might be pissed at you for doing this, but I’m trusting you to get it done. I’ll never trust the feds though, and I sure as shit don’t trust Redding. If he steps out of line, I want to be close enough to at least get a hit in before you kill him.”

I almost laughed. Jesus, I must be close to snapping.

“Call me when you’re done,” he said. “I’ll follow you back to the ranch, and we can figure everything else out there.”

Holy shit, it sounded like he might be willing to give me a chance.

“What else is there to figure out?” I asked.

“For starters, we need to come up with a plan for what to do if the Jokers talk to Redding before killing him and find out that my girlfriend was the one to lure him into meeting with the FBI.”

I skipped right over the fact that he’d called me his girlfriend and went straight to,Oh fuck.In all our planning, I’d somehow overlooked that possibility. I’d been betting on the Jokers having a knee-jerk response to the pictures. That they would act out of emotion and with extreme violence because that’s what I’d come to expect from the clubs. I was treating them like they were nothing but a group of dumb criminals, just because I didn’t like them. Hadn’t Daniel taught me not to underestimate people? And yet I’d nearly made another fatal error. What the hell was I going to do if they sat down and talked to Redding instead? And actually believed him over the pictures?

“I didn’t think of that,” I said in a small voice. I prided myself on being logical, on thinking things through and looking at plans from multiple angles. This was a monumental oversight that could have gotten me killed and made things worse for the very people I was trying to protect.

“You didn’t think of it because you rushed into this and aren’t used to our world,” Jakob said. “But Krista?”

“Yeah?” I asked, his tone making me nervous.

“Nickistrained to think of shit like that. I highly doubt he overlooked the possibility. Maybe you should ask yourself why he didn’t bring it up to you before you continue to blindly trust your old fuck buddy.”

“How”—shit, shit, SHIT!—“do you know he’s an old fuck buddy?”

“I told you I looked into you when you got to town.”

With that parting shot, he hung up on me.

I pulled the phone from my ear, pulse pounding. Mother of God, Jakob had known about Nick all along.

Apparently I still wasn’t done underestimating people.

---