Page 1 of Caught in the Axe
Chapter 1
Owen
“What do you meanthe police are there?” I clenched my steering wheel so tightly my knuckles turned white.
“Break-ins, thefts, suspicious activities in the woods. And four ATVs were stolen from the equipment shed up at North Camp last week,” Gus grumbled. “We’re so behind. March was a wash, and now that things are thawing, everything takes twice as long. Don’t even get me started on the truck that almost rolled on Monday or the creditors breathing down our necks.”
“And now the fucking police.”
Gus grunted. “The chief has it out for us now. After decades of friendship, he didn’t take too kindly to the international drug trafficking operation Dad ran right under his nose. Plus all the assault, kidnapping, and murder that went on in the quiet little town of Lovewell made Chief Souza look bad.”
My stomach sank like it had been at leastonce a day for months. Gus had a point. As the sons of criminal mastermind Mitch Hebert, we should get used to the fuzz crawling all over our business.
Not that any of us deserved it. We hadn’t been involved in Dad’s nefarious activities. And the next few weeks would be hard enough without the authorities interrupting and causing problems. We had enough of those on our own, hence the reason I was headed home, despite how badly I didn’t want to be.
For months, I’d been helping behind the scenes, but I’d adamantly remained in Boston, preferring the comfortable quiet of my condo. I looked over financials and advised Gus and hired lawyers when necessary. But the writing was on the wall. I couldn’t do everything that needed to be done from there. We still had too many open questions, and we still had too many disasters to clean up.
So I was Lovewell-bound against my better judgment.
“Just get here,” he said. “I can’t keep things running on my own. We need investors.”
“We needto sell,” I corrected. For six months, we’d been hemorrhaging money trying to attract investors to our family timber business. At this point, our only hope of getting out of this without losing our shirts was to sell.
Gus didn’t respond. He’d been vocal in his opposition to selling, and we’d come to figurative blows over it several times. If I’d been in Lovewell, I had no doubt they would have escalated to the physical kind.
I understood his desire to keep the company our great-grandfather had built. But we were sitting on thousands of acres of timber rights, one-quarter ownership of the Golden Road—the largest logging road on the Eastern Seaboard,connecting Maine to Canada—and various pieces of real estate, trucks, and machinery. It was all worth a lot of money if we found the right buyer. And by ourselves, there was no way we could keep it from sinking.
Even before I’d become an accountant, numbers had always made sense to me. I saw things in dollars and cents. When it came to Hebert Timber, I saw debts and the federal forfeiture of most of my father’s assets. I saw an opportunity to make sure my mother and brothers were taken care of after the family business fell apart.
But Gus was the lumberjack. He was emotionally connected to the trees and the land and my great-grandfather’s legacy.
A legacy my own father shat all over when he used it as a front to traffic drugs, and even more so when he started murdering people to protect his opioid shipments.
“Two weeks,” I warned as I exited the highway and headed toward the mountains. “That’s all I’ve got.”
The heavy sigh Gus let out crackled down the line, making my gut twist. It ate at me that so much of our troubles had fallen on his shoulders for so long. But Hebert Timber was his life, his passion. He knew the ins and outs of the industry and how to keep the doors open in the short term. I was the one who had run away and never come back.
He was the oldest brother, the protector, and the problem solver. The solid, strong, dependable Hebert. He’d grown up in the woods, and he’d always wanted nothing more than to run the company with Dad someday. Instead, Dad had blocked him. He’d held him back rather than letting him into his inner circle. With his qualificationsand experience, he’d be a valuable asset to any timber company in the United States, but he’d remained loyal.
When Dad went to jail and the entire operation blew up, Gus stepped in and tried to right the ship. He’d been working seven days a week for over a year and was running on fumes. Not that he’d admit that. Nope, he was way too stoic and proud. He’d work himself into an early grave before he asked for help.
And that was why I was finally coming home. To do my part. Even though crossing the border into Maine had me reaching for the Tums I kept in my glove compartment.
I tightened my grip on the wheel and focused on the road as he ran through the outstanding, constantly growing list of crises we were dealing with. Unfulfilled orders, angry customers, employees who were overworked after more than half the team quit, mysterious criminal shit, and the ongoing federal investigation into my father.
I took a deep breath.
Two weeks.
That’s all I was giving this shit show.
Two weeks in hell. Two weeks to close things out.
Two weeks until I could make a clean break from my father and all the shit he’d put us through over the years.
I repeated it like a silent mantra.Two weeks. Two weeks.
The four-hour drive had felt endless. The straight shot up I-95 should have been easy. One where I could field work calls, talk to my staff at DiLuca Construction, and listen to a few podcasts.
