Page 52 of Gonzo's Grudge
“What then?” Loco asked, eyes flat as a lake.
“We tighten the noose,” I explained. “Waverly pushes the requests in the legal ways. Burn keeps the pipeline hot. Dippy sits on the bank VP’s wife. Shanks—remains soft eye on IvaLeigh’s parents’ place. Anyone other than family approaches, I want to know. No contact. Nobody breathes on her unless I say so.”
Nods around the table. Purpose is a meal; you can feel a room eat when you serve it.
“GJ?” Disciple asked. “You want me to get word in, or is that a you thing?”
“Peanut keeps him looped in and breathing because we got Grip on the inside now as his cellmate,” I stated. “I’ll talk to him tonight.”
Burn closed the laptop and leaned in. “You goin’ to her?”
“She told me she won’t be a pawn,” I muttered the words like gravel in my mouth. “If I show up on her porch after that, I prove the wrong man right.”
“You gonna let a mayor run you off a girl?” Loco asked, not mocking—astonished.
“I’m going to let the girl choose,” I shared, “And I’m going to take the mayor apart brick by stolen brick until she can see me without his smoke. Didn’t mean for feelings to get tangled in this shit, but I’m not gonna let her burn with the rest of them. She deserves better from me.”
Tower sat back, eyes narrowing like he was seeing if the plan fit. “That was the right sentence,” he stated finally. “I hate that it is, but it is.”
“Church adjourned,” I said, not commenting back to my VP who knew what a damaged man I truly was.
The gavel didn’t sound like Pop’s because my hand wasn’t his. It sounded like mine—heavier than I liked.
Avery Mitchell Corrections sits on the end of a road like a dare. Razor wire sketched against a big sky. I hate it. I went anyway.
In county, I could put cash in the right hands and get a minute in a back room if I needed to. In prison you get phones that smell like bleach and a clock counting out your heartbeats. I took a seat in a booth that has seen too many broken men and picked up a handset scratched to hell. The line clicked and went alive.
They brought my boy on the other side of glass with a guard who could have been nineteen if you scrubbed the mustache off him. GJ sat down. He looked older than the last time I saw him, which is a sentence I’m getting tired of telling myself.
“Dad,” he said, defeated more than before.
“Boy.” The word always came out rough. Not because it hurt. Because it meant too much.
“They moving me tomorrow,” he said, like he was telling me he’d switched classes. “Grip’s guys say it’s better. Less heat in the showers.”
“Good.” It wasn’t good. It was less bad. “You eating?”
“Yeah.” His eyes flicked to the corner of the room like he could feel something crawling there. “You hear from her?”
I had made sure my son was looped in before anyone else, like his mother, told him some half-cocked story about what I was doing. So he knew I had an entanglement with IvaLeigh Walsh. I swallowed. “She sent me a message.”
He watched my face the way men in cages learn to—like they’re picking locks with your eyebrows. “You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
I huffed a sound that wanted to be a laugh. “You get mouthier every year.”
“Comes with getting older,” he said. He leaned in, the handset cord stretching between his knuckles. “If she runs, let her. Don’t burn your hands yanking on a rope you can’t hold onto.”
“Who taught you that?” I asked.
“You did,” he shared, and smiled the wrong kind of proud. “You said never chase someone out of a building that’s already on fire unless they’re ready to come out. Don’t ever push a woman because when they push back the burn will always leave a scar.”
“I was talkin’ about sex and not forcing shit on a chick.”
“Same geometry,” he stated casually. “You do the math. I’ll do my time.”
