Page 11 of Quentin
“What the fuck do you want with my brother?” he demanded.
“I want to ask him why he shot up Harlow Tate’s bar,” Ciaran said. “And then I want to ask him, politely, to not do it again.”
The little punk laughed. “That’s between him and his old lady…ain’t nothing to you.”
Ciaran smiled. “Since they are divorced, you can’t really call her his old lady. And it’s very much something to me as she’s now dating my brother.”
“I don’t give two shits who she’s dating…she belongs to Joey.”
“Kyle, don’t cause trouble!” the mother warned.
“He’s the one causin’ trouble,” Kyle replied. “Walking up to my door and telling me what me and mine can and can’t do. That shit don’t play.”
Ciaran, already disgusted by the way the little shit had talked to his mother, reached out and grabbed him by the throat. His fingers pressed the carotid artery on one side and his thumb on the other, with just enough force to leave him weak and disoriented. If he pressed harder, he could knock him out cold in under ten seconds, or he could kill him. “I asked you avery polite question. You can give me a very polite answer, or I can snap your neck like a goddamn twig.”
Ciaran kept his eyes on the mother. It didn’t matter that her son was an asshole, he was still her son. Beaten down, abused, she would still defend him with her dying breath.
“Now, Mrs. Barnes, tell me where to find Joey. I only want to talk to him.”
“Don’t hurt him,” she said. “They’re good boys! They just got their daddy’s temper is all!”
“I will do my best to avoid it,” he replied. They both knew that wouldn’t be possible, but he made the offer regardless.
“He’s in Lexington…staying with his cousin down off Fourth Street.”
“The cousin’s name?”
“Tommy. Tommy Barnes,” she replied.
Ciaran released Kyle who stumbled backward and sank to the ground looking dazed. “You should leave them. Every one of them. They don’t appreciate you, and they’re only going to treat you worse the longer you stay.”
She folded her arms over her chest. “They’re my kids. And they don’t hit me.”
“Just your husband, then?”
She didn’t say anything more. Ciaran shook his head as he walked away. You couldn’t save someone who didn’t want to be saved, he reminded himself. They had bigger problems to deal with at any rate. Tracking down Joey Barnes, finding out what information he had on the Russians, and making it perfectly clear that even if the law didn’t stop him from targeting Lowey Tate, someone would.
The drive back to Ash Grove Farm was quiet. Lowey wasn’t saying much, and Quentin felt like he’d talked more in the last two days than he had in his whole damn life. At the very least, he’d said more meaningful things than he had in his whole damn life. Evasion. Misdirection. Distraction. Those were the tactics he normally preferred. Laying it all out on the line was much more Clayton’s style than it was his. But the last year had changed things for them both. Clayton had decided to become more like Samuel in order to bring him down.
As for himself, he’d looked in the mirror one day and saw a hell of a lot more of Samuel Darcy staring back at him than he’d ever wanted to. He was using people, getting what he wanted from them and then walking away. And that wasn’t the kind of man he wanted to be. It sure as hell wasn’t the kind of man Patricia had been raising him to be.
One could argue that at twenty years old, he was already raised by the time she’d had her accident. But the truth was that no twenty-year-old had achieved actual manhood yet. He’d been a boy in a man’s body, and at thirty, he’d recognized that he wasn’t much better. Drinking too much, partying too much, and going through women like they were disposable. That included the one beside him, or at least he’d wanted it to.
There was something about Lowey, though, something that had just crawled inside him and wouldn’t let go. For the past two months, he’d driven by her bar at least daily. Every time he’d been tempted to stop, tempted to grovel, and pride wouldn’t let him. It had taken getting his shit handed to him by a brother he’d just met to humble him enough to go in there and face her, to face what he’d done.
The night that everything had gone south played over in his mind. It had started like any other. He’d worked late, and after finally leaving the office, he’d headed to The Kicking Mule for a drink. When the crowd had thinned out and Lowey could leave everything to the bartenders, she’d slipped away to her little apartment upstairs, and he’d followed.
It had hit him then, walking up those stairs behind her, that she’d become a habit. Coming to her house every night, sinking into the welcoming heat of her, it was more than justscratching an itch. Everything he did in the course of his day was just killing time until he could get back there and be with her again.
That’s when the panic had set in.
He’d done the only thing then that he could. He’d lashed out.
“This isn’t working for me anymore,” he’d said.
She’d stopped at the top of the stairs and looked back at him. “What the hell does that mean?”
“Look, Lowey, we both knew when this started this wasn’t a permanent thing for us. We’re just not long-term kind of people.” The doucheyness of his behavior was haunting him as he remembered the look in her eyes. All the life, all the fire, had just faded from them. And having her look at him with such cool loathing had made him want to squirm even then.
