Page 37 of Legacy of Smoke
“I need you out there.Weneed you out there. No funny shit. And have an alibi at Christmas.” His chair squeaked as he left.
Poppy sent me a worried glance, but kept quiet until we were on the road. “He’s going to kill your brother, isn’t he?”
“Sounded like it, didn’t it? But that’s not our problem, right?”
She sighed. “It is if they find out he hired someone. I’ll never see him again. Worse they could tie it to you, and maybe think you arranged it.”
I reached across the console dividing us. I was going to tell her not to worry, that Pinner wasn’t going to be able to go through with it. Or, that her fears weren’t valid. But those would be lies. Instead, I said one word in a way she’d understand why it needed to be done. “Lily.”
Her face clamped down. About four miles passed like that, me driving, her quiet. Finally, she pulled out the tube of papers I’d brought with and examined the blueprints.
“This room will be hers. When shevisits. And I want French doors to the back porch, not sliding doors in the bedroom.” She tapped the deck I’d sketched that ran the width of the house. “I like this. We need a little wall here, though. That way no one over at Sprout’s can see us.”
“Privacy?”
She nodded. “It’s our bedroom, not theirs.”
Ours. I liked that word.
Two months later, we celebrated Christmas by breaking ground on the lot. Then we walked over to Sprout’s and ate dinner. Our family. Lily, Sprout, Danielle, Ma, Wolf, Tits, just enough to keep the party down to a reasonable roar.
My mom called at about midnight.
Andrew’s car broke down somewhere near Albany. He tried to walk to the station to get help. But his calls didn’t go through because of the remote area. A logging truck didn’t see him in the dark. There would be a closed casket because of that. It was the first I’d talked to her in years. And she was more worried about a damn closed casket than me.
I sat in the living room, processing. Lily sat down next to me. “That call, bad news?”
“Andrew got hit by a truck.”
“Did they back up?”
Her question caught me off guard. “What?”
“You know, run him over, back up, finish the job?” She grinned and made the hand gesture and sounds of a big truck stopping, then backing over the body.
Poppy stood in the framed arch between the rooms. Her eyebrows lifted as if to say, “what did you expect?”
I shrugged. “At least this one wasn’t chopped into pieces.”
Lily made a thoughtful sound. “I wish he hadn’t done that. He’d be out now if he’d’ve just shot the bastard.”
I draped my arm over the couch, protecting her even if I wasn’t touching her. “That bastard is dead. He might have survived a gunshot wound. I’d have done the same thing if it were my child.”
She looked at me with old eyes. “I know.”
There’d been some fights since she was released from the hospital, but she stuck to the program and was getting her shit together. Jewel had moved out of town, somewhere west, last I heard. And the old trailer they’d lived in hauled to the junkyard and crushed. Lily really didn’t have a place to go if she wanted to leave us, but I don’t think that’s what kept her here. “When are you going to move on? Leave this town?” Leave the past behind. I left unspoken.
She snuggled against me, motioning to Poppy to take the other side. “Never.”
“Never?” I glanced at Poppy, letting her see a little of the terror on my face.
Poppy grinned. She high-fived her sister. “She’s yanking your chain, Smoke. That college in Philadelphia accepted her application. She’s going to start in August.”
Thank goodness. Fall couldn’t come soon enough. But before that, there was a Spring wedding to plan with two of the most ruthless Alberts I’d ever met on this side of prison bars. Both demanding a lot of girlie shit. How that would square with bikers and construction workers? I had no clue how the fiasco wouldn’t be a major embarrassment. But if that’s what they wanted, I wasn’t an idiot. They’d get it.
“Too bad I can’t go to Hawaii with you.”
I swallowed. No way was Lily hijacking our honeymoon. “Poppy?”
