Page 8 of If You Go
CHAPTER TWO
RING RING RING
The sound of my phone slices through the dark, loud enough to rattle my skull. I groan, roll over, and squint at the screen. Juniper.
Shit.
She doesn’t call me before nine. Ever. Says I’m “as foul as a three-legged donkey” in the mornings. If she’s calling now, it’s bad.
I swipe and put it to my ear. “Hello?”
Her voice comes fast, panicked. “BRENDEN. The shop. It’s wrecked.” Then a sob cracks her words apart.
Juniper doesn’t cry. Not anymore. Not since Mikey.
Mikey was all bluster and cheap leather jackets, thought he was the king of his little street gang. Not to mention, the fucker thought women were punching bags. By the time she raninto me—literally—she was half-blind from the last beating. She tried to lie, her story changing several times–it was an accident, I’m clumsy, he didn’t mean to–but one look at her busted face and I knew. An accident with fists doesn’t leave someone’s face looking like that. I dragged her to Corver and Josh, sat her down, and didn’t let her leave until she talked. Names, drugs, weapons. Everything. Needless to say, Mikey never saw another sunrise.
She used the money that came out of that mess to open her dream—Tattoos On The Bay. She lived for that place. If someone’s gone after it, I’ll burn them to the ground.
“What happened? You okay? What about the girls?” I’m already hauling jeans up, grabbing a white t-shirt, and my jacket.
“I think it happened after Hazel left. Around two this morning. I just got here. Brenden, everything’s splintered and charred—windows, furniture, and there is a large spray paint something on the wall. It’s ruined. It literally looks like a bomb went off, but I mean that for real.”
My stomach knots. Not Mikey’s crew. Too much time’s passed, and they don’t have the means to get anything big enough to do something like this. No reason for them to circle back. This smells new. Bigger.
“Go to your car. Park a few blocks away. Don’t go back in. I’ll be there in ten.”
I hang up, grab my Glock, and pull my leather jacket over it so that it is covered. Not fashion—utility. Steel blades and weapons are neatly hidden in every pocket. I brush my teeth fast, tie my hair back low. It’s grown darker this winter, heavy brown instead of sun-lightened. Doesn’t matter. I’m moving.
I pound on Joshua’s room, but it’s empty as I open to check when he doesn’t answer. Figures. Corver’s already entering the hall when I go to bang on his door, black jeans and jacket matching mine.
“Josh woke me. Said something about June. Didn’t explain.”
I grunt. That’s Josh. Always halfway gone before you get the story. I think he takes shoot first, ask questions later a little too seriously.
He’s in the kitchen, lacing his combat boots with sharp, practiced pulls, before grabbing his helmet and tucking it under his arm. “Did you hear from June?” He asks as he heads toward the door, ready to go. “I’m heading out.”
“Take a car,” I cut him off. “Not the bike. We might need to move her. A bike is too dangerous if we have people on our backs.”
He doesn’t argue—just slams the helmet down, grabs the Lotus keys, and storms out. My teeth grind. The Lotus Evora is fast, sure. But if he dings it, I’ll kill him myself.
Corver and I pull on our boots, the floorboards thudding beneath us, and snatch the keys to the 5500 utility truck. Time to move.
We make it downstairs, and we watch Josh roar off and damn near laugh at the sight. The kid’s got fire—always has—but he’s reckless the way a man is reckless when he thinks nothing’s fragile enough to break him. Corver slaps the truck’s side with an easy hand like it’s an old friend.
“This thing’ll take lumber or bodies,” I say, because we always say that when we grab the 5500. It’s a joke. Mostly. “We’d know what fits and what doesn’t.”
Corver snorts and pops the back open, the canopy lifting with a practiced push. “Depends on the size of the body and the shape of the paperwork.”
We both grin, but the grin’s flat. There’s a long history under that kind of joke—years of hauling timber and trouble. Anytime anyone asks, we always tell them Slater Construction started dumb and honest enough: three kids with calluses and a van, flipping houses, changing kitchens, making a name in the one neighborhood that didn’t mind our brand of hard work.
Corver was the kid who could bend a circuit board and teach it to sing. At eighteen, he was already stringing networks and sewing cameras into jobs so tidy you couldn’t tell they were there. Josh and I did the heavy lifting. Josh was twenty when we kicked Slater off for real; I was twenty-three and stubborn enough to keep swinging a hammer until the sun set and the last nail held. We did kitchens, we did basements, we did the floor-to-ceiling remodels nobody else wanted. Word spread. People with money liked the way we showed up quietly, did a job, and left their house cleaner than we found it.
Money brings opportunities no one asks for. We were young and hungry, and the doors opened—little ones at first: a back room here, a basement safe there. Then a job on a high-rise and another connected job beside it. The business grew up with us, slow and mean and legal on the books. Slater Construction had invoices and permits, and an office with a nice receptionist. But it had other ledgers too. Corver kept those records smart: contracts that explained nothing to anyone who didn’t need to know, shell companies with names that sounded boring on paper and dangerous in practice, that sort of thing.
When I was twenty-five my ma started seeing a new man. She’d always been soft for the wrong ones—no father around, no lessons on how to spot the rot. This one was worse. He hit her, once, then twice, then to the point that her voice stopped sounding like the safe place it used to be. One night the beating didn’t stop. She died on the kitchen floor with his hand around her throat. There was no talking, no police that would help. So we did what we had to.
We found him and we ended it. Quick. Clean. No trial. No headlines for our house. After that the lines changed. We got more careful. We got smarter. We watched girls walk into bad situations—June was one—and we broke the men who thought they could do that kind of damage. Word got around. Peoplewith the kind of problems that couldn’t be solved by lawyers started finding our number. They came with cash and names; they left with nothing but a receipt that said Slater Construction did a remodel.
