“Do? I won’t have to do anything. They kicked
your ass out, didn’t they?” Mac said nothing, but he knew that Noreen was
pissed off. Byron moved back, heading to the building. “What are you going to
do, Mr. Harrison? I’m sure that this is a blow to your little company too,
isn’t it? Not being able to make this work for them. But I’m glad to see you
leaving with your tail between your legs. It does my heart good to see another
firm fail. It’s what I live for.”
“I think I did all right here, if you want to
know the truth, Elton. Just fine indeed.” His limo pulled up just as security
was coming out of the building. “You, however…I don’t think you’re going to be
cashing in on anything. You have a good day, Elton. I’m sure that things are
about to look…well, differently for you.”
Security was talking to Elton as his car
pulled away. Mac could have gone back in, he supposed, talked to the Stokes
about the rest of his findings, small things that he was sure that they would
find once Elton was gone. But he wanted to go home. Now. He had a new home he
was having fun in, a new sister in Riordan’s wife that was working with him,
and he wanted to go and see his mom and dad.
~~~
“You find her yet?” George Collins looked up
at his son, Jim, and felt a twist that touched his heart.
How a man could
have such an idiot for a kid
, he thought. A moron that didn’t know shit
from anything. He wished now after all these years that he’d taken his sister
Hester’s advice and just left him somewhere. Now he was too old for that shit
and he was stuck with him. “That bitch that called the law on me, thinking that
I had no rights to my own daughter, will be next. I don’t cotton to being
treated that way by nobody. You hear me?”
“Yes, sir, I’ve been looking. If they stowed
her away, they sure ain’t saying much. Aunt Hester, she’s about to have ten
kinds of fits over this. She said you should have taken better care not to get
caught.” George nodded. He sure should have. “When she comes down here, I’m
telling you right now heads are going to be split if she don’t get her way. She
said for you to get home.”
His sister, Hester Casey, was a force, she
was. He loved her to the end of time, but she was a mite on the scary side when
she was upset. Even when she was in a fairly good mood, he tried his best to
keep away from her. George was afraid of her, plain and simple. Not just a
little either; she’d beaten him so badly he almost couldn’t lift up his beer
when the mood struck her.
“You tell her that you got this. Tell her
that I’m okay and that once we get Andi back home, we’re gonna chain her to the
floor like she done told us we should have months ago. She might not have any
money coming in, but we’ll have food cooked for us.” Jim asked him how they was
gonna have food if Andi didn’t work. “You just let me worry on that, fool. I
don’t rightly know just yet, but I’ll get it figured out.”
Six months ago they’d had their welfare cut. Not
just him, but Hester and Jim too. The government got it in their head that they
had to work some for the money. Hell, if he wanted to work, he’d find him a
job. But so far as he was concerned, when you start paying somebody for not
working, you can’t just up and take that from them. It just wasn’t the way that
things were done in his family.
None of them had found gainful employment yet,
whatever the fuck that was, and he wasn’t about to go look for it either. Not
that Jim could. He was as stupid as they came. But George’s family was on a
protest. They weren’t gonna find them a job until the government got their shit
together and put things back the way they were.
George had been stuck in jail for three days
now. He was getting food regular like. Not nearly as much as he wanted, but he
was getting it. No beers either. They had some fool rule about that. Why a man
couldn’t be enjoying his leisure was beyond him. He looked up at his son and
wondered if it was too late to do something about getting rid of him. Probably.
“Dad, they said you might be going back to
jail, the one real far away. That having that gun was against the rules. I
thought you said to me that rules don’t work on us. That we was special or
something.” He told Jim he wasn’t gonna go nowheres so long as he was breathing.
“But if you do, what’s gonna happen to me? I can’t be living with Aunt Hester.
She don’t like me none. I was thinking when we find Andi I might go see if
she’ll let me stay with her. She’s gotta be nicer to me than Aunt Hester is,
don’t you think?”
“Nobody likes you, son. You’re stupid and you
ain’t worth the sex that we had to make your ass. Your momma, God rest her lazy-assed
soul, she done should have known better than to birth you and that ignorant
daughter. Now look at me, stuck here and nobody to help me out.” George stood
up and glared at his son, who backed away. “You find Andi, tell her to get her
ass down here and tell them folks that she fell again. And that the gun was
hers. I ain’t going back to jail. I ain’t, you hear me?”
After Jim left him to have another look for
his sister, George thought of his lot in life. He wasn’t stupid, but he was
lazy. He’d admit that to anyone who asked him. And he didn’t care much for his
daughter or his son, but he’d been given them and he had to suffer with having
them. His wife, he’d tolerated her some, but she’d given him Jim and then a
useless daughter, then up and left him with them like he wanted to be taking
care of them for the rest of his life. Hester…well, Hester was his big sister,
and he knew better than to mess with her.
“Mr. Collins?” He nearly missed hearing his
name and stood up in his cell to see who might be thinking he was a mister
anything. “Are you Mr. Collins? George Collins?”
“I am. What you want? In case you missed it,
if you’re selling something, I ain’t got me no money. If you’re lawyering up
for somebody, can’t help you there. I don’t rat out my buddies.” The man said
nothing. There was something about him that just told you that he was
untouchable, and that had George moving back when the man walked up to the
bars. “What is it you want of me?”
“I’m here to tell you that Andi Collins is
off-limits to you and your family. She’s in a good place, and you’re to stop
harassing her from now on.” George just stared at the man. “And if you’re caught
within one foot of her, I’m going to bring a hell down on you so hard you won’t
be able to lift a hand to bring whatever shit food you eat to your mouth.”
“You can’t tell me what to do with my own
kid. I know my rights. I brought her into this fucking world, and she’ll do as
she’s told.” The man said nothing. “Who the fuck do you think you are, anyways?
I know she ain’t bringing the law down on me. ‘Cause if she can afford you, in
your expensive suit, then she’d better be getting her ass down here and bailing
me out. I’m her daddy, damn it.”
The man only stared at him. George wanted to
flip him off, his favorite pastime when things didn’t go his way, but he had a
feeling that if he even lifted his hand to do so, then he’d be hurting bad.
Worster than he was right now.
“Stay away from her or pay the price.” As the
man walked away, George could feel his bravery coming back to him. But before
he could open his mouth to curse at the man, he was standing in front of George
with his hand around his throat, lifting him up off the floor.
The man changed. Not just his body but his
face, and even his fingernails at his throat seemed to bite deep into his neck.
George looked into his eyes then; they sort of captured him. The man’s eyes had
darkened to an almost black, and George felt his bladder just let go when he saw
the fangs there on his lip.
“Stormy said that if I wanted, I could play. I
might just yet anyway. Would you like that?” George shook his head. “Too bad. Go
near Andi again and I will kill you. Not a threat, you dumb fucking idiot, but
a promise. You know that I’m telling you the truth too, don’t you, moron?”
“Yes.” George wanted to cry. He knew
something, a feeling of fear like he’d never felt before. “I won’t bother her
no more.”
“Good. See that you don’t.” As he was dropped
to the floor, the man straightened his suit sleeves and then his tie. “You
might want to tell your son and that sister of yours to behave too. I’m not in
the mood to have to come back out in the sunlight to wipe this family out of their
miserable existence. And you’d do well to remember that if I have to come back,
you will be dead. Understand me?” George nodded.
Long after the man had left him, George
stayed on the floor. Lots of things were going through his mind as he lay there.
The man had had fangs. He wanted to think that was just a figment of his addled
head, but he had a feeling that they were as real as rain. And the man had
lifted him up like he was nothing more than a bothersome flea.
George knew that he was big. Not muscled—those
had never been a part of his body in any way—but just plain fat. When he was
younger, he’d been heavy. As he grew, so did not only his waistline but his
entire body. George figured he weighed a good four hundred pounds. And the man
had lifted him up with a single hand. But the longer he lay here, just thinking
and letting his mind wander, the less and less of the man he could remember.
“I gotta stay away from my daughter. I don’t
know why, but I gotta.” Nodding to himself, he stood up. He’d pissed himself…not
the first time. But this time he could almost smell the fear in his urine.
“Couldn’t get off the floor, that’s all. Happened before, when that chair of
mine wouldn’t lift me right. Can’t be nothing more than that.”
He knew that there was something there that
he had to remember besides not bothering Andi again. Fangs? Nobody had fangs
except them people faking it, like he’d seen on television. He also had a
feeling that he’d been flying too. But that wasn’t right either, was it? Sitting
on the bed, unmindful of his wet pants, he frowned. When he thought of Andi
again, he felt a little pain in his head when he thought of making her ass pay,
but it went away after a minute or two.
“She’s gonna pay. That she is.” Nodding, stretched
out on the bed, he felt sticky. And when he moved around, the bed groaned. It
was scary there for a minute. The bed he was using creaked a bit more than he
liked. Sitting on the side of the bed, he pulled off his pants and underwear
and took them to the sink. He’d get more later, but these were just stinky. Laying
them on the sink, he went back to his bed. He had some thinking to do.
Andi watched the woman—Martha Peterson, she’d
been told at the counter—pour pancake batter on the grill. There was nothing to
it really, but Martha was still messing it up. Keeping her hands behind her
back so she’d not reach for the pitcher and do it herself, Andi thought about
how grateful she was to Storm.
“You’ll work there and not leave until
someone comes to get you. We’ll drop you off, too, when we can, or one of the
staff will.”
Andi had been released from the hospital the
morning after her father had hurt her, and was brought to Storm’s house where
she got a wonderful meal and a lovely room to stay in for the night. Now she was
here with a job that paid very well. Andi was as happy as she’d ever been.
There was a bakery next door, but that place
gave her the willies with all the business and people coming and going. Andi
didn’t care that much for lots of people around. Storm had laid out what she
wanted from her, and since she’d been so wonderful in not making her go home
with her father, Andi would do just about anything for her. The smell of
burning batter brought her from her thoughts.
“Oh my, this isn’t good at all. I think this
old grill has about had it, don’t you? Just look at this mess. You’ll have your
work cut out for you if this is the way this thing is going to work for us.” Andi
said nothing to Martha when she asked, but decided if the orders were going to
get filled she was going to have to do something.
“I can do this if you want to have a seat. I
know you said your leg was hurting.” Martha looked longingly at the chair, then
back at the grill and told her, not for the first time, that she could not lose
her job. “I think I can make it work. But if I don’t, you can blame it on the
new girl. Just have a seat and we’ll be the only ones that know it.”
“My legs sure do hurt. Old age ain’t all it’s
cracked up to be.” Andi wanted to point out she was younger than the two women
in the bakery next door, and they were running around like they were half her
age. “I’ll just sit a spell and you see if you can make this old girl work for
you.”
As soon as she had all the burnt pancakes off
the grill, Andi did something that she’d never done before: she pretended to be
clumsy. And in doing so, spilled all the batter all over the empty sink. Her
timing was perfect, she thought.
“I’ll do it,” Andi told Martha when she
started to get up to remake the batter. “Won’t be a minute. I can’t believe
that I’ve tripped up on my own feet. No harm though…I can get it fixed as good
as new.”
Mixing up the batter she knew from heart,
Andi was pouring fresh batter on the grill in less than five minutes. Ham was
next, along with bacon and sausage. The orders were piling up and she had to
work fast to get them finished. As she pulled the first stack off and filled it
with the sides, the waiter—Billy, his name was—had just put up another order.
He looked at the platter she gave him and at Martha without a word. When he
walked away with the orders, she wondered for a second what that had been about,
but was too busy to worry too much.
An hour later, Martha was still sitting at
her table, but now she was barking orders at her—She was filling the plates too
full; Billy would spill them. The pancakes were too big; they’d expect that
every day—things like that until Andi had to tune her out or hit her. Billy
came back once and told Martha that she should be helping, but she told him to
fuck off. Andi was used to harsh words between people, so only worked on the
things in front of her. To be honest, she was having too much fun to care what
they were doing behind her.
When the breakfast rush was over, Martha
gathered up her things and said she was going home. That it seemed to her that
Andi had it under control until lunch. She told her to make the soup but not to
screw it up, and that she’d be back at noon. And not to tell anyone where she’d
gone. As she made her way to the door, she turned back to her, and Andi had a
moment of unease. It was there and gone, the look on Martha’s face that scared
her a little.
“I can’t lose my job, you know. My medicines
are expensive, and I don’t get much in the way of pension.” Martha looked
around the big kitchen and smiled. “I sure would hate to have Storm fire you
for messing up this new business of hers. So you take care to do the soup right,
and I won’t have to tell her that it was all your fault that breakfast was such
a disaster.”
She left, and Andi looked at Billy when he
came into the kitchen with her. He got them both a juice and told her to have a
quick seat before she began again. After she thanked him, he leaned back in his
seat and looked at her.
“She’s going to lose her job, you know. Not because
of you, but because of how she’s been acting of late. I had four people say
they were ready to not come by any more even if the meal is free to them if
they was served those things she called pancakes any more. You made some very
nice people happy today.” Andi didn’t know about all that, but got up and started
looking for vegetables for some soup. “What do you need for me to do to help
you?”
“She said I had to make some soup. But she didn’t
say what kind or how much.” Billy asked her if she had ever made soup before. “Yes.
I used to cook for my family. And for a while I was a short order cook for a
restaurant down town. It’s why Mrs. Harrison put me here.”
“Okay, how much…. We usually get in about
seventy-five for lunch on Thursday. Not all of them eat soup, but a lot of them
do. Does that help?” She said that it did, then asked him where the fresh
vegetables were. “If you’re gonna make it from scratch and not use that canned
shit, they might all eat soup today. But it’s over there, in the pantry-like
thing. And if you need something that’s not there, Danny and I can go and get
it for you. He does wash up for us and the bakery.”
By the time Martha returned at ten after
twelve, Andi was serving hot veggie soup with corn bread and sandwiches. Danny
came over to wash up at eleven-thirty and had told her that while the
restaurant was open to the public, most of their customers were vets down on
their luck. As were the few people that worked for the restaurants. Having a
place to have a hot meal and a place just to be social with others was about
the best thing that could happen to most of these people.
“Storm is a big time vet. Honored by the
president himself, I guess.” Andi handed Danny a bowl of soup and he got his
bread. Billy was taking the soup from the window, but she’d put the cornbread
out there for him to serve up. It was a system that worked for them both. “Boy oh
boy, I do like cornbread. If there be any left over, I’d sure be in a mind to
take it back home with me.”
Andi told him that it wasn’t up to her, but
she’d wrap him up a couple of pieces before she had to go for the day. He was
so happy that he began to whistle a tune that made her smile. She wondered if
he knew that the lyrics were dirty.
Probably
, she thought. He was a vet,
too, she’d found out from Billy.
Martha was not happy with any of them when
she came in. Her first order of business was to tell her that fresh vegetables
were not to be made into soup, and that the food was supposed to be on this
side of the kitchen, not out there with the others.
“This is a good idea, letting me get the
bread for my customers, don’t you think, Martha?” Billy had to have heard
Martha and winked at her when he spoke. “I think I could get—”
“You just don’t get used to it. I’m not going
to do it for you. I’m in charge of this kitchen, not her.” Martha looked over
at her with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “You don’t want me to lose my
job over something that won’t work out too good, would you? I mean, Storm, she
hired me to run this kitchen like I wanted. I thank you for giving me a break,
but I’m ready to take over now.”
Andi moved back from the grill. She wasn’t
sure what to do now, so she went to the front of the restaurant to see if she
could help out there. Billy put her right to work waiting on customers at the
bar. The first man she waited on looked like he was more afraid of her than she
was of her dad.
“What can I get for you?” He looked at her,
then dropped his eyes again. “We have veggie soup and cornbread. Can I get you
some of that?”
“Please. And some milk if you have it.” She
told him she did and ordered him the soup and bread. While she got the milk,
Billy moved by her and told her to be careful of Craig. He’d been hurt where
they couldn’t fix him. Taking him his bowl of soup, Andi handed him his
silverware and smiled at him again. “You new?”
“Yes. Today is my first day. I hope you like
the soup. I made it too.” She’d never bragged on herself before but was hoping
for a smile from the man. When he only bent his head over his bowl, Andi moved
to the next customer.
Several times she heard Martha yell for her,
and each time she’d been in the middle of helping a customer and just couldn’t
break away. Andi thought that if she wanted to push her out of her domain, then
she was welcome to it. Besides, Andi was having a blast talking to customers,
getting them what they wanted. So when everyone cleared out and Billy locked
the doors, she sat down in one of the booths with him rather than going back to
the kitchen. Martha came out huffing.
“You abandoned me when you’re supposed to be
working for me. See if I don’t tell Storm that. You might just lose your job,
and I don’t think I care very much.” Billy told her to fuck off, and Martha
turned her anger on him. “I had to serve up that slop in there, and you were
not helping me either pushing them orders on me when I was trying to fix that
stuff she left me. I told you to take the bread back out there, and you just
wouldn’t do it.”
“No, I didn’t, did I? When you explained to
me, in front of thirty people, that the kitchen and what came out of it was
yours to work with, and I decided to let you deal with it and gave you the
bread to deal with too. And from my understanding from Storm, Andi here is
supposed to help where she is needed. She made lunch while you were napping in
the car, made sure that the place was spit polished after the mess you made at
breakfast, and helped me serve her food to a lot of very happy customers.
Unlike the ones you normally serve with that slop—as you called it—you make
up.”
When she left them, telling them that she was
going to call Storm right now, Andi asked Billy if she was going to lose her
job. He smiled at her and told her that he doubted it very much. That when
Storm asked him, and she would, he’d tell her just what had happened and what
Martha had done.
“I can’t go back home. Storm said that I’d
not have to, but if she can’t have me working here, I don’t know what I’ll do.”
Billy put his hand over hers just as someone knocked at the front door of the
place.
The man standing there looked…scary was the
first thing that popped into her head, and then handsome. Like the kind of
handsome that made her think of sexy book covers and nights of sex and sweaty
sheets. Shaking her head a little, she stood up when Billy went to the door to
open it and two more men came in. Billy seemed to know them, so she went to the
kitchen to see what needed to be done in there and to see if she could talk to
Martha.
Martha was gone. And in her place she’d left…well,
a mess would not have even covered what the kitchen looked like. And a lot of
it, Andi knew, she’d done on purpose.
The cornbread pans were all over the place,
most of the bread unfit to eat. Andi had made three pans of it, each of them to
go in after the one before it was taken out of the oven. It looked like Martha
had pulled them out, cut out the middle pieces, then dumbed the rest on the
table. The vegetable pot that she’d used was also on the table. Its contents
were cold now, and she wondered if she’d done anything to it. The lid to it was
in the trash, as was some of the leftover soup. Martha had told them toward the
end of lunch that they were out of soup, and now she knew why. That wasn’t the
end of her destruction either.
Dirty ladles and serving bowls had been
dropped on the floor, their pottery pieces and soup smeared all over the place
like she’d walked in it sliding around so that it was ground into the floor
tile. Billy touched her shoulders and startled a small scream from her when he
entered the kitchen behind her.
“Holy fuck.” She started to cry. There was
nothing tears could do about this, but she knew that Martha was going to blame
it on her. “Don’t move. Just…just don’t move.”
The door behind her opened and closed. As she
moved to the table to start the cleanup, the three men that had come in a few
minutes ago came in the kitchen with Bill. He was explaining what had happened
today. Andi backed away from them; they were very large, strong men—even the
older man.
“I’m telling you right now that if she tries
to say that Andi did this, I’ll quit. And you told me that if I had to quit
this place that you’d close it down. This just isn’t right, and you guys know
it. Andi had the customers happy today. You should have seen her pancakes.
Looked like fluffy bits of heaven. And tasted that good too. Even old Craig had
a second bowl of her soup.” Andi tried to tell them it was nothing. That she’d
just done what Martha told her. “She left us too. Right after breakfast, and
didn’t turn up again until after lunch rush started. I’m telling you, Aedan,
that woman has to go.”