My family had never been the best at handling emotions, and I had the inside and outside scars to prove it.
“Do you want to watch a movie?” she asked out of the blue. “If I start another book, I might have to finish it tonight depending on if it’s any good or not. So it’s best to watch something I won’t get so emotionally attached to this late in the day.”
“This late in the day being eight in the evening.” I snorted as I leaned forward and caught up the television remote. Turning it on, I paused when I saw the guy that I’d been trying to find earlier. The governor. Sander Bryan. The most corrupt governor that’d ever had the chance to lead the great state of Texas.
“That guy looks smarmy,” she said as she stared at him. “It would stand to reason that his dad is just as weird and creepy.”
I agreed. “I can’t believe I haven’t heard anything back from Hunt about him yet.”
Just as I was about to flip the channel to something else that didn’t have that motherfucker’s face on it, my phone dinged, indicating a call.
“Ask and you shall receive,” Belle said as she stood up and pulled her pants off.
I was so busy watching her that I missed the first half of what Hunt was saying. I mean, the woman was stripping naked right there in front of me and expected me to be able to listen?
“…isn’t Sander Bryan’s dad. It’s his brother. His elder brother by about fifteen years,” Hunt explained. “I’ve managed to track him down to a little place right outside of Nacogdoches, Texas. He works as a hotshot transporter. You know what that is?”
When Belle looked at me, I knew that she didn’t.
“Hotshot transporters are men and women that own their own trucks and trailers and move equipment around all over the country like a truck driver does,” I said.
“Exactly,” Hunt said, thinking I was explaining to him that I knew what he meant, and not to Belle. “Funny thing is, TX-DOT doesn’t show that he’s taken a single haul anywhere but from his part of town to the Arkansas/Texas border. He never deviates from the path, even though he gets hundreds and hundreds of orders and requests a month. Not even his crew that he hired about two years ago deviates from that path.”
“What does he transport each time he goes?” I wondered, watching as Belle moved until she was tucked against my side before reaching for the blanket on the back of the couch.
I had to lean forward slightly to allow her to get it out from behind me.
“Says he transports insulators,” he answered immediately. “Those things that go on telephone poles?”
I shook my head. “You able to get into his camera feed or anything?”
“Nope.” Hunt sounded disgusted. “The guy doesn’t have any camera feed to jack into. He’s completely off the grid. Even has solar panels and his own goddamn cell tower. He’s one-hundred-percent self-sustainable.”
I groaned. “Like that isn’t fuckin’ suspicious at all.”
“Exactly,” Hunt agreed immediately. “I am using other peoples’ business systems to get as much as I can remotely before I suggest we start sending people in.”
“Nacogdoches is about forty-five minutes from where you are. And about ten minutes from where I ended up riding the other day before they tried to run me over,” I told him.
There was a long pause on Hunt’s end and then, “We’re looking into it right now. You did the hard work, man. This part, finding them, is going to be easy. And obviously they have something to hide, or they wouldn’t have tried to run you over. Or put a hit out on you. Good work.” Hunt paused. “I have a really good feeling about this.”
I was beginning to have that same feeling.
For the last two years since this all started, I’d had a feeling that each person we took down was only one really small part of a whole.
But this time, I felt like maybe, just maybe, we might’ve gotten lucky and found the snake that kept laying the eggs.
The momma.
The bad motherfucker that was the brains behind each and every bad thing that went on in our neck of the woods.
When I finally hung up a few minutes later, it was to find Belle leaning into me so heavily that I knew she was asleep.
At some point, with the movie up on queue, and through the rumble of my voice going back and forth through Hunt’s questions, she’d succumbed.
And I wondered idly how long since she’d had a true night of sleep.
They’d told me that she’d stayed vigil at my bedside for the days that I’d been in a coma.