“Fair enough. Yes, it was Rebecca.”
“Good,” he said, sitting down across from me. “You’re going to need something good to focus on considering where we are going.”
“Oh Lord, not again,” I grumbled.
Everett nodded. “Yup. We have a crew of nine out at the Filmore property. He’s not letting us cut.”
“He signed a contract,” I said. “I have it on my laptop, in my email, and printed out with his signature in ink in the folder on Carter’s desk.”
“Well, you might want to go get it,” Everett said. “Because he’s standing out in his property, holding a shotgun and refusing to let anyone get anywhere near his trees before he talks to you.”
“Great,” I sighed. “Tell the crew to go on lunch. I’ll pay for it. Have them tell Lauren where they’re going, and I’ll give her the company card to take to them. They don’t deserve guns getting drawn on them.”
“Alright,” Everett said. “Then you and I need to go down and talk some sense into him.”
“Call the county sheriff first. I don’t want to take chances.”
Nodding, Everett headed back into the living room area that served as our lobby, and I rubbed the bridge of my nose. It would all be worth it this weekend, I kept telling myself. It would all be worth it this weekend.
The truth was, there were times where I got so frustrated, I thought about walking off the job and telling Carter and Everett that I couldn’t do it anymore. It wasn’t often, usually only when I had to deal with some pencil-neck geek from the government or some unreasonably angry landowner who wanted to change the details of our deal at the last possible, and sometimes post-possible moment. Other than those moments, I loved the job and the life I was learning to live in Ashford. But in those moments—it was a tough sell to stay.
It had been my turn to drive to work, so Everett hopped into the truck in the passenger’s seat and immediately went about choosing music. The drive was a good half hour away, which since I had moved to Ashford was essentially referred to as “right down the road.” People in Ashford were used to driving an hour to anything that wasn’t right in the heart of town, so a half hour up into one of the many mountains of the Appalachian was no big deal.
“Hand me a drink, will you?” I asked.
“Sure,” Everett said, bending over and opening the cooler that I always kept stocked and sitting in the truck when it was in use.
Filled with ice from the freezer at the office and stuffed with water and soda, the cooler was one of those nonnegotiable things I had about my truck. After spending as much time in the deserts of Afghanistan as I had, there were a few rules I lived by. Never would I take having a cold drink for granted was one of them. Having a water bottle iced up or a really cold soda was a delicacy that I thoroughly enjoyed. Everett did, too, and he often dipped into my stash.
Handing me a water that was so cold it would be uncomfortable to hold for too long, he closed the top and cracked open a lemon-lime soda. With the music blasting, we drove to the Filmore property and parked close enough to the house that we could be seen but far enough away that if he started taking shots at us from the porch that we could get out of there.
“Mr. Filmore?” I asked as his phone picked up when I called him.
“What?” he said, rather loudly.
“Mr. Filmore, it’s Deacon Rowe. I have Everett Westin here, and we’d like to talk to you for a moment if we could,” I said. “Would you be able to come out to the porch for a few minutes?”
“I already talked to some of your boys, and I told them I said no,” he said.
“If you could just come outside so we could speak to you, Mr. Filmore,” I repeated.
“Fine.” He huffed a sigh. His phone clicked dead, and I looked over at Everett as I stuffed it back in my pocket.
“Well, he’s coming,” I said. “But I’d be ready to roll out if he has a gun.”
“Want me to cover you?” he asked, and I realized that could only mean one thing.
“You brought a piece with you?”
“He pulled a gun on our crew, Deacon,” he said. “He might not want to talk. He might not want to listen either.”
“You stay behind me,” I said. “For the record, I don’t like this. You stay behind me and keep the door open. If he does something stupid, just lay down a few shots way over his head and get the truck started.”
Nodding, he opened his door.
It was eerie how quickly we could slip back into those men we used to be. How easily we could revert back to two early twentysomethings, ready to turn off all normal human emotions and reactions and act clinically and mercilessly to accomplish a mission and stay alive. It had made us a very good team. It had also almost gotten us both killed.