Wasn’t gonna happen.
Dopey stood at the far end of the yard, smoking and giving us privacy. I’d fill him in later.
“Did he lay hands on you?” I asked Hannah, considering the situation. She looked away, one hand coming up to rub her arm self-consciously.
“He grabbed me,” she admitted. “Twisted my arm. I’m more worried about Callie. The way he looked at her… This is bad. Really bad. We need to leave town right now.”
“What about your boyfriend—the deputy?”
“If I call him and they find the drugs, Mandy could go to jail,” she said. “It’s better to leave.”
“I’d rather go to jail than let them get the girls,” Mandy chimed in.
“If there are drugs in the house, you’re both in possession,” I said flatly. “Doesn’t matter who put them there. You both get arrested, those kids will go into foster care, and that sicko might come for them.”
Hannah nodded, her face determined. “So we’ll leave.”
“Do you want to leave Violetta?” I asked her, considering the situation. She shrugged.
“Doesn’t matter. We can’t stay.”
“And you?” I asked Mandy. “What about probation? You’re only four weeks out from total freedom. This could destroy that.”
“Hannah and the girls are all I care about,” she told me, her voice resolute. “That’s what counts here. If they leave, I can go crash on Sara’s couch.”
I nodded, already making my plans. We could handle this, of course. Randy and his little friends were like gnats to a guy in my position. I could run them off without hardly noticing. That would be too easy, though. If one of those bastards was into kids, he’d had other victims. Men like that needed to be put down. That part was straightforward enough.
More complicated was doing it in a way that let Hannah stay in Violetta. That deputy of hers was the kind of man who married a woman, took care of her. For reasons I didn’t care to examine too closely, I liked the idea of Mandy’s sister being happy.
That meant we had to solve the problem of the trailer—God only knew what other kinds of shit Randy had lying around.
We’d need to interrogate him, I decided. Find out exactly what he’d left there, figure out if it could be cleaned up. If he got seriously hurt during the questioning, all the better. It’d still end the same, but I wouldn’t lose a wink of sleep if he bled a bit first.
“You got a place the kids can go for the afternoon?” I asked.
Mandy narrowed her eyes suspiciously. “Why?”
“Because later today we’re going to have Hannah call Randy and tell him to come over. Then we’re going to talk to him and you probably don’t want the kids around while we do it. Might be a little traumatic.”
The sisters shared a look.
“Are you serious?” Hannah asked. “Even if you dealt with Randy, his friends will still be after us. We can’t pay them off. We barely have enough money to buy bus tickets north.”
“I’m the president of the Reapers Motorcycle Club,” I told her, my voice gentle. “Not the local chapter of the club—the whole damned thing. We got more than a hundred brothers in four states, plus all the support clubs under us. Altogether that’s maybe a thousand guys, and I’ll set every single one of them to hunting those fuckers down if I need to. Then I’ll make sure they never bother you again.”
“But—”
“They’ll never bother you again,” I repeated.
Hannah’s eyes widened. “What will you do?”
“What needs to be done.”
Both women stared at me, understanding dawning.
“Why?” Mandy finally asked, genuinely confused. I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose.
“Because we haven’t had breakfast yet,” I told her.
“What?” Hannah asked.
Mandy just looked at me like she couldn’t quite believe I was real.
“It means we’re not done yet,” I said to Mandy, catching her gaze and holding it. “And that means you’re mine, at least for now. Nobody fucks with what’s mine.”
“We’re not in a relationship,” she whispered, and I couldn’t decide whether she was trying to convince me or herself.
“Call it what you want. Just don’t fuck anyone else while you’re fuckin’ me. As long as whatever the hell this is that we don’t have lasts, you’re under my protection. Your sister doesn’t want to leave town. She’s in love with that bastard, Andrews. Suck it up, Mandy, and accept some help. These are not good guys. Let me handle them and worry about definitions later.”
“Okay,” she whispered. “I’ll call Sara—maybe she can take the kids.”
“You do that,” I told her. “I need to make some phone calls, too. Dopey is gonna make sure you get over there nice and safe. Then he’s gonna cruise by periodically to make sure everything stays safe. You can call him if you need to, but don’t unless you have to. The less of a trail we leave the better.”
“We can do that,” Hannah said fervently.
“Yup,” Mandy agreed.
“Great. I’ll be back in a couple hours with some of the brothers. We won’t be riding bikes and we won’t be parking in front of your place. Give me your keys now, so we can let ourselves in quietly. You got any nosy neighbors?”
“Mrs. Collins, across the street,” Mandy said. “She’s half blind. You won’t have to worry about her. The folks on the other side are new—I don’t know them very well.”
“Then we have a plan. Mandy, I’ll text you when it’s time to come home. Just a quick message asking if you’re feeling okay. You tell me yes if you’re ready to go and no if you’re delayed. We’ll take it from there.”
“What if someone sees you?” Hannah asked.
I smiled at her.
“Don’t worry about me. I’m real good at this shit. Why do you think they made me president?”
Mandy
Sara was available, thank God. We’d packed the girls into the stroller with their favorite blankies and stuffed animals, on the off chance she managed to get them to nap. Not that it seemed likely, but it was the decent thing to try. She had to suspect something was up, but she didn’t ask any questions and we didn’t offer any explanations. She just asked us to come and pick them up by three. That’s when she had to leave for work.