Page 5

CHAPTER FIVE

V elina…

I stepped through the doorway that the fat man behind the counter in his stained, light blue, vertically striped, dirty coveralls had indicated and found myself in a sort of little antechamber with filthy, wet, concrete floors populated by several engine stands with a mix of boat and regular-looking motors strewn all over.

The workbenches around the perimeter of the small room were piled with rusty and greasy leavings of mechanical parts that I couldn’t even begin to tell you what they did.

I knew a thing or two about car engines, which some of these motors looked exceedingly similar to – but it was like looking at an AI-generated image of what a car engine was supposed to look like. Yeah, it looked almost right, but then you would see hoses that didn’t make sense or vacuum lines that didn’t go anywhere recognizable. Then you realized the smiling mechanic in the photo had little stubby nubbins for fingers and that he had eight on one hand and only three on the other – because Artificial Intelligence was too dumb to get the hands right on most of what it spits out.

I steeled myself, unsure what to expect on the other side of the bright portal of a doorway leading to the outside in front of me. I took a deep breath and, letting it out slowly, squared my shoulders and went through the door and back out into the muggy and oppressive heat.

The sun beat down through a canopy of trees that ringed the property’s fence line, and inside that fence line was a myriad jumble of both defunct cars and boats… mostly boats, though.

I swallowed hard, eyes darting over the mayhem and wreckage in front of me, looking for any movement or sign of a single living soul among it.

I mean, their president was out here somewhere, wasn’t he?

A tall, lanky, older man with a big, long, white-and-gray beard slid out from between two piles of cars and boats and looked my way. He had on the same blue coveralls the fat man behind the counter wore, and when he spotted me, he gave me the creepiest grin. It was only with almost every other tooth in his mouth, all stained brown and rotting away. For reals, with his hunched back, leathery skin from too much time in the sun, and those teeth behind thin lips spread into what could only be described as a rictus grin – I could almost hear the banjos in the distance.

I know I was being a judgy cunt, but it was hard not to. The sight of him making lanky long strides toward me made me physically want to cringe. I thought I was holding my ground but then I bumped back into a person standing behind me who I hadn’t heard so much as a whisper from.

I jumped and let out a startled little shout, whirling in place to set eyes on a man who wasn’t that much taller than me, but was infinitely scarier than backwoods, swampbilly Bob out there in the ruins.

I bit off a startled shout, the strangled cry dying in my throat at the sight of this bald, built, and tattooed man’s deep, dark eyes.

And I do mean dark. As in wall-to-wall darkness, the whites of his eyes turned black with, if I had to guess, ink injected into them somehow.

I swallowed hard, and he loomed silently, dragging those eyes over my face and back and forth between my eyes, which I already knew were too-wide with a combination of shock and fright.

I watched his mouth turn down with what looked like certainty, and he grunted and nodded once before relinquishing my personal space by taking a step back away from me.

“You’re Louie’s kin, alright,” he said, his voice somewhat low and surprisingly pleasant to the ear.

“Why do you say it like that?” I asked.

“It’s in the eyes,” he answered quietly. “You’ve got Louie’s eyes – or rather, he has yours. He was the youngest out of the two of you, right?”

“Right,” I said. “He was born after me – and we both get them from our dad.”

The man grunted and gave a nod, whipping out a stained and faded, red mechanic’s rag from somewhere behind him, working at the worst of the grease on his hands.

“Boy’s ‘ll handle whatever you need,” he said. “You can git on back to Saint.”

“Thanks?” I said with a lilt to my voice, the sarcasm apparently lost on him as he grunted, gave a nod, and moved out into the yard with all its sad and dejected wreckage.

The skinny man melted into the heaps of junk boats and cars, and I watched the man who’d startled me retreat in a straight line to the back of the junkyard, his broad shoulders narrowing in an almost perfect triangle to narrower hips made bulkier where he had the coveralls he wore tied at his waist. He wore a thin, white wife beater, his skin around it glistening with sweat, and as he moved, the hard cut of his muscular frame deepened in shadow where hard muscle bulged and flexed over the other parts of him.

He looked like he could snap me like a twig, which scared me.

I retreated from the odd exchange, back into the gloom inside the building, pausing in the little engine-filled antechamber to allow my eyes a moment to adjust.

When I returned to the main front register area, only the fat man on the stool behind the cash wrap remained, playing his game of solitaire on the outdated computer monitors.

“Boys are out front waiting on you,” he said without looking up from the screen.

“Thanks…” I said, and I knew it sounded lackluster. This whole thing was bizarre and confusing.

Like playing a game of chess where none of the rules had been spoken aloud. Like I make a move, and the piece moves back to where I moved it from in a silent, you can’t do that, but no one is bothered to explain why .

I hated it, but so far, whatever the rules of engagement, I seemed to be doing okay.

It was nerve-racking, for sure, like I was walking a tightrope, but I wanted to learn everything I could about my late little brother, and these guys seemed to hold the keys to that kingdom…

…and then some with the state my car was in.

Blast it.

Saint and Collier looked up from their bikes as I turned in the direction where they’d parked them. While Collier lifted his chin in a sort of greeting with an easy smile, Saint was obnoxiously inscrutable. His deep brown eyes roved my face as though reading me like an open book, while the rest of his features might as well be carved from stone.

“Got the part, just waiting on you, princess!” Collier called with a grin.

“How’d it go?” Saint asked, his veneer of uncaring cracking over his burgeoning curiosity.

I frowned. “I honestly have no idea,” I said.

“Sounds like LaCroix,” Collier said, voice cracking over the laughter he was trying to suppress.

“Went fine,” Saint said, glancing at his phone.

I rolled my eyes and said, “Peachy.”

“C’mon, let’s go find some lunch,” he said, more to Collier than me.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I’d like to get back to my car.”

“You will,” Saint declared. “After lunch.”

I frowned at him and opened my mouth to argue. He just stared at me, stoic as a tree, and fired up his bike to drown out whatever protest I was going to conjure up. My frown crushed down into a glare and he finally cracked a smile at that.

What the fuck? What an asshole, I thought to myself, but still, be that as it may, that asshole still had me at his mercy with the part to my busted car spirited away somewhere on his bike or person.

Lunch, huh?

I could eat.

The question really was, could I afford it on my extremely limited budget? It depended on the place and the prices on the menu.

I climbed aboard the bike behind Saint and was doing the math in my head, crunching the numbers on the limited funds I had left and trying to factor in how much I might be charged for the parts and labor on my car. While I would have been cooked at a regular garage – I might be okay with Garnett’s… friends … doing the work.

Still, I was an anxiety-riddled mess by the time we rode into the gravel lot at this swampy dive bar kind of a place right off the highway.

I must have looked as dubious as I felt because Collier laughed at the look on my face when he turned around after getting off his bike.

He held out a hand to assist me with my dismount, but I waved him off verbally with a testy “I’ve got it,” before I got up.

He gave a nod, and I realized he was legit just trying to be polite, but still, looking back to Saint, who was rising from his seat like a leviathan from the deep and looking back on our interactions so far… I didn’t trust it.

The inside of the bar was… rustic. The walls had the same boards as the exterior walls, yet, somehow it managed to remain cooler in here. Maybe that was from the dim crisscross of Edison bulbs strung back and forth along the ceiling, the strands draping artfully over each other over the scuffed square of linoleum flooring in front of the low stage, serving as a dance floor.

The windows set high in the back wall along the ceiling were so dirty that barely any sunlight came through them.

It was bare rafters above us and the metal sheeting of the bar’s roof over that. All I could really think as we stepped across the worn path of silvery warped boarding under our feet that comprised the rest of the bar’s floor was the cooling costs of this place must be astronomical.

There was no ceiling, no insulation, no drywall, no nothing – but as absolutely bare bones and rustic as the place was? It was charming. Cozy even, with its shot-up street signs on its walls and stuffed alligator heads on plaques lining between them.

The booths were clean and cozy too, where they ringed the dancefloor on two sides – the vinyl of the benches green and relatively new. No cracks or tears. A single light fixture illuminated the table from the half wall that separated our booth from the booths on the other side.

“Best fried alligator and gumbo in Louisiana served here,” Collier said.

I made a bit of a face. “I’ve never eaten alligator. Doesn’t even sound appealing,” I told them, sliding into one side of the booth. The two men slid into the side across from me, and I was secretly relieved one of them hadn’t boxed me in.

“Can’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it,” Saint said as he took his seat after Collier. He leaned back against the backrest of the booth and stuck one of his long legs out into the walkway. I eyed him and tried to get a read on him, but it was impossible. He was as inscrutable as they came.

“Fair,” I conceded.

“Tastes like a gamier, stronger version of frog legs,” Collier said.

“Now that really doesn’t sound appealing,” I told him. Of course, that might just be leftover trauma from having to dissect the fuckers in science class. Blech. Whenever I thought of frogs, the smell of formaldehyde stuffed my nose, and I wasn’t a fan.

“Tastes like fishy chicken,” Collier said with a one-shouldered shrug.

“Can’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it,” Saint said with that same impassive look.

“If it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll pass,” I said, looking out into the bar and rocking in my seat a little bit. “Is anyone even here?” I asked.

“Thought you weren’t hungry,” Saint said.

“I didn’t say that,” I said. “I just said I’d rather not stop and would like to get back to my car. Besides, how much does this place cost, anyway?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Collier said.

“To you, maybe,” I said.

Saint shook his head.

“He means lunch is on us. We said we were stopping, and you said you didn’t wanna. That means it’s our responsibility to at least feed you.” He sniffed, and it was almost dismissive. Like he wanted to add, so quit being dumb onto the end of it, but he didn’t.

I blinked and let my eyes flit back and forth between them.

“You’re buying?” I asked, surprised.

Collier grinned. “He is,” he said, jerking his head in Saint’s direction. “I got a growing teenage boy at home. I’m fucking broke.”

Saint’s lips twitched, almost like he was going to smile, but that was all we got from him. He was staring at his thick fingertip, tracing the whorl of a knot in the plank on his side of the table – the gears in his head turning slowly. I wondered what he was thinking about, but before I could ask, a woman appeared from in the back somewhere.

Her uniform was jeans and a tee shirt, with a thin strip of apron with just enough pockets to hold rolls of napkin-wrapped silverware on one side, paper-wrapped straws in the other, and her notepad and pens in the center, which she plucked from their pocket as she approached us.

“Sorry y’all, I didn’t hear you come in. Hope you wasn’t waiting long.”

I looked up at her. She was a middle-aged woman, strong-featured with her curly brown hair in a high ponytail in a purple-and-gold LSU scrunchie. She wore the bar’s tee shirt, in gray, the logo small and on the right, like so many businesslike tees and polos. I still couldn’t quite make out the name of the place in the dim lighting, but it had a fleur-de-lis in an outline behind it, sort of like the club’s logo, only not with the purple-hatted zombie.

“Can I have a menu?” I asked.

She blinked at me and said with a laugh, “Ain’t had that question in a while here. Guess I’m so used to locals. Let me go on an’ see what I can scare up, now.”

“No need,” Saint interjected.

“Thank you,” I said pointedly, giving Saint a withering look.

I would order my own food. Thank you very much, and goodnight.

“Cuppa gumbo and a salad,” he said. “For the lady.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“That alright with you, cher?” the woman asked, waiting on me.

“I’d like to look at the menu,” I said.

“I’ll get one for you.” She walked away and came back a moment later with a laminated page that had listings front and back.

The guys ordered while I perused the menu, and fuck if he wasn’t right… the gumbo and a salad did sound good. I half contemplated choking down something I didn’t want just to stand on principle but opted against it.

“A bowl of gumbo and a side salad,” I said. “Cup doesn’t sound like it would be big enough. Is it very spicy?” I asked.

“Aw, yeah.” The waitress laughed. “You in the swamp now, sweetheart.”

“Damn,” I muttered.

“You want it from the pot we keep goin’ for the tourists?” she asked.

“Please?” I asked.

“I gotcha,” she said.

Both men stared at me like I’d done something weird, and when I looked up and asked, “What?” They broke out into snickers and laughter.

“Never seen someone handle being insulted so hard so well,” Collier said.

I shrugged. “I like what I like, and I don’t like to taste my endorphins.”

“How do you like them?” Saint asked, and his gaze had lost its curiosity and had switched out for an uncomfortable intensity.

I felt my mouth go dry and answered him starkly with, “That’s private and likely something you’ll never find out. So change the subject.”

Collier busted up laughing while Saint’s eyebrow went up as a slow grin spread across his lips. He leaned back in his seat and nodded slowly at me like I’d got him, and that was okay. But it held an edge of “ it’s on, now” that I didn’t know if I quite liked.

I wasn’t here to spar or to flirt. I was here to find my little brother and keep a tenuous hold on “family” only to find that I’d been too late. Now I only had one thing left – learning about who he was, but I didn’t know if I would be so lucky that any of these fools would tell me.

“That was good,” Collier said, wiping a tear from his eye.

I felt a smile of my own start to crack my lips just as our waitress returned with some glasses of water and asked what else we wanted to drink, flustered at the fact she’d forgotten all about the beverages since we’d been so quick with our food order.

It was a welcome change of subject with the way Saint let his gaze drift over me as though I’d finally said something interesting.