Play It Safe

  “Seven years ago, my sister upped, stole a wad of my cash, my car and took off on me,” Casey returned.

  “Cash you were given to take me away from Gray, from Mustang,” I reminded him, it was a guess but I knew it was the right one when Casey’s eyes flashed. But he didn’t confirm this information.

  Instead, he noted, “Car was mine, sis. You left me high and dry with no wheels.”

  It was my turn to remind my brother of something. “If I remember, I won the pinks to that car in a game of pool.”

  Casey’s face got hard and he inched up a bit in his chair. “I primed that mark.”

  “We both know,” I said quietly, “that I didn’t need you to prime anything.”

  “Jesus, fuck, yeah,” he spit, eyes narrowing, “you didn’t need me, right? Fuck, Ivey, you got a selective memory.”

  Pain ripped through me.

  He was very right at the same time being pitifully wrong.

  At this point, Gray entered the conversation. “This is not why you’re here. We’re not goin’ over the history of Casey and Ivey Bailey. You’re gonna talk about what you did seven years ago.”

  Casey’s eyebrows shot up and he asked sarcastically, “I am?”

  “You are,” Gray confirmed.

  “I wanna talk about somethin’ else, I can’t. If I can’t talk about what I wanna talk about, why would I talk about what you wanna talk about?” Casey asked.

  “You owe it to your sister and you owe it to me,” Gray replied.

  Casey inched up even more, his body tensing, his face twisting and he hissed, “I don’t owe you or that bitch shit.”

  Then it happened so quickly it was like I didn’t see it. Gray was across the room, Casey out of his chair and Gray tore him out of it with such force, the chair, which was not light, tipped to its back and skidded a couple of feet. The end result was Casey, his back to the wall, and Gray, his body pressing into Casey, his hand wrapped around Casey’s throat, squeezing.

  Casey kicked out his feet but Gray positioned his body to Casey’s side so he had no target at the same time the fingers on both Casey’s hands curled around Gray’s forearm to pull it away but Gray had such a fierce hold on him, he had no hope.

  “Talk!” Gray barked in his face.

  “Let me go!” Casey wheezed, still kicking, still pulling at Gray’s hand and all the men in the room closed in on the two of them.

  Gray either was so focused he didn’t feel them or he didn’t care. Instead, using Casey’s neck, he pulled him away from the wall and slammed him into it so his had cracked against the drywall, sounding with a sickening thud.

  Then he did it again.

  Then he roared, “Talk!”

  Clearly, he’d also put more pressure on Casey’s throat because now Casey was gurgling in an attempt to get air in. He’d stopped kicking out with his feet because all his effort needed to be at Gray’s arm which still didn’t budge.

  When Casey formed no words, Gray again pulled Casey away from the wall and his head lurched forward like a ragdoll and smashed back against the wall when Gray slammed him there.

  “Talk!” he again thundered.

  I stood still and frozen and Frank got close to Gray.

  He put his hand on Gray’s shoulder and said quietly, “Son, man can’t talk with you squeezin’ the life outta him.”

  I deep breathed as I watched Gray’s upper body moving in a way that I knew he was doing the same. He took a moment to consider his uncle’s words then he yanked Casey away from the wall and threw him across the room. Casey flew over the turned chair, ass over head rolling and landed on his stomach on a skid that took him dangerously close to a table with thin, curved legs and an old-fashioned, glass-based lamp I particularly liked.

  Once he stopped, Gray stalked to him and stood over him, repeating, “Now, talk.”

  Casey rolled to his side, clutching his throat with one hand, coming up to the other forearm, his eyes going to Gray. The belligerence was still there but significantly muted because now there was not a small amount of fear.

  Yes, my brother Casey had not changed. Gray had shown him he could best him, it was a long time ago but everything about Gray showed he had matured and remained fit and healthy and everything about Casey showed the exact opposite and, still, Casey had underestimated Gray.

  When he sucked in enough breath to function, he reminded Gray, “You got a cop here.”

  “I know,” Gray returned immediately. “A breakdown of who’s in this room is not what I want you to talk about. Now, talk.”

  This explained why Casey thought he had the upper hand and could be an asshole. He thought the presence of Lenny would be his shield.

  Casey looked to Lenny as did I and seeing him leaning a shoulder nonchalantly against the wall opposite the drama, even someone as stupid as Casey couldn’t miss that Captain Lenny was not here in an official capacity and had no intentions of stepping up for Casey.

  When my eyes went back to my brother I saw he was making movements like he was going to get up but Gray stepped closer to him, leaned over and whispered, “Stay down. You say what you gotta say from right there.”

  “Man, I gotta get up,” Casey clipped.

  “No, man, you gotta learn when you’re beat and stay down. You’re beat. Stay down and…” he bent further at the waist, “talk.”

  Casey glared at Gray then he put his hand at his throat to the floor, looked beyond Gray to me and finally got smart.

  “That guy, name’s Sharp, the one you beat at pool, he sent a tracker out to find me.”

  Gray straightened and took half a step back. Everyone else in the room also partially retreated.

  I kept my eyes locked to my brother.

  He kept talking.

  “Tracker found me, brought me to him. He offered me ten K to get you outta this shithole and keep you out. No one knows, no one sees us leave. When I got you gone, no phone calls, no comin’ back, nothin’. I made it so you ceased to exist for Cody for good and forever.”

  I guessed it, deep down I knew it but it still hurt like hell to know it.

  Casey continued, “Five K up front, five more after I got you gone. They came up with the story I was gonna feed you and to convince you, him and his three friends took free shots at me.”

  My head started shaking at how stupid and greedy and just plain stupid my brother was but I didn’t tear my eyes away from Casey.

  “You take the note?” Gray asked and Casey looked up at him.

  “No,” he answered, showing he knew exactly what Gray was referring to. “But when I called to confirm we were gone, told him she wrote it. He told me it was seen to.”

  “The rest of her stuff, he tell you about that?” Gray kept questioning and Casey shook his head.

  “He didn’t tell me shit but I reckon, he had someone go in and nab the note, they took the rest of her shit. Objective, she vanished. I did my part, he did his.”

  Everyone was silent.

  “Ten thousand dollars,” I whispered into the silence and Casey looked back to me.

  That was when it leaked through. The real Casey. The one that faded through the years as he let life beat him down without fighting back.

  The Casey who loved me.

  And I saw it through the remorse that shown from his eyes.

  And I didn’t care.

  “Ivey –” he started but I kept talking.

  “Even if Gray wasn’t here, in this town with these people, the way it is, I was happy here,” I told him. “I’d found a home.”

  “Sis –” he tried to break in but I didn’t let him.

  “But Gray was here and so not only did I find a home, I found a family.”

  Casey closed his eyes.

  I kept speaking.

  “All I ever wanted, Casey,” I reminded him and he opened his eyes. “I told you that, I don’t know how many times. All I ever wanted and you, my own brother, all it took was ten thousand dollars and you took that away from me.”
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  He pushed up to sitting but stayed down, eyes never leaving me and he opened his mouth to speak but I got there before him.

  “Seven years. You stole seven years from me.”

  “I –” he tried again but I shook my head.

  “There is absolutely nothing,” I leaned in on the last word, feeling my blood racing through my veins, the rush of it in my brain, “you could say that would explain or make me understand why you would do that to me. Not one thing.”

  Casey swallowed.

  “I loved him,” I whispered, the surge of anger disintegrating, instant sorrow taking its place. “I loved him with everything I had, everything I was. He made me happy for the first time in…my…life. And you took him away from me.”

  Casey didn’t speak.

  I did.

  “You’re dead to me.”

  His face paled, pain slashed through his features and I didn’t get that. I didn’t get how he could sit there and think for one minute that my reaction would be anything but what it was.

  Then again, for a long time I didn’t get a lot about Casey.

  “Dead to me,” I whispered.

  Then I turned on my flip-flop, walked out of the living room, up the stairs and to Gray and my room.

  I was standing at the window looking at the burned remains of our barn when Gray’s arms wrapped around me, one at my ribs, one at my chest and his lips came to my ear.

  “Lash and Freddie need to know what you want done with him,” he said softly.

  “I don’t care.”

  His arms gave me a quick squeeze and he kept speaking softly in my ear.

  “I get you feel that way now, dollface, but you gotta power through that just for a second ‘cause those two men are itchin’ to teach your brother a lesson. You open that opportunity to them –”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Ivey –”

  I turned in his arms, put my hands to his waist, looked into his deep blue eyes with their russet lashes, eyes that were the last thing I should have seen every night for seven years and eyes I should have woken up to every morning and I repeated slowly and firmly, “I…don’t…care.”

  His beautiful eyes held mine before they moved over my face then his hand came up, fingers gliding along my cheek and back. He slid them into my hair, cupped my head and dropped his to touch his mouth to mine.

  When he lifted his head, he whispered, “Okay, honey.”

  “Okay.”

  He bent his neck to touch his forehead to mine for a second before he gave me a squeeze and let me go.

  I watched his ass in his jeans until he turned down the hall.

  Then I turned back to the window and looked at the burned out barn.

  Twenty-two years of hell. Seven years of happy limbo.

  Now I was home.

  I was home.

  I focused on that.

  Then I drew in a steadying breath and waited until I heard the car start. Then I heard another one. I also heard them going down the lane.

  Only then did I walk out of our bedroom but I turned away from the stairs and walked the few feet to the end of the hall where there was a window seat and a big, sashed window that looked out to the side of the house.

  The cruiser gone. The Lincoln gone. The Cody cars remained.

  And there it was. I had a house full of family, a kitchen table full of generosity so I had to get my ass downstairs and provide hospitality.

  So that was just what I did.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  That Kind of Sweet

  Three weeks later…

  I was in the kitchen doing the lunch dishes and smelling the cake I was baking in the oven for after dinner.

  I looked out the window to the cleared out area where the barn was.

  Gray with Shim, Roan, Danny, Barry, Gene, Sonny, Lenny and Lenny’s son, a seriously good-looking man with an easy smile like Gray’s and a quick wit who I put in his late twenties, Whit, helped him clear away the debris, pull out the dead horses and bury them.

  Fortunately, the insurance company didn’t mess around with their inspection or getting us a check. Now, there was a massive pile of wood covered in see-through plastic tarps wrapped with thick wire and weighed down with bricks next to the skeleton of the barn that soon would be. So soon, the roof was done and, at the back, they’d already put up the wall.

  The insurance company paid for us to have builders see to it but Gray and his posse were doing it themselves. They knew what they were doing and it saved money. It surprised me but the work was going quickly even though Gray did it with mostly just him and Sonny, who was retired so he had the time. All the rest of the men had jobs but a few always came at night to put in an hour or two. I fed them if they didn’t have women at home to do it and then they’d leave. Weekends, usually the entire posse was there. Gray reckoned, with the progress, the barn would be up and our horses would have their new home in another two weeks, at the most three.

  Gray told me I got to pick the color he’d paint it. The house was white with two different shades of gray adorning the woodwork intermingled with hints here and there of barn red. The old barn was painted gray.

  I picked barn red. It was a barn and I liked the idea of living on a ranch-slash-orchard with a barn painted the stereotypical red. I might be a cowboy rancher’s stylish girlfriend who often wore designer clothes and high heels but we lived the rancher life. Might as well go whole hog.

  The quick raising of the barn was the good news.

  The bad news was, Lenny’s nephew Pete was going down for what he did but Buddy wasn’t. He didn’t confess, even after his father put pressure on him to do so. And he might be an asshole with a freaky, scary obsession with Grayson Cody but unfortunately, he wasn’t a stupid one.

  Pete bought the poison. Having once worked (and lost his job at) another orchard in the vicinity, Pete had the knowledge to procure the virus he injected in the trees. Cash withdrawals from Bud and Cecily’s accounts could be traced as to what Pete told the cops Buddy paid him to do his nefarious deeds but Buddy contended he gave him the money, “to help out a friend.”

  Unfortunately, Ted and Jim, Buddy’s other two sidekicks, stepped up to throw Pete right under the bus, corroborating that Buddy, being a good guy, just wanted to help Pete during a tough time and Pete was talking shit to get his ass out of hot water.

  The fact that Pete had no motivation to do what he did to Gray and Buddy had publically carried on a one-sided, seriously whacked feud with Gray since junior high was unfortunately all Pete had. All the material evidence was found at Pete’s house and he gave his confession. Outside of the payments made with timings that loosely coincided with the deeds done, nothing linked any of Pete’s activities to Buddy. With only the word of a man caught and going down to connect Buddy to the crimes, they had nothing to go with so they couldn’t charge him with anything.

  Lenny gave us this information in our living room and he did it hesitantly and angrily. He didn’t like that he’d failed Gray but his hands were tied.

  Gray’s were not.

  Therefore, Gray had visited Buddy at his place of business. In his glass-walled office, he explained exactly what would befall Buddy at the hands of Gray as backed by the Brothers Cody if anything else happened on his land, to Gray or to me. No one heard any of the words, they just saw the exchange and it was the talk of the town.

  I didn’t suspect this would stop Buddy.

  What I did suspect would stop him was that the Mustang Police Department put our ranch on radar and they did this openly. Random but frequent drive-bys not only from cruisers of the Mustang PD but also the County Sherriff during which, often, the cruiser would coast up the lane. They were visible and meant to be.

  They weren’t the only ones.

  The Brothers Cody, Shim, Roan, Whit (the latter three when they weren’t working on the barn) or one of Jeb Sharp’s ranch hands were nearly always parked across from the mouth of our lane on the side of the road in
front of our property, standing vigil. Also often, night or day, Shim, Roan or Whit would drive down the lane, saddle up one of our horses and take him or her for a wander through Gray’s land. Further, Gene, who was an electrician, set up random and very bright lights in the orchard that had motion sensors and would light up like a beacon if someone tripped them in the night. They made no noise but they could be seen from our bedroom window and anyone out there doing something they shouldn’t could wake up a rancher under fire who was not sleeping soundly (and, alas, this was true for my man) but also might make them visible to a passing cruiser or the vigilance of the Brothers Cody and Jeb Sharp.

  It made me feel safer but I knew it didn’t make Gray feel that way as evidenced by the aforementioned light sleeping.

  My man was struggling.

  And I knew why because he talked to me about it.

  He had no plays open to him. He couldn’t beat the shit out of Buddy to teach him a lesson because he’d not only done that before (several times) and got nowhere but also it was against the law and all eyes in Mustang were on him. He also was not the kind of man to play with him or get to him through making plays against Cecily or their children.

  He had no options except the one he took, to warn Buddy off.

  And he hated it.

  But I also knew if Buddy did one more thing, Gray would lose it and then we’d both be screwed.

  That said, Gray might not be the kind of man to play with Buddy but Janie, Chastity and Stacy had shared with me that others didn’t feel the same way. Since our barn burned down, Buddy and Cecily had had a lot of bad luck.

  A lot.

  Buddy’s car had had two flat tires then it quit working altogether and considering it was only a year old, this was suspicious. Their house had been vandalized, windows egged and the words, “horse murderer” painted on the front in blood red. Their mailbox sitting on a post at the road had been targeted twice by drive-bys and baseball bats. And Whit had shared with Gray that his Dad had shared with him that Buddy came into the station with a note Cecily found on their doorstep that was just one piece of paper in an envelope with four words computer printed on it, “Get out of Mustang.”