Chapter Thirty-One

Collin

“Well, she packed a bunch of stuff into duffel bags and threw them into her car,” Logan said. “That doesn’t seem like your normal eleven at night activity.”

“No, it does not,” Luke said. “Ask him if she’s in the car now.”

“He heard you. He said yes. Hasn’t turned it on yet, though.”

“She’s debating going,” I said. “She thinks this might be the end. I can’t blame her. She’s going to meet a stranger at midnight to pay off a blackmailer in some way.”

“How though? Have they made any demands?” Charlotte asked.

“Not that I know of,” I said. “She might have more information than I do, though. I’m sure she does, actually.”

“So we expect her to hit a bank on the way? You can only get so much out of an ATM. Is she the kind of girl who keeps all her money in cash?” Luke asked.

“She’s a cook, not a waitress,” I said. “Cash is king, but you don’t keep wads of it everywhere. You keep it in a bank. If she hasn’t gotten cash out yet, she isn’t planning on it. So there’s something else they want.”

“I wonder what that could be?” Luke asked rhetorically. “Has he seen Amber?”

“Have you seen Amber?” Logan asked. He waited a moment and then shook his head no.

“She’s going to be careful,” I said. “If she sticks to the plan, she’s not even going to trail her until she gets to the interstate.”

“I should have gone with her,” Charlotte said. “I wish I had.”

“I can drop you off,” I said. “We need to follow along too, a little farther behind. She will recognize any of the trucks if we get too close.”

“You think she would?” Jesse asked. “She was only here once, and most of us were gone.”

“I don’t want to take the risk,” I said. “She would have seen them at the wedding.”

“Fair enough,” Jesse said. “So we drop Charlotte off with Amber, and then what? Wait for her to pass us?”

“No,” I said. “We go to the next most logical place to get to the bottom of all this.”

I made eye contact with Luke and knew he was on the same page.

“The jail,” we both said in unison.

“The jail?” Jesse asked. “I thought we decided it probably wasn’t Eugene.”

“Probably and definitely are two different things. I’d like to cross him off the list for sure,” I said.

“Me too,” Luke said. “I don’t trust the Andersons. Period.”

“Let’s do it,” Logan said. “No time to waste.”

After dropping Charlotte off with Amber, we double-timed it back to the jail and hopped out of the truck like a mob, ready for war.

Trish Anderson, the little sister of the group and the only one who wasn’t technically a cop, saw us coming and rushed to the door, trying to lock it before we got in. Unfortunately for her, Logan was already there and pushed it open easily, moving her aside.

“What is going on?” she cried. “We don’t have any of you Galloways! Why are you here?”

“Where is Eugene?” I demanded. “Is he here? He had better be here!”

“He’s… he’s not here.”

“That means he’s the one,” I shouted. “Where is he? Where is that son of a bitch?”

“Collin?” she said, cowering against her desk.

Despite it all, I actually felt kind of bad scaring her like that. Sure, she was an instigator, and at least at cause for some of the issues we’d had over the years, but the fear in her eyes was real, and part of me wondered if a lot of her actions weren’t motivated by that very same fear coming from her brothers.

I tried to take a breath and lower my voice. Of all of us, I was probably the one she least suspected to be like that. I’d been the one to talk to her civilly many times just to get one of the other brothers out of jail.

“Trish, I need you to listen to me. We need to see Eugene. Right now. If he isn’t here, then there is going to be a problem. Do you understand?”

She nodded, tears welling up in her eyes, making them look glassy.

“I do,” she said. “But he’s not…”

“What the hell is going on in here?”

We all looked up to the back of the jail, where the bathroom was for employees. Eugene was coming out of it, tightening his belt back up.

I stood there dumbfounded for a moment. It wasn’t him. Despite everything, it wasn’t him.

“I’m sorry,” Trish said quietly. “I’m sorry Collin. I just didn’t want y’all to mob him.”

“It’s… it’s fine, Trish,” I said.

“I said, what the hell is going on?” Eugene demanded again.

I crossed the room, walking directly up to Eugene and getting in his face. My brothers braced behind me but didn’t follow. They would jump in if they had to. But this was my fight.

When I spoke, there was grit in my voice. Gravel and mud and blood and hate. But I didn’t raise it. I didn’t shout. I spoke just loudly enough that he could hear the venom.

“You threatened Brandy,” I said. “I don’t want to hear a denial. I know you did it. You know you did it. Let’s move on. You threatened her, and that makes you a suspect, you understand? I’m thinking like a cop. Something you should be familiar with. You are suspect number one now. So I need you to tell me this isn’t you, and why the hell I should believe you.”

He stared at me intensely for a long moment, not moving other than chomping on a toothpick and rolling it from one side of his mouth to the other.

“I don’t have the faintest fucking clue what you are talking about, Collin,” he said.

“About the threats, or…”

“I spoke to her,” he admitted. “I’ll leave it at that, because you and I are going to have very different opinions as to what constitutes a threat. But I did speak with her. But when I spoke with her at her apartment, that was the last time I did. I haven’t seen or heard from her since. So does that answer your question?”

“No,” I said.

“Then what the hell is it I was supposed to have done? Has she gone missing?”

“Not yet,” I said. “But someone is blackmailing both her and me. Someone with an axe to grind, apparently. They don’t want money. They just want me and her embarrassed.”

He huffed a mirthless laugh. “Now I would absolutely do something to embarrass you, Collin Galloway. Or any of you yokels. I hate every last one of you with every breath in my body. You know that. I would embarrass you at the first opportunity. But I would not blackmail you for it. I’d just do it. If I had something on you, I’d just make sure everyone knew about it. How’s that for an answer?”

“It’s about what I expected, actually,” I said. “You’re a worthless, gutless, useless pig. Three hundred pounds of shit in a two-hundred-pound bag. A sad excuse for a badge and a sadder excuse for a man. But I didn’t think you’d resort to blackmail. You aren’t smart enough to pull it off anyway.”

He grinned. “Then we agree on something,” he said. “It wasn’t me.”

“I suppose not,” I said.

Our noses were almost touching. I felt like we were on the brink of either coming to blows or shaking hands, and I didn’t know which way it was going to go.

“I already have too much heat on me because of you, Collin. I’m no idiot.”

“Debatable,” I said.

“I’m no idiot,” he repeated, undeterred, “which means I wouldn’t do something so obvious that could take me away from here. S, no. I didn’t do a damn thing to your precious little Brandy, nor am I part of any blackmail. So take that, stuff it up your pipe, and get the hell out of this office.”

“Collin?” Logan said. “Collin, we need to get going if we’re going to catch up.”

“All right,” I said. “Owen tell you where they are?”

“I have his GPS being tracked,” Logan said. “But we need to go. Now.”

“What about these two?” Jesse said. “I don’t trust them not to leave. What if they are part of it and are just waiting for us to be gone?”

“I’ll take care of that,” Logan said. “I’ll stay here. You guys go. I’ll send you the link to the tracker.”

“Do it,” Luke said. “Thank you, Logan. We will call you if we suddenly need you.”

He nodded.

I turned to Eugene again.

“If we need him urgently, it will be an emergency of the highest order. The kind that means we need police. Right that moment. So should I do that, I am trusting, as someone who would like to clear their name, you would give him a ride. Are we understood?”

“Got it,” he said. “In that case, I sure as shit hope you don’t need him. Because I don’t want to sully my ride with the sweat of a fucking Galloway.”

“Keep an eye on him,” I said quietly to Logan as I turned around and faced him. “And Trish. Just in case.”

“Will do, boss,” Logan said. “What’s next?”

“Next is we take the truck, follow Owen, figure out where the hell she’s going and intercept her. Because whatever this is, it’s not going to end with her just getting the footage like that. Especially now that we know it’s not them. It’s going to get crazy. Are you ready?”

“Ready,” Logan said.

“Everybody else?”

“As always,” Jesse said. “I’m always down for something different.”

“And I am occasionally interested in different things, especially if one of those different things might involve me punching someone in the mouth.”

“Good,” I said. “Who needs an army when I have four out of five Galloways?”

“Let’s roll,” Luke said. “I’d like to be home for breakfast.”