Bull Mountain (23 page)

CHAPTER

H
ALFORD
B
URROUGHS

2015

1.

“Boss, Scabby Mike just checked in. Two bikes are coming up the east bend, five minutes out.”

“Good,” Halford said. He sat in the great room of the main house on the compound,
at a huge oak table made from a tree he’d cut down himself. It used to serve as a drying room back when weed was the family’s largest cash crop, but the meth industry required much less space. These days, Halford used it more as an armory. The place was fully stocked with loaded gun racks and metal cabinets lining the walls for the assault weapons and long guns. Military-grade footlockers stacked
up on the floor were all full of handguns and ammo. A thin yellow blanket was spread out over the table, and shotgun parts sprawled across it. The room smelled rich of gun oil.

“Why don’t you come in here for a second?” Halford said to the scruffy messenger lingering outside the door.

“Uh, yessir.” The young man snapped to attention and walked in, his rifle slung over his shoulder. The
screen door slammed behind him.

“Sit down,” Halford said.

The young man did.

“You’re Rabbit, right? Holland’s boy?”

“Yessir.”

“How long you been workin’ for me, son?” Halford picked up the blued steel barrel of the 12-gauge, looked down it, then blew through it.

“Going on my first year, I reckon.”

“You reckon, or you know?”

The boy was nervous. He was aware of his
hands shaking so he kept them out of sight, but he couldn’t keep his knee from bouncing spastically under the table. “I know, sir. Next month will be a year.”

“And how long you been on the shit?”

The boy said nothing. His throat was suddenly frozen shut.

“Did you hear what I asked you, Rabbit?” Halford took a long hooked piece of wire from the table, attached a bit of oiled cloth to
the tip, and fished it down the gun barrel.

“Yessir.”

“Then answer me.”

“I . . . I . . .”

“You know the rules around here, don’tcha, boy?”

“Yessir . . . I . . .”

“I consider that anyone doing my crank, on my time, is stealing from me. You know how I feel about stealing, right, Rabbit?”

The young man found his voice. “I swear I ain’t stealing, Mr. Burroughs, sir. I ain’t.
A few fellas and me just like to party sometimes, but it’s always on our own dimes. I would never take from you, sir. Everybody knows that would be . . .”

Halford looked up from the gun parts. His eyes were almost black in the low light seeping through the canvas-covered windows. “That would be what, exactly?”

The young man choked out the rest. “That would be . . . crazy.” The roar of
multiple Harleys pulling up outside filled the air. Halford looked to the window, and the scruffy kid caught his breath. Halford swiftly assembled the gun and wiped oil off his hands with a paper towel. “I’m going to have a talk with your deddy, see how he wants to handle it. Holland is Scabby Mike’s second cousin. Am I right about that?”

“Yessir.”

“That makes you kin. It’s also the only
reason you’re still breathing right now. You get me?”

“Yessir. Thank you, sir.”

“Don’t thank me yet. Your deddy might still kill you once he gets word.”

Rabbit looked down at his bouncing knee.

“But today is the last time you show up anywhere near here with that shit in your system. I find out you even dipped the butt of your smoke in that shit before you come to work and it won’t
be up to your deddy what gets done. You understand that, Rabbit?”

“Yessir.”

“Good. Let your
fellas
know the good word, too.”

“Yessir, I will. I promise.”

“Now get out.”

The young man nearly fell and broke his neck trying to get his ass out of that seat and get outside. He managed to reach the door without having a full-on heart attack. Once Rabbit was out, Halford laughed a
little to himself. He rose from the table and stretched his bones before following Rabbit through the screen door with a recently cleaned Mossberg over his shoulder.

2.

“Goddamn, Bracken, what the hell happened to you?” Halford ran his hand over the damage done to Bracken’s bike.

“We got jacked right outside Broadwater.”

“By who?”

“No idea. I was hoping you could tell me.”
Bracken took off his helmet, hung it on the handlebar of his battle-scarred Heritage. His passenger, Moe, stepped off the bike, and when Bracken followed, it was clear from his careful manner the big biker was feeling the effects of laying his bike down at forty miles an hour. Romeo and Tilmon got off the second bike and crowded behind Bracken.

“You think it was mountain folk?” Halford asked.

“No, I don’t think so. Ex- or current military would be my guess.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Something about the way they talked to each other. The lingo. The vibe was professional. They were equipped with pro gear, too, but nothing like our hardware. They had all their bases covered, too. Massive intel, like they didn’t have a care in the world that we were on the side of a public
highway. They knew we’d be alone out there.”

“Where’s the truck?”

“We had to wipe it and leave it. Don’t worry, it’s clean.”

Halford looked at the three tarped pallets of pot with no truck to be loaded into. He scratched at his mammoth beard. “What did they get?”

Bracken unzipped his leather cut. “They got it all.”

“All what?”

“All the money, Hal. They took it all. Let’s
go in and talk about it.”

The little bit of skin that showed through Halford’s mane flushed red. “What the fuck is there to talk about? You lost my money. You need to get out there and find it.”

Bracken flicked his eyes to his men and then back at Halford. “We didn’t lose shit. We got jacked. What we need to do now is sit down and try to figure all this out. These guys were prepared. They
had information. It’s a very short list of people who knew we were gonna be out here and knew they could work without the law showing up.”

“Not my problem,” Halford said. “Your people. Your problem.”

Bracken tilted his head and looked at Halford as though he might be someone else. “How long have we known each other, Hal?”

“Not long enough to forgive a two-hundred-thousand-dollar fuckup.
Folks get killed for a whole lot less around here, and they been knowing each other since before their nuts dropped. You need to call Wilcombe and make it right.”

“I tried that already.”

“And what did the old prick have to say?”

“I can’t reach him.”

That gave Halford pause.

“You can’t reach him?”

“I’ve tried to call him six times since we got hit, but he’s not answering.”

“He’s not answering?”

“That’s what I said. He’s not answering.”

“Has that ever happened before?”

Bracken looked back at Moe, Tilmon, and Romeo. None of them had the answer to that.

“No,” Bracken said. “Never. That’s why I’m saying we got something to figure out here.”

Halford dropped the shotgun down off his shoulder into both hands. Bracken and Romeo both reached for their
weapons but froze at the echoing sounds of several cocking weapons flanking them on all sides.

“You’re pretty goddamn jumpy, Bracken, for an innocent man.”

“Hal.” Bracken held his gloved hands in plain sight. “Everyone needs to calm down for a second and think. If I wanted to rob you, would I have done it, stashed the money, and then rode up this mountain a day late right into the lion’s
den? Seriously, would I walk right up to the man I just ripped off and shit on his front porch? I mean, damn, Hal, if I wanted to rob you, I could have just kept riding. I know what a war with you means, and I certainly wouldn’t have come here to your doorstep to fight it. Put the gun down.”

Halford glared at Bracken and the bikers. At least ten armed men stood behind them, waiting on the
word to mow them down, no different to them than picking off turkeys. Bracken kept his hands up, palms out, showing the shredding on the leather. “Hal, I wouldn’t have wrecked my bike on purpose.”

“With that much money, you could buy another one.”

“We were robbed, Hal.”

“Right, by the phantom G.I. Joe crew that disappeared into the wind.”

“Not all of them,” Moe said.

Halford
pointed the shotgun at him. “Keep talking.”

“Romeo tagged one of them. Killed that fucker in the street.”

“That right?”

Romeo nodded in agreement.

“Where’s the body?”

“Most likely with highway patrol,” Bracken said, edging back into the conversation. “We left it in the street. I didn’t recognize him, and it was everything we could do to get to a friendly place to patch up and
get here.”

Halford lowered his gun. He nodded, and his men lowered theirs, too. “Come on, let’s call your boss.”

3.

Halford stomped up the front steps of the compound, passed a shaky young Rabbit, and headed straight to the kitchen area. He yanked open one of the drawers and rummaged through the contents until he found a silver-and-white cell phone. It was a dedicated burner used only
as a direct line to Oscar Wilcombe. He rarely used it. He rarely had to contact the man directly anymore, but when he did, it never went unanswered. He fished around in the drawer for the battery, clicked it in, and held the power button down until a series of beeps indicated it was powered up. He paced around the kitchen as he waited for a signal, grumbling and cussing under his breath. Bracken
and the other Jacksonville Jackals, as well as Scabby Mike and two more of Halford’s lieutenants, Franklin and Ray-Ray, entered the great room and spread out into the armory. Each of them filed in quietly, knowing full well they were standing in a house of cards that could collapse at any second with a simple nod from the man with the phone.

Halford put the phone to his ear. It rang only once.

“Hello, Halford.”

“What the fuck is going on, Oscar? I’ve got Bracken and three more of your boys here and they’re light. About two hundred grand light.”

Wilcombe was silent at first, but when he answered, his voice was restrained. It was a liar’s tone. “That’s unfortunate.”

Halford tilted his head toward his shoulder and shot a brief but confused glance at Bracken. Bracken lifted
an eyebrow in response and Halford turned his attention back to Wilcombe. “Yeah, I reckon it is,” he said slowly, as if he’d just joined a game where he was unsure of the rules. “Now tell me what you plan on doing about it.”

“I wish I could help you, Halford, but I cannot. I assure you I know absolutely nothing about the trouble you’re having up there.”

“I don’t give a shit about your
assurances, Oscar. All I want to know is how you intend to get me my money.”

“I don’t.”

“You don’t what?”

“I don’t intend on doing anything.”

Halford chewed his lip and squeezed the phone. “Start making sense, Oscar.”

“Listen to me carefully, Halford. I’m truly sorry for whatever is grieving you up there. I think we both know that my club president and his associates were not
responsible for anything that belongs to you going missing. In fact, I have complete faith in your business sense that you will be able to recover goods stolen on your turf. It is a minor setback that I’m sure you can sort out. But while I have you on the phone, I’m afraid that I have more bad news.”

Halford went eerily calm and the rest of the room remained silent.

“Are you there, Halford?”

“Keep talking, old man.”

“I’m afraid that circumstances beyond either of our control are going to force our business together to come to a close. As of today, there will be no more commerce exchanged between our two enterprises.”

“Speak English, you Limey fuck.”

“I’m out, Halford. Retired. After this call, we will not speak again.”

“Just like that? After more than forty years
of partnership with my family, you’re just going to up and walk away?” Halford’s voice was oddly serene. Scabby Mike and the others knew it was a precursor of terrible things to come, like the quiet sound of distant thunder.