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Authors: Brian Panowich

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BOOK: Bull Mountain
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CHAPTER

10

G
ARETH
B
URROUGHS

1973

1.

Gareth pulled the business card from the center pocket of his overalls and tossed it on the table. “Tell them what you told me,” he said.

Jimbo Cartwright picked up the card
and sat back in his chair. He looked around the table at Ernest Pruitt, Albert Valentine Jr.—Big Val to his friends—and the old man. Cooper didn’t add much to these meetings anymore, but Gareth insisted that he be present, out of respect. “We got us a problem, fellas,” Jimbo said. “And this guy?” He held up the card between two fingers. “This guy is the solution. A situation like yesterday can’t
be allowed to happen again. We got lucky and y’all know it. It won’t happen like that again. We can’t afford to lose any footing here. If Milkbone Arnie or the Hall boys figure out we don’t have the firepower to protect these crops, they’re going to push harder than they did yesterday and we’re gonna lose.”

“So what do we do?” Ernest said.

“We acquire sufficient firepower from this guy.”
Jimbo tossed the card back on the table. Ernest reached for it, but Val picked it up first.

“Wilcombe Exports?” he said, reading aloud.

“We need guns,” Jimbo said. “This guy Wilcombe has guns.”

“How do you know him?” Ernest asked. Val handed him the card.

“Last year when me and Jenny were having our troubles, I spent some time riding in Florida. Before I came home and threw in
with Gareth.”

“Riding?” Ernest asked.

“Yeah, riding.”

“Riding what?”

“Harleys. What the fuck else would I be riding?”

“Take it easy,” Ernest said. “I didn’t know you were into that kinda stuff.”

“I am. I mean, I was. I had me a brand-spanking-new Electra Glide Classic. Traditional colors. Jenny made me sell it.”

Val smirked. “Did you ask Jenny for permission to be here?”

“Kiss my white ass, Val.”

“Get to the point, Jimbo,” Gareth said.

“Right. Anyway, I fell in with an outfit out of Jacksonville making a little side money working for a fella named Bracken Leek. The guy’s solid. Good people. He’s a big boy, too, Val. About your size.”

Val shrugged.

“Anyway. We made some money, a lot of money, and I trust him. Him and this guy Wilcombe are joined
at the hip, and guns are his thing—big guns.”

“Where does he get them?” Val asked. “Gareth has gone to great lengths to keep us off any federal radars. We can’t put that in jeopardy.”

“We won’t,” Jimbo said.

“It might,” Val said. “If, say, a massive shipment of traceable weapons stolen from the military led the United States government straight up our ass.”

“They’re not stolen.”

“So where do they come from?” Ernest said.

“That was my first concern, too,” Gareth said. “Tell them, Jimbo.”

“They build them,” Jimbo said. “Wilcombe Exports has factories throughout the Panhandle, Central Florida, and Alabama. Mostly, they build custom motorcycle parts for shops and motorheads all over the world, but some of their larger facilities are capable of building
other
things.”

“Other things,” Val repeated.

“Yes, other things.”

“And how do you know all this?” Ernest asked.

“Because I’ve seen it. Bracken showed me. I’m telling you. These guys are stand-up. This solves our problem. I’m not talking about buying some secondhand guns with the serial numbers filed off from some colored street hustlers in Atlanta—no offense, Val.”

Val blew Jimbo a kiss and
flicked him a bird.

“I’m talking about fifty to a hundred untraceable semiautomatic assault rifles to arm every man we’ve got working the crops, with access to another hundred more anytime we want. Ammo, too.”

“Is this what you want, Gareth?” Ernest asked.

Gareth rubbed at his whiskers and looked at his father. “What do you think, Pop?”

Everyone turned to Cooper.

“Heh?” the
old man said, shuffling his weight in the seat.

“What do you think about the guns?”

“You already know what I think, boy.”

“Well, why don’t you tell us anyway?”

The old man pulled the thin, clear tubing that supplied his supplemental oxygen off his nose and let it hang around his neck. He tapped a thin finger on the table, clicking his fingernail against the hard wood. “I’ll tell
you, but I already know it ain’t gonna matter nohow. You’re just going to do what you want.”

“Pop, I’m trying to—”

“This family doesn’t need anything from anybody.”

“Cooper,” Ernest said. “This time it’s different.”

Cooper stared at Ernest hard and long. His look was cold with genuine confusion. “Who the hell are you?” he finally said. “And why are you in my house?”

Gareth
and Val both narrowed their eyes at the old man, then at each other. “That’s Ernest,” Gareth said. “And this is
my
house, Pop. Not yours.”

Cooper glared at his son. “You got all the answers, don’t you, Rye? No tellin’ you nothing. I don’t know why you even ask.” He tried to replace the tubing in his nose but couldn’t. His hands had taken to shaking too bad. They did that when he got upset.
Which meant they did that all the time.

“Jimbo, help him with that and do me a favor. Bring him home.”

“Sure, Gareth,” Jimbo said, and got up to reattach Cooper’s oxygen. “Where are we with all this?”

Gareth looked at Val first, and the big man nodded. Ernest did, too.

Gareth slid back in his chair and seated a fresh plug of chew in his cheek. “Everybody give me a minute.”

2.

After the room cleared, Gareth picked up the card and turned it over and over in his fingers, running his thumb over the embossed lettering. His father was sick—and dangerous—but he was right about keeping the family safe from outsiders. It felt wrong, but something had to be done. He sat folding, unfolding, and refolding the small cream-colored card between his calloused fingers. Plain block
letters printed across it read
WILCOMBE EXPORTS,
with a phone number underneath with a 904 area code. He noticed the thing barely held a crease.
Some kind of goddamn crazy space paper,
he thought. He wondered how much something like that cost. He wondered what kind of asshole would pay for something like that.

The same kind of asshole that could supply him with what he needed.

The same
kind of asshole Cooper had traded his sanity to keep his family safe from.

He slipped the card back into his pocket, walked over to the phone, and dialed. It rang twice before a husky female voice answered. Not at all what he expected an asshole to sound like. More like a vampy late-night deejay spinning those terrible disco records.

“Wilcombe Exports. How can I help you?” The woman’s
voice dripped with enough honey, Gareth almost asked for a meeting with her instead of her boss. He centered himself and spit a string of tobacco juice into a coffee-can spittoon. “I need to speak with Mr. Wilcombe.”

“May I ask who’s calling?”

“Go ahead.”

There was a long pause on the line before the woman’s voice finally said, “Sir?”

Gareth spit again. “Look, honey, my name’s
Gareth Burroughs. I got this card from a fella named James Cartwright. You might know him as Jimbo or you might not. Why don’t you go ahead and put your boss on the phone.”

“Please hold the line, Mr. Burroughs,” the woman said without losing a bit of her late-night sizzle. Gareth listened to a few seconds of David Bowie crooning “Starman” on the line and looked at the phone like it had just
mutated into a dead fish. He guessed that’s what folks like Wilcombe were passing off for music in the sunny state of Florida. He held the phone a few inches from his ear until the line picked back up.

“Mr. Burroughs?”

“Yep.”

“Oscar Wilcombe here.” His voice was nasally and monotone. This was the voice Gareth expected. Weak. Fancy. Entitled. He already missed talking to the female.
“Mr. Cartwright said you might be calling.”

“He did, did he?”

“How can I help you, Mr. Burroughs?”

Gareth also took the man’s voice as foreign, but clearly he’d been stateside long enough to make his accent barely noticeable.
Probably Cubano,
he thought.
Florida is full of them Cubanos.

“I wanted to let you know I’ll be down your way in a few days. Was hoping to bend your ear on
some business.”

“Yes. Yes, of course.” There was the sound of the phone being muffled, and Gareth thought he could make out another voice besides Wilcombe’s—a man’s voice. Although Jimbo had already taken him from the room, he felt his father’s stare across the table from him, and the faint clicking of his fingernail on the wood.

“This family doesn’t need anything from anybody.”

He
shook it off. It was the only idea on the table, and he wasn’t his father.

“You still there, Wilcombe?”

“Yes, yes, Mr. Burroughs. Three days’ time works well for me. I can assume you’ll be bringing something along to make the trip worthwhile for everyone involved?”

“If that means the quote I got from Cartwright, then I reckon it would be a good assumption.”

“Outstanding. When you
arrive in Jacksonville, call this number and Julie will make all the arrangements.”

“Julie, right.”

Wilcombe might have said something else, but Gareth hung up.

3.

Three days later, Gareth, Val, and Jimbo checked in to a roadside motel off the interstate in Jacksonville. Gareth called the number on the card from the room phone and got the address for the meet from Julie. Jimbo
tucked a camo duffel bag containing thirty grand under one of the room’s twin-size beds and sat down.

“Jimbo, you stay,” Gareth said. “Don’t leave that money alone for a second, and put a hole through anybody that tries to get through but us. Even if you know them.”

Jimbo tapped the hand cannon under his shirt. “I got this, brother.”

One hour later Val and Gareth pulled the truck up
in front of a bar with three dressed-down Harleys parked in front. The bikes were all black—no ornate silver-trimmed saddlebags or flashy paint jobs—just three squat beasts hitched like horses to a post outside a saloon. The building itself was a one-story concrete block with nothing to even signify it was a bar except a flickering
MILLER TIME
neon hanging in one of the rectangular fixed windows
lining the top of the storefront. A sun-faded
OPEN
sign hung from a suction cup stuck to the plate-glass door. Gareth had expected more. He had expected the place to look like a scene from Sturgis or
Easy Rider
, but aside from the hogs outside, it looked more like a tax attorney’s office. Considering Wilcombe’s fancy accent, MC errand boys, and hot-shit-sounding secretary, this place was nothing
short of a dank shithole.

After exchanging an underwhelmed look, Gareth and Val got out of the truck and walked to the door. Gareth put his hand on the glass but paused before pushing it open.

“I gotta tell you, Val, I’m not sold on this idea. I’m out of my element here.”

“That makes two of us.”

“If this goes south . . .” Gareth said.

“It won’t. You’re Gareth Burroughs. You’re
fucking invincible.” Both men smiled, but only briefly. Gareth took a breath and pushed open the door.

4.

They both let their eyes adjust to the sickly blue electric light and took a quick inventory of the patrons and the layout. To their left, two bikers were playing pool under a hanging Pabst Blue Ribbon lamp, and a thin bartender with a huge Wyatt Earp–style mustache stood behind the
bar. His facial hair gave him tusks like a walrus. All three of them were sporting
JACKSONVILLE JACKALS
patches on their cuts. One of the men playing pool looked able to handle himself—tall, with lots of bulky muscle crammed into a denim jacket. His buddy, on the other hand, looked like he hadn’t skipped a meal in all of his fiftysomething years. He was soft and pudgy, with a long, stringy gray
ponytail. The size-up was reassuring. Three men in an open room matched the three bikes parked outside. That didn’t count what could be out back, or in the bathroom to the right, or on the other side of the door behind the bar. Gareth guessed it led to a kitchen or a storage room. It could serve as an ambush point or an escape route, but if shit went sideways, Gareth knew right away his chance of
getting out of this box, as it stood, was a fifty-fifty shot. He breathed a little easier, but not much. He’d faced worse odds back home.

BOOK: Bull Mountain
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