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Lytton’s blood ran cold. “
What
.”

Iso grinned manically, obviously proud of himself for this crowning touch. The truck crawled into the alley. “Yeah. The Mexicans aren’t making enough money selling us pot anymore. Legalization in the States means prices have fallen and there’s barely any demand since we can grow it domestically. You know that.”

“I know that.”

“So in Mexico everyone’s planting opium poppies instead of pot. At the last minute we decided to throw a couple kilos of ‘Golden Triangle White’ into our shipment. Genius, huh?”

It took every shred of restraint Lytton possessed to refrain from burying Iso right then and there. His fingers were itching at the grip of the Sig Sauer, just as The Bare Bones patch holder’s fingers had itched an hour ago with the urge to punch Lytton. So now, without consulting Lytton, they’d gone and thrown some heroin into the mix? The sentence for heroin possession was
way
more severe than for possession of banned pesticides. It wasn’t even illegal to sell marijuana that had been drenched to hell and back with pesticides. Nobody regulated that. Nobody cared. It would just get A Joint Effort shut down for awhile.

And this had all been as a result of Lytton’s beef against Ford, not a Cutlass beef. They had no right to go behind his back and throw some H into the truck.

But Iso was maneuvering the trailer into the alley, and the back door of A Joint Effort blew open.

“Whoa,” breathed Iso, braking with a jerk for the inspector.

Saul Goldblum jogged to his government vehicle just as Turk and Ford appeared at the door. Saul yanked open his car’s door and threw himself into the cage. He practically took off with the door still open, sashaying down the alley, hitting garbage cans with precision like Detective Frank Drebin of
Police Squad
.

Aha
. The call had finally worked.

Iso whined, “What’s up with that guy? He’s not going to get a chance to bust them with this heroin. And I didn’t even see him looking into the Dumpster like you promised he would.”

Lytton placed the barrel of the silencer against Iso’s temple. It was amazing how calm he suddenly was. His hand didn’t shake one iota. “Tell me, Iso. Tell me how you thought you were going to get away with it.”

Iso still played dumb. “With what?”

“You didn’t succeed at killing my old lady. Just permanently scarred her for life. She told me what you did.”

“What are you talking about? I left right after you left yesterday. If something happened to someone, it must’ve been one of The Bare Bones come to get revenge for jacking their weed. Or one of the Ochoas getting revenge for that driver. I saw that van heading up the hill, remember?”

The rage was unbelievable, spilling out through Lytton’s very pores. The angrier he became, the calmer. It was strange. Some sort of testosterone had taken over, some fight or flight instinct, one of those situations where the mother lifts a school bus off her child. Lytton felt he could move a mountain, the power surged so strongly through him. “Too bad your fucking prints are all over that bloody hammer that was used to crush Helium Head’s skull.” Lytton didn’t know that. He just assumed they would be.

Ford and Turk had come into the alley by now. They were standing just below the truck cab looking up, arms crossed, as though absorbed in a good movie.

Iso actually chuckled. “Helium Head needed some more air in his brain.”

Lytton cocked the trigger without even thinking. That sobered Iso up a bit. “So you
did
get the security code before bashing him to death?”

Iso licked his dry lips. “What do you mean? What security code? What hammer?”

Lytton stretched over the console and jammed the silencer into Iso’s forehead. The guy reeked of every body odor known to man. Lytton hadn’t noticed him take a single shower while staying at his house, and he was still probably covered with the blood of Helium Head and others too painful to think about. “Mother
fuck!
I saw you kill that driver beaner in cold blood, you scum-sucking rat bastard! Now just fucking
tell
me you got the security code from Helium Head!”

Iso lifted his hands in a surrender pose. Real fear was in his eyes now, finally. “Okay! Okay! I got the code, all right? Jesus. I was having a bad day. I was bored being stuck in your nerdy little incubator house with those dweebs all day long. Why should I be punished for icing a wetback? That’s all in a day’s work, my friend! Helium Head was a dime a dozen. As for your old lady, I still take no credit for having handcuffed her and beaten—”

Lytton’s finger squeezed the trigger before his brain had even told it what to do.

It was amazing how quickly consciousness vanished from Iso’s eyes. The silencer was amazingly effective. Over the idle of the big truck’s engine, Turk and Ford might not have even heard the shot. Blood and grey matter like a dozen smashed snails splattered the driver’s window, like an air bag that had exploded.

Iso was buried. Now he was just a scummy, smelly outlaw whose time had come—had probably come a long time ago.

Lytton had to place the piece in his lap in order to unscrew that signet ring from Iso’s hammy hand. Thinking of June’s two pitch black eyes and her broken jaw, Lytton jammed the ring onto his own thinner finger so it went easily onto the first knuckle. He connected such a lightning fast jab to Iso’s stupid cheekbone, he could readily see the imprint of the shield and eagle’s head left there. He shoved the ring carelessly back onto the tip of Iso’s finger.

He didn’t want to linger. He didn’t know how to drive an eighteen-wheeler, so he stuck the pistol in his waistband and dragged Iso’s body off the driver’s seat. He shuffled in the paperwork on the console until he found a bill of lading with the name A Joint Effort typed in the “ship to” box. Jamming this into his jeans pocket, he tore out the last page of the log book that was open on the console before leaping out the passenger door.

He passed the Sig Sauer to Turk as he walked by the men. “You can handle an eighteen-wheeler, can’t you?” he said to Ford.

“Sure can.” It was not his imagination that there was newfound respect in Ford’s eyes. The two men shared a brief glance that conveyed so much in just a fraction of a second. Time was of the essence, though, so Lytton continued on into the dispensary while Ford climbed into the driver’s seat, yelling at Truitt and the other guy to get in, too.

Toby was standing in the back hallway gaping and guffawing. “Unreal! I hid in the computer room, but that dickhead Saul was just wondering why there was so little medicine on the shelves. Of course we couldn’t admit to having the load jacked last week, so Turk was coming up with all sorts of lame explanations, like mold in the last batch. Then he got desperate and mentioned aphids and beetle borers. Thank
God
Saul picked up Madison’s call. Worked like a charm. I almost feel sorry for the guy panicking, thinking his wife was hit by a car. Then I remember he’s a corrupt toolbag.”

Lytton barely paused as he breezed past his business partner. “You might want to erase the past half hours’ worth of security footage while you’re at it.”

Slushy was still in the locked storefront, safely in the zone of plausible deniability. Just to pass the time, he was obliviously chewing on a brownie from a box clearly labeled “Make Me Happy.” He shook his head with pity when he took note of Lytton’s stance, his regal bearing. Slushy had worked for the Ochoa cartel before coming to work for The Bare Bones. He’d seen plenty newly-minted members of the “Filthy Few” in his time.

“I knew the second I saw you, you were nothing but bad news.”

Lytton said, “Those Cutlasses were going to serve us with a truckload of China White. I just refused the shipment.”

Slushy gulped his brownie so he could tsk-tsk without a full mouth. “I take it that’s ‘refused…with extreme prejudice.’”

Lytton shouldered the security guard aside. “I’m going to the hospital now to be with June. Send me the carwash bill.”

Slushy gave a thumbs up while nibbling the crumbs off his other palm. “Will do, hot stuff.”

JUNE

T
o celebrate the removal of the arch bars from my teeth, we closed down The Bum Steer to the public.

I’d had a bilateral mandible fracture that had left a couple of teeth dead—we didn’t notice that until the arch bars were removed. I was beyond ashamed that I had to appear in public still puffy with both eyes slightly blackened, as though I’d looked through some nerd’s high school microscope that was dusted with black chalk.

Lytton was closing up at The Joint System. That was an amalgamation of the two stores. Physically it was A Joint Effort’s storefront—Doug Zelov had backed out of the medical marijuana business, given up the Entwistle Street property after being stuck with a load of poisonous pot and no product from Leaves of Grass. Oh, and maybe losing his sergeant-at-arms to a traitor among the Dotards, some idiot named Truitt, had something to do with it. All I knew was that when I was discharged from the hospital, Lytton had cut all ties with The Cutlasses and abandoned his idea to open a rival dispensary. The two brothers had banded together and triumphed in some intra-club rivalry. I was beyond ecstatic that Lytton and Ford were finally on the same side.

We sat at a couple of tables near the bar. A few hang-arounds ran The Bum Steer now, although a decade ago it was The Bare Bones’ clubhouse, before they moved to the Citadel. Madison had told me a couple of horror stories about stopping by here back when it was their clubhouse, something about a box of adult diapers, so I’d pretty much been scared off of ever entering the premises until now. This was supposed to be a party for me, so I had to come.

Toby was saying, “So I told him, we’ve already got Helium Head and Crybaby. We already sound like a motorcycle club.”

Slushy pointed at Toby with his can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. “You don’t want to be a Prospect, nerd boy. Just ask Speed. They made him wander in the desert without food for five days until he saw a blue unicorn.”

“Purple,” said my brother, who had been fully patched for a year. “And in my own defense, I really
did
see a unicorn. It was biblical. I ran into a group of those furries doing their yiffing thing in the middle of nowhere. I seriously wasn’t hallucinating. But yeah, Toby. I don’t think you want to try to prospect. You’d never make it.”

“What are furries and yiffing?” My BFF Emma was by far the most inexperienced and naïve person in the entire bar and grill. The Bum Steer was open to the public normally but the forbidden, dangerous aura was still there owing to the Harleys parked in the side alley and the cut-wearing brothers who still worked the bar and kitchen. Emma’s unhot boyfriend Paul hadn’t come to our party. I wondered if she had even invited him. I knew The Bare Bones could sure use having a building inspector on their side, but Emma had currently been ogling one of the inked waiters.

Speed was the knowledgeable one to explain. “Furries are people who like to dress up as cartoon animals, I think. They have whole conventions and all. Not all of them yiff, though—have sex while in costume.”

Emma wrinkled her nose. “Isn’t that kind of hard to do with all those layers of fur?”

Speed shook his head at the floor, awash with wall-to-wall peanut shells. “You’d be surprised.”

Slushy was taking the wrapper off one of Turk’s “Make Me Happy” brownies. I was surprised he’d been so into those, since I thought he was allergic to pot. “The Califur convention is one of the biggest in all of furry fandom.”

Everyone stared at Slushy. Finally it was Turk who said, “Have you been eating too many brownies, Slushy? Sort of sounds like you attended one.”

Slushy looked up from his brownie and chuckled half-heartedly. “Yeah. Makes it
sound
. You guys know me. Mister Close to the Vest. I keep a low profile, watching my Christopher Guest movies and pretending to enjoy classical music. I’d be invisible if I got any whiter.”

“Does anyone even know where you live?” I asked.

Everyone shook their heads, murmuring their
No
s.

Faux Pas said, “I ran into him picking berries at a farm by Mormon Lake once.”

Tuzigoot said, “He’s got one of those oval two-letter Oregon bumper stickers.”

“I saw a photo of your daughter once,” said Turk.

“Slushy’s got a daughter?” I asked.

Slushy held up his hands. “Hey, hey. I support community agriculture. Don’t you prefer it this way, no one knowing where your lawyer lives? I brought you some of the heirloom tomatoes I grew, and Duji, I saw you at IKEA a couple months ago.”

Duji looked embarrassed. “What the fuck would I be doing at IKEA? Prospect! Another Bud!”

Behind the bar, the Prospect waved his acknowledgement. Emma leaned over and whispered, “That’s the one I think is hot.”

I actually hadn’t noticed the heat level of anyone other than Lytton for months now. Jake Gyllenhaal could be strutting through The Bum Steer’s bar wearing adult diapers and I would nurse my beer. I’d even gotten over my childish crush on Ford, although he did bear a strong resemblance to Lytton. No, Lytton was the only one for me.