Made for Breaking (The Russells Book 1) Read online

  He didn’t back down right away, and for one tense moment, Lisa started to worry that he would fight her on it. But finally, he afforded her one last hooded look – which could have been the result of a bruised ego or disbelief – and left, Hektor settling down on the floor with a little grumble once he was gone. Only once his car was turning back onto the street did her dad reappear.

  “Good job.” Ray’s voice startled her. She’d been staring through the window, watching Lynx leave, and whipped her head around to see her father striding casually back into the office, hands in his jeans pockets. Mark followed him, his garage shirt with his name sewn over the breast pocket unbuttoned over a white undershirt, toweling his hands on a greasy rag.

  “What was he doing here?” She wasn’t so quick to take the praise and pretend like nothing weird had happened.

  Ray didn’t look at her, but stared out the window, a frown pressing deep grooves in the skin around his mouth. “Musta been some kind of miscommunication.”

  Uncle Mark turned and offered her one of his patented smiles.

  Lisa sighed. “Something shady’s going on and no one’s gonna fill me in, are they?”

  Ray spared her a quick, hard to read glance. “Nope. Now how ‘bout you take that lunch break we talked about.”

  “Apparently our new friend Ricky is more resourceful than we thought.”

  “A lot more.” Mark had taken Lisa’s seat at the desk and put his oil-spattered boots up on the blotter, the chair groaning in protest. “So much more that I’ll bet each of you a hundred bucks we’ve got the Piper to thank for our visitor today.”

  Sly nodded from his position leaned back against the fridge, his arms folded.

  “I keep telling you guys Simon Piper is not worth trusting,” Eddie said.

  Ray sat on the edge of the desk, listening to his brother and employees without really hearing them. Their arguments made sense, but none of them had any revelations that hadn’t already crossed his mind.

  He had not once, not ever, invited any activity that so much as smelled criminal onto the lot of his brother’s garage. King Customs was a completely legitimate business – not necessarily a profitable one, but there was nothing conspicuous going on. He’d practiced law too long to think that lines could be blurred without consequence. Helping out a church – whether he got paid for it or not – had nothing to do with the classic car business.

  At least, that’s what he’d fooled himself into thinking. Seeing a hired thug come onto the lot had planted a tight, hard knot of doubt in his chest. That, or he was having heart palpitations…but either way, they had a problem.

  “I’m calling Father Morris,” he said, lifting his head to find Eddie in the middle of a comment that he squelched. He and Sly might have been car thieves in a former life, but they’d been SEALs too, and they had some respect for authority. Ray stood. “He’s gonna have to find someone else to get his shit back for him.”

  “Ray,” Mark said.

  “It’s too big a risk.”

  Mark dismissed Sly and Eddie with a look. They left without protest and closed the door behind themselves. Ray thought maybe he should give them a raise, despite the lack of profits.

  “Okay.” Mark pulled his boots down off the desk and sat forward, elbows braced amid the stacks of paperwork Lisa hadn’t finished yet. “Since when do you think anything’s too big a risk?”

  Ray snorted, and then stood when he realized Mark was serious and was giving him that annoying little brother stare that demanded an answer. He shoved his hands in his pockets and took casual steps toward the window, stalling until he turned and put his back against a file cabinet; he stared at his shoes until he no longer had any excuses. Mark was still looking at him, his green eyes full of genuine wonder. How has he lived this long and still stayed so…? Ray groped through his mind for a word. His brother wasn’t naïve per se, or ignorant, delusional. He just always seemed to take things at face value. That, and he had this unshakeable faith that Ray could always find a way out of every sticky situation.

  “Some hired meathead,” he said, “came into my business today. Your business. With my little girl. You know how many prisons I’ve been into? How many of my clients were in orange jump suits and handcuffs? That put me at risk; but when this Robin Hood shit is coming into my personal life, trying to reach out and touch my family…” He shook his head. “That’s too big a risk.”

  8

  Sly had spent the majority of his thirty-five years taking orders from someone else. He was used to it. He was good at it. It didn’t bother him. Ray was his boss, the man who cut his paycheck, but it was easy to slip into a mindset in which he was his CO too.

  Despite the radio, he could stand at the grill of the 1970 Mustang Fastback he was working on and hear the dull murmur of voices coming from the office. Eddie had his head down, his hands black with grease as he stripped old, dead parts out of the Ford, but he heard too. For all his money spent on hair products and obnoxious sneakers, the guy was still the Eddie O’Dell who’d jumped out of planes and executed top secret raids. He always heard, he was just smart enough to keep his thoughts to himself.

  When Ray came out of the office and into the garage, scrubbing a hand over his short, thinning hair, Sly stepped away from the car and put his back against a metal shelf stacked with boxed air filters. Ray’s eyes followed him.

  “Everything alright?”

  Ray gave a short, curt shake of his head. “I’m pulling the plug on this church thing.”

  Eddie bolted upright and smacked his head on the underside of the Mustang’s raised hood. “Ah, shit,” he hissed. “Mother…”

  “Why?” Sly asked.

  His boss’s expression was uncharacteristically defeated, shaken almost. Sly didn’t understand: He’d seen the boxer come by, and he wasn’t impressed with the guy. So he could hold his own in the ring - that didn’t mean shit out in the real world.

  As if he could feel the calculating stare that was aimed at him, Ray shed all outward displays of emotion, and went to prop a hip against the fender of the Trans Am. He camouflaged his worries so well most of the time that Sly thought he would have made a better lieutenant than lawyer.

  Either way though, he shouldn’t have been giving up this easily.

  “Boss,” Sly said, and earned a backward look thrown over Ray’s shoulder. “We can handle Ricky Bullard.” And on his part, that wasn’t bullshit. “If you still wanna do this, we can keep it from coming back home.”

  Eddie must have recovered from his fatal blow to the head, because he chimed in with, “We can.”

  “Ray.” Mark’s voice echoed from the office door behind Sly. “The girls won’t get hurt. I swear.”

  “Oh, you swear?” Ray crossed his arms over his chest, stress threatening to put permanent furrows between his brows. “And how’re you gonna make sure of that, little brother?”

  The title was said with such contempt that Sly wondered, had his own brother spoken to him like that, if he’d have been able to resist taking a swing at him. But Mark put his hands in his jeans pockets and propped a shoulder in the doorjamb. “This is small potatoes, bro,” he told Ray with a placid almost-smile smoothing the lines on his own face. “How many big-time assholes have you dealt with? How many real bad guys? You can help this church out. They have no one else to go to.”

  “Who?” Johnny had gone around back to search for a misplaced box of electric motors and now stood in the open roll top door, box in hand, staring at all of them curiously.

  “No one,” Ray finally answered him after a long stretch of silence. “Everybody back to work.” He headed back for the office, but paused when he reached Sly. His green eyes bored holes into him. “Do not screw this up,” he warned in a voice just above a whisper.

  Sly inclined his head in the barest of nods. “Wasn’t planning on it.”

  ***

  Hektor rode home that evening standing up in the small backseat of Lisa’s truck, his head wedged in b
ehind her headrest so the tip of his nose was pressed to her cracked driver’s side window, breathing in the smells of their travels. Lisa propped her forearm up against the hot window glass and rested her head against her knuckles, set upon by late afternoon sleepiness and a general dissatisfaction for the day as a whole. She watched Alpharetta – and all its boutiques, coffee shops and expensive luxury cars – fade into more humble suburbs, then into pasture as she headed home. Her home of the past three years. To Cartersville. The degradation she could do without, but despite the difficulties in overhauling her life, she missed nothing about Alpharetta, or its people.

  Her mother, who worked as a receptionist in a Cartersville dentist’s office, was home before anyone else, as usual, and she was in the front yard as Lisa pulled into the drive, a garden hose snaking through the grass like a long, black mamba as Cheryl watered her dozens upon hundreds of flowers. Lisa parked behind the house in her usual slot – if she didn’t, someone would come raid her keys out of her purse, move her truck and put it where it was supposed to be – and opened the rear suicide door so Hektor could hop down. He didn’t so much hop as bound onto the pavement and took off at a gallop around toward the front of the house.

  “If only I had your energy,” Lisa said with a shake of her head as she slung her purse over her shoulder, shut the doors, and followed her dog at a more dignified walk up the drive and around the wide front porch.

  Cheryl glanced up as she came across the yard, then her eyes went back to the yellow lantana she was tending. “Hey, baby.” The sun was inching toward the horizon and its buttery, golden light caught the water streaming out of the hose and turned it to liquid crystal. Cheryl had changed into old jeans cut off at the knees, garden clogs and Ray’s Allman Brothers t-shirt tied at the waist, her hair piled up on her head with a clip. “Good day?”

  “Depends.” Lisa found a dry patch of grass and plopped unceremoniously onto it cross-legged, her bag beside her. Hektor had been sniffing through the flower beds but came to her, snuffled at her face and then stretched out at her side. “What do you consider good?”

  “That bad, huh?” Cheryl let her thumb fall away from the end of the hose and the water pressure slackened to a drizzle.

  Lisa put her elbows over her thighs and rested her weight on them with a skyward sigh that ruffled her long, overgrown bangs. “Dad treats me like I’m five.”

  “Have you been acting five?”

  She snorted. “No more than usual.”

  Cheryl grinned and knelt in front of the pine straw-stuffed bed that ran along the foot of the porch. Her dedication to her plants bordered on obsession. Ray complained about it frequently, but the results were spectacular. “You know how he is,” she said as she began pulling weeds with careful fingers.

  “That’s the problem.” Lisa sighed again. “I think he…” She trailed off, chewing at her lower lip, unsure if she should be gossiping, even with her mother.

  “You think what?”

  The thing that she’d been thinking for a while now. Lisa flopped onto her back, the grass springy under her, the tips prickling at her bare arms. She felt almost like she’d be betraying her dad, even if she was only speculating, and even if she was only talking to her mom. It wasn’t even as if she knew anything. She just had suspicions. But suspicions, as she’d learned with Tristan, had a way of eating at a person.

  “I think he and the guys” – she squinted, eyes watering beneath the assaulting brightness of the cloudless sky overhead – “are involved in some really…not legal things.”

  There was a pause. Lisa lifted her head a fraction, straining to see her mother.

  Cheryl was still plucking weeds from amongst her lantana. “Guys being…?”

  “Uncle Mark. Sly. Eddie. Maybe Johnny…I dunno.”

  “And by not legal you’re thinking…what?”

  “I don’t know, Mom.” She let her head fall back, hair rustling against the turf. “I just…nevermind.”

  Cheryl’s garden clogs brushed through the Bermuda and then her face appeared in the sky some five-feet-four-inches above Lisa’s. She twitched a sideways smile. “You always were a good secret keeper.”

  Lisa frowned. “I’m not keeping any secrets.”

  Cheryl’s smile widened. “The CIA couldn’t crack you, baby.”

  She retreated, but Lisa continued to frown. Secret keeping or not, every fiber of her being was screaming with the need to talk about what had happened at the garage that day. But she couldn’t bring herself to open her mouth and start spilling. Maybe it was better to be left out of the loop, to stay home and do girly things and go nowhere near the underground fights. Then she wouldn’t be having this dilemma.

  Cheryl reheated leftover homemade veggie soup for dinner and slathered a baguette with butter that she sliced up and served on one of her grandmother’s favorite serving platters as a side. Johnny and Mark contributed heartily to her attempts at conversation, but her husband and daughter were awkwardly quiet. They weren’t fighting, because Cheryl could always tell when they were at odds, but both seemed preoccupied.

  Lisa helped her clear the dishes and clean up the kitchen until Cheryl saw her yawning and finally sent her away. “Go read, sleep, listen to music, whatever. But unwind before work, sweetie.” Poor baby – as everyone else wound down for the night, Lis was just prepping for job number two. She worked too hard, neither of her jobs anything that resembled a career. It was times like these when Cheryl wished so hard that her interior design business might take off that she had to bite her lip to keep from screaming; she wanted better for her baby than bartending and paper shuffling. Better for herself too, if she were honest.

  Alone in the kitchen, or mostly so, she listened to Ray’s stocking feet move across the linoleum and held out a hand for his sweet tea glass without glancing up from her sink full of dishes. The dishwasher was running, but wasn’t large enough to handle all the dinner aftermath, so she was finishing up by hand so she didn’t come downstairs to a mess in the morning.

  The damp, condensation coated glass was pressed into her hand, but then she felt his arm slide around her waist, his palm flattening over her stomach. A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth as she put the glass beneath the foamy water and picked up her sponge.

  “Trying to make up?” she asked.

  “For what?” She felt his chin on top of her head.

  “Am I supposed to be unhappy with you?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Okay, enough with the word games, counselor.” She bumped his arm with her hip, moving him a step back, and rinsed the glass. “We talked about Lisa this morning. So why did she come home in a mood?”

  Ray sighed and pivoted around so he was leaning back against the counter beside the sink. “She’s a girl. Isn’t that what you were telling me this morning?” He lifted his dark brows. “Girls have moods.”

  A different father with a different daughter might have been able to chalk this up to “girl problems.” But Ray and Lisa were too close, and too much alike, for that to be the case here. Cheryl gave her husband a pointed, sideways glance before she returned her attention to her task. “Ray.” She dropped her voice a notch, despite the loud rumble of the TV coming from the living room. “You and I had a conversation three years ago.” Another glance told her that a frown was pressing lines into his face as he stared at the opposite bank of cabinets. “About keeping work and home separate – ”

  “I’m doing that,” he cut her off, his voice hard. “Things are separate.”

  To be so smart…She cut off the tap, dried her hands on a dishtowel and turned to face him, one hand on her hip, the other propped on the counter. “Clearly, you weren’t listening then.” His gaze lifted to meet hers, bristling with challenge. “When you take Lisa to those damn underground fight clubs, that’s putting her in physical danger. That friggin’ bar job she has…” She exhaled in a loud, tired rush. “But she’s tough enough to know why you go to those fight clubs.”


  He looked like he wanted to protest.

  “Don’t lie to her and treat her like a child,” Cheryl said more gently. “She’s a smart girl, babe. She’ll be your biggest fan in this crusade you’ve got going on.” She smiled. “Like me. And you won’t have to worry a day about her talking to people she shouldn’t.”

  “I know that.”

  “Then tell her you know that. She just wants to make you proud.”

  “He still hasn’t shown.”

  From the other end of the cell phone connection, Ricky made a sound that reminded Drew of the one made when you turned a two-liter bottle of Coke upside down and let it all go pouring out at once: a sick gurgling sound that could have been a burp or a puke or God knew what else. “He’ll show,” the trainer insisted and then released what was definitely a burp. “Mighta been too scared to meet you today, but he’ll show tonight. Pipe says he don’t like bein’ seen in public. Rich asshole thinks he’s untouchable.”

  “Yeah, well…” Drew cast a glance down the long, empty stretch of concrete and asphalt to his right. “I’m just askin’ to get picked up out here. And I got a van full of – ”

  “Just shut up and wait,” Ricky barked. “Call me when the drop’s done.” And then a dial tone buzzed in Drew’s ear.

  With a sigh, he snapped the cheapo prepaid flip phone shut and slipped it into the pocket of the light windbreaker he wore over his t-shirt and jeans. It was a warm night, but he’d been told, and believed, that dark clothing with sleeves did a better job of hiding a guy who wanted to stay hidden.

  He was parked along the back side of a long row of warehouse businesses. A tire store, several furniture wholesale places, a feed store and an industrial lighting place rented slots in the low-slung, metal-sided, ugly structure that ran parallel to a twin building in the middle of a sprawling parking complex, the structures looking very much like chicken houses. Drew had nosed the van up to a loading dock at the lighting place where, ironically, the streetlamp was on the fritz and a circle of darkness hid him, and his van of stolen electronics, well. He stood leaning against the van and, through a stand of baby pine trees, he watched the road and wondered if each passing set of headlights belonged to a cop.