The Shack: An Unreasonable Man

Before I could follow up, the two deputies piled onto him like an avalanche of bricks. Delaney just stood watching with a barely suppressed smirk. She hadn't so much as shifted an inch.

The Sheriff looked back and forth between me and Delaney. "What the hell were you thinking, girl? He could have hurt you."

"With Needles here? Do you really think he'd ever let that shithead touch me?" Delaney moved out of the way to let them finish cuffing and searching him. I noticed her reach quickly into the SUV and tuck something into her pocket.

The Sheriff shook his head. "Jesus. Now I have to process him for assaulting law enforcement officers." He nodded to his deputies. "Get him the fuck out of here. Process him and run him for warrants."

I nodded. "That's good, you can book him on that. At least Delaney won't have to relive that horrible experience."

She giggled.

We watched as the deputies stuffed him ungently into one of their cruisers. The Sheriff shifted his stare to me after they drove off. "We need to talk, Needles. I recognize those tattoos. I saw some like them in a report about the same time you made your little trip to Durham to pick up Delaney here. North County Wild Boyz gang members who got themselves very dead in some kind of car chase and shoot out."

For a fraction of a second Delaney looked like a scared little girl again, but it was gone in a flash.

The Sheriff was much smarter than his "Good 'Ol Boy" demeanor would ever suggest, and he knew my background better than most. I shrugged. "Odd coincidence."

"Seriously, there's more to this. I can't help much if I don't know what the hell's going on."

I nodded. "I didn't think there would be, thought it was all over. Until the shithead showed up."

"That gang was tied in with South American gangs, and it was involved in drugs and..." He paused looking over at Delaney.

She stared right back and finished for him. "And underage prostitution? I heard gangs like that grab runaways and street kids then break them. With gang rape. Then they turn them out as whores." Her voice was mostly steady with just barely a quaver in it.

The Sheriff blinked twice. "Yeah. That's what I heard, too."

I nodded to her and Delaney took a deep breath. "Sometimes karma catches up to them just in time. Sometimes they fucking die screaming before they can hurt someone. That's what I heard, anyway." She shot me a glassy sidelong glance.

He shook his head, looking at the gravel under his feet. "Shit. But I kinda figured it was something like that." He looked up thoughtfully. "How'd they find you this time?"

Delaney looked up at me, desperate. "I swear to God, it wasn't me. I haven't been on the internet or anything."

"They already had your real name from before. Maybe somebody decided they needed to tie up loose ends." Even as I said it, it didn't sound right, I was sure there was more to it. Most gangs lose eight guys they keep their fucking fingers out of the buzzsaw if they can.

Delaney looked down. "I can't believe I was that fucking stupid."

I touched her shoulder. "It's okay to fuck up once in a while, everybody does."

"I know, 'as long as we learn from it.' I remember." She looked up me with a weak smile. "Even short bus kids like us can get by."

"We can, can't we?"

The Sheriff keyed his mike and told his men to be extra cautious with their prisoner. Then pointed to the bag on the ground. "Is that his?"

Delaney walked over and held up Sheree's bra. "Not unless he wears a Double D cup. I was here to get clothes for Sheree."

A thought suddenly struck me. "Goddammit to Fuck."

The intensity of my tone caught the Sheriff off balance. "What?"

"These are the kind of assholes who might go after family. We have to warn Tiffany, Tara, and..." I couldn't say it.

"Shit. Shit. Shit." Delaney sounded as disgusted as I felt. Her head dropped forward and she closed her eyes. "My mother."

My phone started buzzing and Sheree's number popped up. I answered as calmly as possible. "Hey, Babe."

"Is Delaney with you?"

"Yeah, we got held up, sorry for not calling, it was a little hectic. But we'll be up there in a few minutes."

As soon as I was off the phone, I nodded to the Sheriff. "I'll be by to talk, but I need to get Delaney up to Sheree."

"Anytime this afternoon is fine. I assume you aren't pressing charges?"

"You should have plenty without me. Especially if that gun is unregistered or he doesn't have a license for it."

"There is that. Then I won't need you to come by at all."

I had Delaney ride with me in the truck to the Quickmart. She didn't even argue about it; she had to be really upset.

I waited until we were out of sight of the yard and the Sheriff. "Let's see his phone."

She sighed and wordlessly pulled it out.

"Is it locked?"

She checked. "Nope. He's a dumb-ass. It's got Facebook and everything on it...Instagram...Tinder...Jesus who'd wanna hook up with him? Swipe left for fuck's sake."

"We'll go through it later. The Sheriff's cool, but I don't need him sticking his neck out for us any more than he has to."

Delaney shot me a look. "You're going after them, aren't you?"

"I have to do something."

"I want to help."

"You already did."

"No, I mean when you go after them."

"It's too damn dangerous."

She fell silent for a minute. "Are you going to tell Sheree?"

"I don't hide things from Sheree. I trust her." I did. More than anyone. I'd told her about my divorce, my drug problem, and my anger. She'd just smiled and told me about her past, with three months in jail for destroying a cheating boyfriend's truck when she was 20, and almost a year dancing topless under the name "Candi" at the Kitty Kat Lounge in Norfolk to make ends meet a couple decades ago. Neither of us was perfect, but so the fuck what?

When I told her what happened when I went to get Delaney, she had no problem with it.

Delaney smiled. "I trust her, too. I..." She stopped suddenly.

"What?"

"She's just great, that's all."

"She is." I parked the truck behind the Quickmart and we climbed out.

Sheree walked straight out, with her head cocked to one side, staring fixedly at us. "I'll clean up after we eat. Got yer food all laid out on the counter already. Whatcha all been up to?"

"One of the gang that grabbed Delany showed up in town. Sheriff has him."

She looked over Delaney. "Are you okay, Baby?"

If anyone else in the world had called Delaney "Baby," she'd have gone ballistic, but she just stepped forward and hugged Sheree. "I'm fine, I didn't even know what was happening until Needles got him."

"Got him?" Sheree raised an eyebrow as we sat down at the little table.

"I pinned him in his car with the truck, and just held him till the Sheriff got there."

"Oh, I thought she meant, like, beat him up. Or shoot him."

Delaney giggled around a mouthful of hotdog. "He did hit him once. Right in the head. Really hard. Right in front of the Sheriff."

Sheree nodded. "That sounds more like it. I 'spose since you ain't callin' for bail, the Sheriff was okay with that."

"Yeah, the asshole broke away from the deputies."

Sheree looked out the window for a bit. "You think there'll be more?"

"Maybe. Can't be sure, but maybe. No way to keep him from telling anyone else what happened."

Sheree took a sip of her soda. "I don't know what kind of shape it's in, 'cause it's been a couple years, but I still have Pop's cabin down at the river. Two bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen. No electricity, and it may be a mess, but nobody'd know to look for us there."

Delaney looked up from her rapidly disappearing hot dog. "Sort of like camping. I've never been camping."

Sheree smiled. "I let Big Ed use it to go fishing last April, so it should be all right. He said the hand pump worked and the camp stove just needed a propane bottle."

"What kind of heat?"

"Big brick wood furnace to heat, a woodstove for more serious cooking and a fireplace."

"I can get John's son to drop a coupla of seasoned cords out there by this evening. Maybe a good idea to move out there tomorrow."

Sheree looked relieved. "We'll have to get some kerosene, some camp lamps and lime for the outhouse."

That was pretty much that.

Except for a phone call to Delaney's mother. I'd rather have had a root canal without anesthetic, but I'd just managed to get my two daughters to start talking to me after almost two decades, so if I didn't warn her, I might lose that.

"Les." She was wary when she answered the phone; she'd probably peeked out the curtains to make sure I wasn't parked out front. I had promised to kill her once or twice, so I could understand the sentiment.

"Listen, Charli, one of the assholes that grabbed Delaney showed up at the yard today. Not sure why, but I'm pretty fucking sure it wasn't to offer an apology."

"Jesus, Les. I thought this was over." She managed to sound as if she were blaming me for the problem.

I bit back a comment. "Look, just make damn sure your security system is on. If they can find us, they can find you. I don't need the girls blaming me if you fuck up and get yourself killed. Make sure they know to be extra careful."

"Just how do I explain that?"

"I don't give a fuck. Act like a concerned mother for once and find a way to get them on their toes. Or do you want me to explain things to them in detail?"

She went silent for a bit. I knew her relationship with Tiffany and Tara had gotten pretty strained when they found out how thoroughly they'd been lied to about the reasons for our divorce. They'd also figured out how ruthlessly Charlotte and Charles had worked to destroy me. Tara must have dug up the old court filings. I suspected they might have even had a hand in forcing Charlotte to give me guardianship of Delaney.

She sighed. "I'll take care of it."

"You better, Charli. If I something happens to either of them and I find out you didn't, there'll be hell to pay."

"I said I have it, Les. Is there anything else?"

"Nope..."

She hung up before I could say anything else.

Bitch.

***

Sheree, Delaney and I had everything packed up into one flatbed truck and headed out to Sheree's cabin on Sunday.

The four room cabin was made of squared off logs and had a metal roof. It'd had been battened down tight. Solid shutters were locked over the windows and the place looked surprisingly clean and uninhabited by wildlife. Sheree seemed embarrassed until she saw Delaney's reaction. She was walking the entire place, touching every surface she could reach.

"Your Grandfather built this?"

"No, his father did."

Delaney touched a window sill almost reverently. "That's like a hundred years ago. All by hand, right?"

Sheree nodded with a slight smile. "Some of it's had to be fixed over the years, but all built by hand."

Delaney was obviously awestruck. "This is amazing."

I sensed moving back to the trailer would be a very hard sell. Hell, the cabin was twice the size of the trailer. Delaney wouldn't have been impressed by a mansion, she'd grown up with money, but the cabin overwhelmed her. She must have made six cups of hot chocolate on the woodstove, and just sat in front of the fireplace most of the evening.

When Delaney had finally spun down and went to bed, Sheree and I sat on the couch watching the fireplace.

"Why'd you have an apartment in town?"

She shrugged. "I don't know. Electricity, heat. Didn't have to worry about bein' snowed in. Us'ta be the power lines were farther away, cost too much to run it out here."

"I bet it isn't that much now. Those new lines back at the main road aren't that far away. I could cover that. If it's too much we'll get some damn solar panels or some shit."

She nestled in a bit more. "It felt too empty before. But with the three of us..." She trailed off.

"It'd be nicer than the trailer."

"The trailer was always fine."

"This would be better."

I could feel her smile.

***

The next morning I pulled out Asshole's phone. We had to start somewhere and if he hadn't bothered to put a lock on his phone, he was either careful enough not to have anything useful on it or he was a complete idiot.

He was a nearly complete idiot.

Friends, check in locations, every fucking social media platform ever designed. Fucker probably still had a MySpace account. It wasn't hard to tell the gang members from casual friends, either. Massive "NCWB" neck tattoos made it pretty obvious. So did all the pictures of Glock handguns being waved idiotically around over piles of cash. I wondered how many of the idiots had managed to shoot their own houses up on accident.

I had to have Delaney decode the fucking slang though. Even with her help I didn't understand what the fuck "Yeet" meant.

I also had to stop Delaney from changing his Tinder profile to say he was a "goat-felching strap faggot with a My Little Pony fetish." Twice. I finally gave the phone to Sheree at that point, while Delaney giggled almost uncontrollably from the couch.

Sheree looked over the messages and posts on the phone. "When's the next Tar Heels game?"

"Saturday, I think."

She pulled up some messages. "It looks like they have 'Boyz Only' night at 'the Pad,' wherever that is. They do it whenever there's a game."

Finding "the pad" wasn't difficult, either. He hadn't turned off the GPS so it wasn't a challenge to map out all his travels for the last 60 days. Every game day, it was the same trip to a place outside Durham.

Sheree looked at me. "Whatcha gonna do?"

"Depends on what the Sheriff gets out of the Asshole. If he doesn't get anywhere I'll just look into things over there."

She looked over at Delaney who'd wandered off to fix herself another hot chocolate. "I don't like this, Les. I can't remember ever being this happy in my life. Now this happens."

"Nobody's gonna take this away from us. I won't let them."

*****

Monday morning the Sheriff was at the yard before I was, sipping a cup of coffee.

"Morning, Needles."

"Morning. What's up?"

"Just a heads up. Your Asshole came up hot on the system with gang affiliation and stack of Failure-To-Appear on traffic charges. Durham County isn't interested in extradition on those FTAs, so it's catch and release on that. But there's no way Judge Warner is going to grant bail to an out-of-state gang member with a stack of FTAs."

"What next?"

"The gun was registered and the Escalade isn't his, but it wasn't reported stolen. Prosecutor is kind of on the fence about it, but I think he's going to offer him a plea deal this afternoon. Thirty days for simple assault."

"Really? Think he'll take it?"

"He'd be an idiot not to take the plea; any lawyer on the planet will tell him that. The prosecutor could nail him for resisting arrest and attempted assault on a minor, but he reviewed the body cams and he'd rather not take a chance. Your Delaney's got a mouth on her. It shouldn't matter, but the wrong jury and they'd cut him free. Took him a half-hour to stop laughing, though."

"Glad we could provide some entertainment."

"Look, this is reality. Trials are expensive and if he ends up with jail time instead of prison, well, that costs money, too."

"Yeah, I fucking get it."

He got up and glanced down at his feet for a second, then looked up at me. "Needles, seriously. I know you. Not in my house. I don't want any blood on the ground here unless it's self-defense."

"Got it."

He looked at me suspiciously. "I mean it. I got no problem with a man defending what's his. But I've heard rumors about why Ronnie Pelton is walking with a cane and working for free down at Big Ed's hog farm. That was pushing it, you shoulda come to me about that."

I nodded. "Got it.

Thirty days was almost exactly the wrong number, just long enough for the gang to get antsy and decide to send someone else. It'd be all too easy for the gang to decide to try to cap me in a drive-by shooting to get a clear path to Delaney.

His prediction came true, Asshole took the thirty days as a guest of the county rather than risk hard time.

On Friday, Delaney and I took Sally out of her garage and took her to the cabin.

Delaney looked back at the Mustang as we got out. 'You're going after those assholes tomorrow, aren't you?"

"I'm just taking a look, that's all."

She shivered, but there was more to it than fear. "I hate them."

"We don't know if all of them were in on what was going to happen to you."

We did our Movie Night with no movie, just staring into the fireplace, Delaney was strangely quiet, but slept restlessly.

Late the next afternoon, Delaney retreated quietly to her room when I got ready to head out.

Sheree watched her. "Maybe she'll get some sleep." She turned to me. "You be damn careful, Les. I just got you and I'm plannin' on getting old with you."

"I'm just planning on taking a look and maybe grab one to talk to. I'll be back in no time. You gonna be okay?"

She smiled. "I have the 12 gauge with the plug out, seven rounds of double ought in it and two whole boxes of shells. You jest make sure you don't startle me coming in."

I chuckled as I fired Sally up and punched up "Black Magic Woman" on the CD player, earning a smile from Sheree.

***

Two hours later, just as it was getting dark, I shut the engine down and sat for second, checking my .45. All I had to do was grab one of them and get out, but I'd still grabbed four extra magazines. Nobody ever regretted having too much ammunition in a shootout.

This needed done. Delaney was my responsibility.

Delaney was...I stopped, thinking for a second. Goddammit.

I slid out of the car, walked back to the trunk and popped it open.

"Goddammit."

Delaney stared at me from inside with a stubborn set to her jaw, clutching a two-foot-long wrench. "Shit. How'd you know I was here?"

"You didn't cause any trouble when I left. You fucking had to be up to something. How were you planning on getting out if I didn't open the trunk?"

She pulled a pair of needle nose pliers and a screwdriver out of her pocket and held them up. "Just like you showed me"

"You shouldn't be here."

"This is my fault." She sat up. "You taught me that. If I break things, I have to fix them."

I caught my breath, choking off my response. "Damn it. Some things need to be dealt with by someone else. This isn't like a dropped socket in an engine."

She crossed her arms. "It's my responsibility. Even when I can't fix something, you always make me watch and help."

"You're too damn young for this. You're still a kid."

"Girls used to fight in wars at my age. I listen to all those audio history books you know."

"Damn history books."

"You got them for me."

"Shut up."

She slung her skinny legs around and pulled herself out of the trunk. "So what are we going to do?"

"We aren't going to do anything. You're going to sit in the car until I get back. I should have sent you somewhere safe."

"Safer than with you? You're not going to fucking send me off to some...convent or something!"

"Convent? Hell, I hadn't thought of that. You could become a nun, like Sister Mary Thugbunny or something."

She glared, but I could see a glint of humor. "It's not fucking gonna happen."

"The Pope would excommunicate me and I'm not even Catholic." I shook my head. "Christ. How long does this teenage shit last?"

Delaney suppressed a smirk. "I think Sheree said about seven more years."

"Dammit. Just get in the car and stay there."

***

A small wooden house stood in front of a metal workshop labeled "Bailey's Welding." I moved as quietly as I could toward a corner made blind by aging stacks of lumber and a couple of old couches that sat oddly on the front porch. I slid toward the house, past a rusted, smoking kettle barbeque standing awkwardly on an uneven platform of cinderblock on the side of the house. As tall and dry as the uncut grass was, I still didn't have to worry about being heard. I could hear laughter and shouting over the blasting sound of a television.