Page 114 of The Slayer
It wasn’t how completely run-down it was.
Poverty didn’t bother him.
It certainly didn’t scare him like it did others.
Hell, in a lot of ways he was more comfortable in it. There was something about the cleaned-up, whitewashed downtown of Garnet where he lived that still grated, with all its old-fashioned houses and shops, buffed and polished to look quaint.
It made him resentful.
He didn’t even know why it made him resentful.
It just did.
But Garnet, like most towns, had its poor sections too. He’d changed his running route when Vaughn was released, winding his way through the back roads where Garnet’s poor lived, hidden off in the woods, with its run-down trailers and broken front porches, even though he had avoided this area like the plague since he’d moved there.
He had stayed away because of the drugs.
Wyatt was a good sheriff, but Chuito found them the first time he ran past the trailer park. He’d known all along it was there, but he hadn’t actually seen it until he was forced to look for it. He could spot a drug deal from a mile away, and they were far more prevalent than Wyatt probably realized.
Like Tino said, the underworld would always be there.
Crime found a way.
Always.
And it was so fucking creative.
Like a living body that adapted and survived.
What was interesting was for the first time, it repelled away from Chuito rather than find him like a magnet. These redneck criminals did not like that Chuito changed his running route.
The third time he ran past a house that was just down the way from the trailer park Chuito had been scoping out, a motherfucker had the gall to flash a shotgun at him while he sat on his porch, dealing as the sun set in the distance.
A fucking shotgun.
Chuito had seen a lot of different firearms in crime, but a shotgun? Not the most user-friendly weapon of choice. Sure, it’d kill a motherfucker dead, but these redneck assholes would still be sliding the chamber back while Chuito was putting holes in them. It wasn’t like he was a fucking deer. He could shoot back, but for some reason that had escaped them.
So he started running strapped.
Even if it chafed like a bitch.
But he kept up his route for two fucking weeks.
Through the backwoods, where the snowy roads weren’t as well kept, and it left his shoes soaked and freezing. The fifth time someone flashed a shotgun at him, he finally just flashed his gun back, daring them to try and shoot him, ’cause he had decent aim and a shotgun was the tortoise of weapons.
Really, the shotguns were bothering him.
These pendejos were not very good at this shit. They’d die in two seconds in Miami and probably faster than that in New York.
One thing was for sure—if Chuito or Tino ever did feel like falling off the wagon, they weren’t going to be able to buy drugs in Garnet.
Chuito was friends of the Conners, and everyone knew it.
Tino was tied to them by marriage.
They might as well drive up in a sheriff’s SUV. They’d get the same reception, and Chuito told Tino that one night when he stopped by, but like Chuito, he had a harder time moving past the shotguns than the knowledge that they weren’t going to be welcomed into the crime underbelly of Garnet even if they wanted to be.
Which they didn’t.
