Page 105 of Bleed the Shadows
ETHAN
I tooka drink of my afternoon matcha and pulled up the drone footage from that morning. I was glad Christmas was over. It was a fucking depressing holiday and the expectations of it all always got to me: happy families and happy couples and storybook houses and homemade cookies.
The world had been that way once, but not anymore. Now the world was a hard place and the only way to survive it was to be harder.
I’d spent Christmas Day working, keeping track of the cam girls and watching our analytics soar as all the lonelies handed over the credit cards for a few minutes or hours of company with a girl who told them they were handsome and smart, things no real woman would tell them because most of them were losers.
Anton and I had gone out for dinner but that had been the extent of our celebration.
Now I watched that morning’s drone footage, hoping today was the day.
I was tired of waiting.
Main Street came into view and I watched as the nicer north side passed below, then the seedier south side of town. Some ofthe names on the storefronts had changed, but the landmarks of my youth in Blackwell Falls were still there.
The drone cruised past the Orpheum and the brick building near the end of the street came into view. It was one of many in town that the Butchers owned, but it was important because it was the only one they actually lived in.
We’d been watching it for the last week, waiting for Bram and his friends to leave, but Christmas had kept at least one of them close to home at all times.
The clock in the lower right hand corner of the screen ticked away the morning hours. A couple people walked by on the pavement outside the loft, and twice Maeve Haver came out to walk the dog around the building.
She looked small on the drone footage. I had a visceral memory of the way she’d looked chained to the wall of the tunnel, and I was surprised to feel my dick get hard.
That didn’t happen much anymore.
Maybe it was a product of my business — you could only see so many naked bitches turning tricks in the cam rooms before a woman’s body became just another commodity — but any lust I’d had as a younger man was mostly gone.
Now all my lust was for money or control, both infinitely easier to come by than a woman who wasn’t a gold-digging whore.
But the memory of Maeve, naked and scared got me worked up. Maybe it was the way she’d fought, kicking Anton with her boots, trying to buck him off her. I think she’d even scared the shit out of Nick.
Or maybe it was the way she’d shouted, calling us motherfuckers and telling us she was going to help the Butchers kill us. Maybe it was just her, with her silky black hair and the blue eyes that were somehow cold and hot at the same time.
Hard to say, but I was definitely excited to be alone with Maeve Haver.
It was dark when Poe stepped out of the building carrying two duffel bags. He hopped off the old loading dock, carried the bags to the Hummer, and loaded them into the back.
He disappeared into the building, and a few minutes later he returned to the Hummer with two more bags. By the time he disappeared into the building for good, he’d loaded eight bags in the back of the Hummer.
I sat back and watched until the video ended about twenty minutes after Poe had left the parking lot for the last time.
I had no way of knowing what was in the bags, but whatever it was meant the Butchers were either going on a trip or they were planning some kind of operation.
A big one.
A week ago, it would have worried me. I might even have left town.
Now I only hoped they weren’t taking Maeve Haver with them.
Because I had plans for her.
65
BRAM
We spentmost of the day with Maeve, avoiding the subject of our impending assault on Todd’s compound in an effort to keep Maeve from worrying. But it was there under the surface of the day anyway.
Maeve cooked a big breakfast and we played one of the video games she liked, fucked on the sofa again, ate lunch, fucked some more, and fell asleep in Poe’s bed.
