Shine (Kentucky Outlaw Book 1) (7 page)

Kenny’s mouth hung open and he looked from Ethan to his truck and back.
 
“You’re a damn liar.
 
I just bought that truck last month.”

“Jesus Christ, Salo, I wasn’t serious.”

Kenny brushed himself off and said, “Yeah, well, you best stay out of my way.
 
I got a gun, you hear?”
 
He stumbled to his truck, opened the driver’s door and got inside, but the engine stayed quiet.

“Hope he sleeps that off before he tries to go anywhere.
 
You OK?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Julie said briskly.

“It’s good to see you again,” said Ethan, trying to strike up some kind of conversation, but Julie wasn’t having it.
 
She wasn’t getting involved with the Daltons, even if Nick had been friends with this one.

“Yeah, sure,” she said and without another word she walked back to her car.
 
She could see Ethan in the reflection of her window, looking at her, wanting to say more, but he turned back to the bar and walked in.
 
Julie didn’t know what Ethan Dalton was doing at Traxler’s, but she knew that nothing good came of the place.
 

The sound of the pickup truck starting up made her forget all about Ethan.
 
She watched Kenny pull the big truck out of the parking lot and onto Budd Road.
 
Kenny’s license plate read KY GNGSTA.
 
Julie rolled her eyes and made a last minute decision to follow.
 

It was tough, she didn’t want to follow too closely and give herself away, but Kenny drove fast and took a lot of corners.
 
They went through a few back roads, but ended up driving through town.
 
Kenny drove pass Crossroads, through the small furniture district, and towards the hill where Julie lived.
 
Kenny kept driving up the hill that would eventually lead to the Prescott house.
 
She was sure it was a coincidence but every time he came to a split in the road where he could go a different direction, he always chose the direction that led to Julie’s.
 
She checked her pocket to make sure her phone was where it was supposed to be.
 
She didn’t know what was going on, but if this guy was heading towards her house she was going to be on the phone with Austin in a heartbeat.
 

Kenny rolled up to the last stop sign before Julie’s.
 
If he turned right he would be at her driveway in a under a minute, but instead he turned left and led her right to the Butler house instead.
 

He rolled to a slow stop, and sat at the entrance to the driveway.
 
Before going around the bend and catching up with him, Julie pulled her car to the side of the road. She was pretty sure Kenny wouldn’t spot her between the curve in the road and the trees.
 
She could only see the back of his truck, so she got out of the car and silently made her way past the trees.
 
She stopped suddenly when she say that Kenny had also gotten out of his car and was standing at the bottom of the driveway.
 
Unlike Julie’s house, Nicky’s home didn’t have a gate.
 
There was nothing to keep Kenny from going up the drive if he wanted, but he stayed put, his only movement his drunken sway, staring at the big house.
 

She watched him for five full minutes.
 
He didn’t seem angry, not from what Julie could tell anyway.
 
He just looked at the place the way a child might look at a toy in a store window.
 
Finally, he got back in the truck and Julie hurried back to her car.
 
Kenny was driving so fast it took her several minutes to catch back up with him.
 
He drove back into town and after another mile Kenny pulled the pickup into a parking spot next the sidewalk. She parked three spaces up from him and watched in her rearview mirror as he stumbled into another bar.
 

Julie’s phone rang and she hit the silence button without looking to see who it was.
 
She didn’t know what she had just witnessed, but whatever it was, she knew she was on the right track.

“Everything square with Traxler?” asked Ged.

“Yeah, he’s expecting us at eight,” said Ethan.

Ethan, Ged, and Zeke were pulling plastic jugs of moonshine out of the storage sheds and loading them into the back of the truck.
 
They were just about to make a run, Ethan’s first in more than two years.
 

Making the moonshine was one thing, but it was worthless if you couldn’t get it somewhere to sell it.
 
The Dalton moonshine was popular, and almost everyone who bought it knew who made it, but only the family was allowed to be where they cooked it. It was one thing for the law to know the Daltons made the shine, but it was another thing if the law could prove it.

 
They had been running shine for years, long before Ethan was born, and it required a driver that was quick and skillful behind the wheel. Ethan had been the runner since he was 14 years old, and he delivered every batch until he had left Remington. Now Jackie was the runner, and by all accounts was a better driver than Ethan, which was fine with him.
 
He had long since given up the need to prove himself to his family.

After the last of the jugs had been loaded up Zeke took a look at his watch.
 
“It’s seven-damn-thirty.
 
Where the hell is that boy?”

Ethan was wondering the same thing.
 
Jackie had promised to help load the shine onto the truck, but had been a no show.
 
That wasn’t unusual, but it wasn’t like Jack to pass up chance to drive fast.
 
It was close to the running time and he hadn’t even called.

Ged sat down on a tree stump and said, “What’s the matter, little brother?
 
You forget what real work is like?”

Ethan didn’t want to take the bait, but he had been putting up with Ged’s comments the entire time they were loading the shine.
 
“No, Ged.
 
I actually worked while I was gone.
 
I didn’t have a free place to stay and food to eat, I had to go out and grind my ass all week long to bring home a paycheck.”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
 

“It means I wasn’t cooking up shine and loading once a month.
 
I had a boss, and a schedule, I had to meet quotas to get by and I still got paid shit.”

Ged lit a pipe and said,
 
“You think with all that you would’ve come back sooner.”

“Hush,” barked Zeke.
 
“The boy’s back now and that’s good enough.
 
He had to take care of his own shit.
 
You had to do the same and Lord knows your brother Jackie gets up to enough trouble.
 
You just did it in town and Ethan had to go explore for a bit.”

Ethan was surprised.
 
It was the closest his father had ever gotten to a compliment or kind word about him.
 
When Ethan was in school, Zeke’s friends would tell him about how proud the old man sounded when he spoke of him, boasting about his grades and achievements, but Ethan had never heard any of that come from his father directly.

Ged changed the subject.
 
“So then, you meet any girls when you were out doing all this exploring?”

“Yeah, Ged, I met me some girls.”

“But none you liked enough to bring home?”

“There were a couple that qualified, but it never lasted.”

Ged blew out a plume of smoke, “More like Jackie than me in that regard I guess.”

He decided to change the subject.
 
“So tell me what you know about Nick’s murder.”

Zeke said,
 
“Nothing much to tell.
 
Robbery gone wrong.
 
Two bullets to the chest and the cops don’t have much of a lead, but they’re looking into it.”

“Hate to say it, but it’s doing us a favor.
 
Cops are looking for a murderer, they don’t some much care about a bunch of moonshiners,” said Ged.

“You hush that talk before I slap the taste out of your mouth, boy,” Zeke said.
 
“The Butlers are good folks and I’m not about to take pleasure in the death of their boy.”

“Hell, Dad, I didn’t mean nothing by it,” said Ged.

“Then keep your damn mouth shut.”

“I don’t think it’s a simple as a robbery,” said Ethan.
 
“When I was down at Traxler’s earlier I ran into Julie Prescott.
 
She was arguing with Kenny Salo about Nick.
 
I only caught the tail end of it, but it sounded like Julie thought there was more to it than that.”

The two older Dalton’s looked to Ethan.

Ged said, “What’re you doing hanging around a Prescott?”

“I wasn’t hanging around her.
 
I ran into her when I went to talk to Traxler about tonight’s run.”

“Prescotts never did us no favors.” said Zeke.
 
“Best to keep away from them.”

Ethan was reminded of the social divide in Remington.
 
There was a very real and sometimes violent difference between certain families in town.
 
On one side were families like the Prescotts and the Butlers.
 
They all lived up on Buffalo Hill in their big houses behind their iron gates.
 
On the other side there were families like the Daltons.
 

The divide wasn’t about money.
 
The Daltons had a fair amount stashed away, not as much as the Prescotts, but enough to live without punching a clock.
 
The divide didn’t even come from how the money was earned.
 
It was a well-known fact that Prescotts got their start in bootlegging as well.
 
The real social divide came from buying respectability.
 
The Prescotts moved to Buffalo Hill and started buying their way into political parties.
 
They gave money to the right people and from that came extra protection from the cops.
 
Ethan knew that the real power in the community wasn’t the mayor or the chief of police but all the rich folks on that Hill.

Zeke checked his watch and said, “I don’t know where the hell that boy is, but we can’t wait any longer.
 
Ethan, you’re going to have to do the run.”

“I ain’t done it in years.
 
You got to give him another few minutes.”

Zeke stood up and tamped out his pipe.
 
“You forget how to drive?
 
You know we can’t be late.”

Ged stood up as well and brushed off the back of his pants.
 
“Come on, little brother, I know you still got it in you.
 
‘Sides, you do this and you’ll get Jackie’s cut.”

Ethan went to the Mazda and ran his hand over the hood, just like every time before going out on a run.
 
The metal was cool, but that would all change as the car sped through the Kentucky back roads.
 

Ged tossed him the keys and said, “We’re doing route number three tonight.
 
You remember which one that is?”

“Hell yes,” said Ethan.
 
“Down by Marshal’s field over to the river.”

The sun was nothing more than a faint glow below the horizon and Ethan watched as his father and brother started up the truck, then he climbed in behind the wheel of the car and started the engine.
 
Just as Jackie said, it ran as smooth as ever.
 

When they pulled out onto the paved road Ethan dialed up Ged’s mobile phone and put the call through the car’s speakers.
 
He’d need to communicate with them while having his hands free.

“You ready to do this, little brother?” said Ged.

“Try to keep up,” said Ethan.

Ethan heard his father tell the boys to get their asses in gear, so Ethan checked that no one was coming, flipped on his headlights, and got moving.
 
He was up to seventy miles an hour inside of ten seconds.

A coursed through Ethan, not just from the speed, but from knowing he was earning money by breaking the law and he knew when he got his cut it would feel better than ever punching a clock.
 
For a minute, he forgot all about the problems with his family and the history of the town and fell back in love with being a moonrunner.

“How you doing up there?” asked his brother through the car.

“All clear so far.
 
You’re good past Ellis Bluff.
 
Any problems?”

“The shine is riding fine, you just let me know if you run into trouble.”

Ethan felt completely invincible behind the wheel, he and the car were one mind, and the machine was just a natural extension of his body.
 
After rounding a curve, there was a stretch of straight road for two whole miles.
 
Ethan shifted the car into sixth gear and watched the needle rise above one hundred and twenty miles an hour.