“You better hope you’re faster if you hit me.”
Colt ginned.
“Can’t sleep?”
His smile faded.
“Shit man, that got nuts.”
He whistled. “Yeah, sure did.”
“I can’t let tomorrow happen.”
He looked grim. “Same. We can’t allow that.”
“The fuck are we going to do?”
My friend shook his head as he cracked his own beer. “We could take off. Grab her, steal a truck, and just fucking bounce, but then there’s Gramps.”
I nodded, frowning.
“I mean, that old man can take care of himself if it comes down to it, but—”
“But we can’t do that.”
He nodded.
“Plus we’d be on the run forever, and that can’t last.”
Colt dropped his eyes to the ground, his jaw tight. “They can’t get their hands on her man. I’ll lose my fucking mind if they do.”
“So we can’t run.”
He sighed. “And we can’t let them take her.”
We glanced at each other.
“Fight?”
I whistled lowly. “That’s a stacked fucking deck. There’s what, ten other guards here besides us? Plus Jeb, plus the five bosses from Jersey. Plustheirguys.”
Colt grinned. “Two to twenty-five. Not bad. We’ve had worse, right?”
I rolled my eyes.
“The other guards wouldn’t fight. Shit, half of them are here ‘cause of the same sort of shit deal we are.”
“Colt, I love you brother, but those are shit odds, even still.”
We drank our beers, drank another, then a third. Eventually we found our beds, but I stayed awake.
I couldn’t let them have—
And then I froze.
I started to think about our gramps, and about the time he’d taken us hunting out on the prairie.
“You gotta watch out for rattlesnakes, Romeo.”