Excerpt of Included!

DOWN RIVER“Hurry up,” he said.I thumbed five bills out of the wallet, folded them, handed them over. Hehunched his shoulders and shoved them in the front pocket of his jeans. Hegave me an address. “It’s a shit-box skinny out in the middle of nowhere. The addressis good, but it’s a bitch to find.”He started to turn. “How did he manage to pay off thirty thousand dollars?”I asked.“What do you care?” His voice was mostly sneer.I held out one more bill. “Another hundred,” I said.He rolled back, snatched the bill, and leaned in close. “We track himdown. We mess him up a bit. Eight days later he shows up with thirty thousandin cash. Brand-new bills, still in the sleeves. He tells us that’s it, he’s done gambling.We never hear from him again. Not a whiff. Not a peep. All cleaned-upand proper.”The drive out of Charlotte was a sunbaked nightmare. I kept the windowsdown because I needed wind on my face, eighty miles an hour of hard NorthCarolina air. It kept me sane as heat devils twisted the horizon and my insidesroiled with the cold hard fact of my brother’s deceit. He was a gambler, adrunk, and a stone-faced liar. Three hundred thousand dollars was a mint ofmoney and there was only one way he could hope to put his hands on it. Thatwas if my father sold. Jamie’s stake would be ten percent, call it a million five.Coin to spare.And he had to be desperate. Not just to save himself a beating like Danny’s,but also to keep the truth from my father, who’d already bailed him out once.But how desperate was he?Just how black was his soul?I tried to stay calm, but could not escape one simple fact. Somebody attackedGrace, beat her half to death to make a point. Tell the old man to sell.That’s what the note said. It was Jamie or Zebulon Faith who did it. One or theother. Had to be. Please, I prayed. Don’t let it be Jamie.We would not survive it.245