The Initial Insult - Mindy McGinnis Page 0,75
Cecil turned his back. And then it had changed.
The cat was up. Not as fast as normal, no, but not exactly slow, either. Maybe I shouldn’t have yelled. Maybe it would’ve been better if the cat just got a swipe across his back, but I did. I yelled Cecil’s name, reloading my tranq gun at the same time. Cecil had turned—catching a slash right across the face. Luckily, the cat had been too wonked to calculate his leap correctly, and that’s all Cecil got . . . if lucky is the word for it.
Now he’s laid up in the trailer, a swath of bandages covering half his face. He’s drinking against the pain, half-thrilled some days because with that injury our Oxy supply just went through the roof, half-pissed the rest of the time because I won’t let him have as much as he wants.
I can’t. We need the money.
Insurance doesn’t cover wild-animal attacks when you actively make the choice to live with one. So, we’re kind of fucked. The one thing Cecil is real serious about is paying bills on time, because the last thing we need is people poking around the property, looking to see what we’ve got of value.
The answer is—just the one thing.
That one thing is half an acre of marijuana, and that’s not exactly something a collection agency is interested in. But the sheriff sure would be.
The Oxy has been a nice sideline, a decent enough trickle coming in through what Cecil calls his guys. Cecil has always got a guy. It’s how we procured Dee and Zee, and of course, the cat. Now the little pickup brings bottles, and the cage in the back has been replaced with a shotgun rack.
But not enough bottles.
Because now I’m the one who’s got a guy. He’s coming down the trail with some buddies, and I’ve got nothing to sell him because I wasn’t planning on Felicity Turnado needing to get high and handing over money to make it happen.
Shit. That’s the other thing. I slip off my backpack and tuck the wad of cash inside. These guys aren’t going to be happy. Neither will Cecil, if they decide to jump me and take the day’s earnings instead of the pills they came for.
If that’s all they do to me.
I straighten my shoulders and stick out my chin, ready for the response when my usual customer shows up, two guys I don’t know alongside him.
“Tress,” he says, giving me an up-nod, and I give it back.
“Bad news,” I tell him. “Store’s closed, unless you want weed.”
“Weed?” He gives half a laugh, looking at his friends, who follow suit. “We’re not after weed, you know that.”
“I do,” I say, keeping it as agreeable as I can. “But I can’t sell you what I don’t have.”
“Well, that’s some bullshit,” one of his friends says, and I nod, still trying to keep it on the up-and-up.
“I know it,” I tell them. “But I got cleaned out. Would you turn somebody away who wants to hand over their cash?”
I hold up my hands, like What’re you gonna do? It makes me look like I’m with them, that I totally get where they’re coming from, and maybe we were all in the same place to begin with—just a bunch of people scrambling for money. It also lifts my jacket enough to display the butt of the tranq gun jammed into my jeans.
One of his buddies sees it, and his eyes flick off it, nervously.
It looks enough like a real gun to do the trick. And acts enough like one, too, in a pinch. But it can only hold one dart at a time, and there’s three of them.
“So you want some weed, or what?” I ask, trying to push them toward a decision. If I don’t give them enough time to get angry, they might forget that they are, and settle for something less than what they came for.
“Let’s talk a sec, over here,” my customer says to his buddies. I nod, like that’s perfectly fine, and they go off a few paces, heads together. I tighten my backpack straps, ready to run if I need to, and rest my hand on the butt of the gun.
Their voices rise, low and muttering, but then there’s something else, footsteps—heavy ones—and I realize someone is coming down the path, running, by the sounds of it. I usually duck into the trees when this happens, but I don’t want to be off-trail if I suddenly have