For obvious reasons, considering his reaction to me even being there, I did not share about the Evie-hacking portion of my master plan. Fortunately (now), she’d refused to do it, so it wasn’t like I was keeping anything from him.
Exactly.
“You’re right, something’s off,” he confirmed.
“Well, yeah,” I said. “I mean, they’re hardly Scientology with millions of members around the globe. The multiple-wives thing is screwy. The money thing, though, is fishy.”
“They have a lot of members.”
I shook my head. “It’s always been small. Dad says—”
“Pepper, sweetheart, they have a lot of members. And one of the reasons they do is because your sister is their top recruiter. She’s your sister, so it might not have registered on you, and she’s not as gorgeous as you are, but she isn’t hard to look at. And she’s not the only one. Higgins has a good number of hot babes dragging mostly men in, and it isn’t the promise of being closer to God that’s bringing them in. It’s the access to hot babes and approval direct from God to have however many you want under your thumb and in your bed that’s bringing them in.”
“I can’t…I don’t…” I couldn’t spit out the depth of my disbelief.
“It’s probably not a surprise to you that there are a lot of losers out there who will find God in the idea of having four or five wives that look like your sister,” he continued. “But that’s not the primary hustle. That isn’t going to get you seventeen million bucks. We just haven’t had time to find out what the primary hustle is.”
“How are they getting hot babes to do that?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“Have you seen Reverend Clyde? I mean, the dude is hardly Pierce Brosnan.”
Auggie’s perfect lips quirked. “Pierce Brosnan?”
“Ask any breathing female on this planet if they’d do Pierce Brosnan, right now, at his current age. The answer will be, ‘yes.’ Some might whisper it, but others would scream it.”
Auggie started chuckling.
“Including you?” he asked.
“I’d scream it, but I think we made enough of a scene while you and the boys thwarted my master plan.”
He kept chuckling but queried through it, “Master plan?”
I didn’t answer that.
I pointed out, “If this hot-babes situation is true, you do know Hattie is perfect for undercover work on this operation, don’t you?”
He was smiling but also shaking his head.
“I won’t even tell Axl you suggested that. He wasn’t real hip on her being in the car with you, seeing as we all knew you were up to something. He was even less hip on her hauling her ass out of it and heading to that building. No way is Hattie going undercover.”
This was probably true. I’d noted that the girls’ guys were protective.
“Well, my family is always asking me to go to church…” I muttered, trailing off thoughtfully, since this was actually a cool idea.
I mean, not to use my mom’s illness to uncover some possibly felonious behavior of Reverend Clyde.
But it’d be the perfect excuse to tentatively (albeit fakely) come back into the fold.
Two birds, one stone, I’d be able to spend time with my mom and maybe ferret out some good intel.
As I was contemplating my new master plan, I was also lightly rubbing the stitching on the collar of Auggie’s t-shirt.
I should have been paying attention to his face, because when I did that, I saw he’d turned into a Greek god statue wearing kickass wraparounds.
A beautiful one.
But a pissed-off one.
“What?” I asked.
“Are you insane?” he asked back.
“No,” I answered.
“You’ve got a kid, Pepper,” he reminded me.
“Uh…yeah. But I said I’d go back into the fold. Not Juno. No way for Juno.”
“What I mean is, you’ve got a kid and you don’t need anything happening to you,” he clarified.
“Anything happening to me? What could happen?”
“I’ll try another prompt since maybe you didn’t get what I meant by the other one, baby,” he said gently. “Waco?”
I felt the hair on my arms stand on end at a repeat of this incident that had a very unhappy ending, and my fingers gripped his shoulders.
“Are you telling me what’s happening at the church is dangerous?”
“How about no phone date tonight,” he suggested. “How about I come over with some takeout and we talk.”
“No, Augustus,” I denied and smacked his arm for good measure. “That’s an important question. I can’t sit on it, waiting for you to bring over crab rangoon and orange chicken with everything fried rice from your choice of Chinese place.”
Auggie grinned again at my completely unveiled order for food for our date adjustment.
And then he got serious.
“Pepper, shit gets real when money and God are involved. For Higgins, my guess is, it’s money. For his followers, it’s God. There is no way in hell that church has that kind of cash legally. Even if they do have a number of members. Something’s very wrong. If you threaten it, Higgins is gonna activate his disciples. He’s going to be protecting what he has that he does not want to give up. They’re proceeding in the name of God. Both are volatile. Together, they’re radioactive.”