Shane (Mallick Brothers 1)

I pulled up in front of the building an hour later, jumping out and grabbing my crowbar again, heading not to my building, but the junkyard next door. One of the things that needed to be fixed was the shitty fence separating my land from Carl’s and his rabid beasts. I rapped on his front door with the crowbar, shaking my head at the dogs who charged the fence toward me, mouths snarling, foam flying everywhere. I understood wanting to keep shitheads off your property, but they were a public menace.

“Shane?” he asked, eyes immediately going to my crowbar, making him stiffen. A Mallick at your doorstep with a pry bar was never a good thing. And while we had definitely done business with Carl before, he wasn’t currently in our debt.

Carl looked exactly like his name and exactly like the kind of man you could see running a junkyard. He was in his forties with a protruding beer belly that he barely kept contained by a tight white wifebeater. His hair was stringy and unkempt around his meat-oily face. His seventies porno ‘stache was fucking criminal.

“You need to get your beasts away for a while. I’m taking down that fence before one of my tenants gets rabies.”

“Shane, man, it’s not like I can go out there and get a leash on…”

“I don’t want to hear your fucking problems,” I cut him off. “Get your dogs put away or I will call in the SPCA and see what they have to say about them living outside year round with no shots. They’ll get taken out of here and you know what will happen to them in a shelter. They’re vicious and they’ll get put down. Then you’ll have nothing to guard your shityard from thieves. So get your fucking dogs away in the next twenty, or we’re going to have problems.”

With that, I headed back to my truck, throwing down the wheelbarrow and filling it up with the posts, steel fence sections, buckets, and cement for grounding the posts. I watched through the green shit in the chainlink fence as Carl came out with a tranq gun and shot his dogs who didn’t even whimper at the impact. Ten minutes later, they were all passed out and he moved out and dragged them into a garage at the side of his property. He offered me a salute and I went to work.

It was a few hours later when I smelled cigar smoke and looked over to see Barney standing over me. “‘Sup, Barney?” I asked, swiping my arm over my forehead to wipe the sweat away.

“You know that girl hates these dogs,” he said casually. “Told me she was mauled once. Got stitches and all that. When she gets out of her car and hears them, she runs her pretty self to the door. The door that doesn’t lock,” he said pointedly.

I gave him a smile, liking that she had someone in the building looking out for her, even if it was an old arthritic forger. I motioned over toward my pile of supplies to the new door I had laying there. It wasn’t some piece of shit hollow wood door. It was a security door with a dozen internal metal bars that would mean a fuckuva lot more work for me to install it. “Got that covered too,” I said.

“You’ve seen her, right?”

“She works for my sister-in-law,” I said with a nod, standing to go grab a bottle of water.

“Pretty girl like that with no man to watch over her.”

“I’m watching over her,” I said without thinking.

What the fuck?

I wasn’t watching over her. That was ridiculous.

Except that, I was.

I spent several thousand dollars to fix up my apartment building. For no other reason than her living there.

“Good. That’s good. She needs a man like you.”

“Why’s that?” I asked, genuinely curious. Barney, for all his years in the underbelly, had keen eyes and good instincts. I wanted to know what he thought of Lea.

“Because she’s not what she appears. Pretty? Sure. Self- sufficient, hard working, smart mouthed, and tough? Yes. But she’s something else too.”

“You gonna tell me or what?”

He shrugged his frail shoulders, taking a long drag of his cigar. “It’s the little things.”

“Such as?”

“Such as the way she looks around the lot when she gets out of her car.”

“It’s a shitty neighborhood. Any woman would check around.”

“Nah, not like her. And she stiffens when she hears a bike. And she doesn’t get mail. Not even an advert. Nothing. Now, I’ve made fake IDs for every kid in this area. And I’ve made passports to get crime lords out of the country before they get hauled off to jail. But you know who comes to me the most?”

“Who?”

“People who get themselves into shit that they can’t untangle themselves from with their identities intact.”