“Whaddr you doin’ here?” The words were slurred together and he stumbled again, one beefy hand slapping onto the thin wall of the trailer to keep him upright.

I sighed heavily as I stared at him through narrowed eyes. He was too drunk for anything I was going to have to say to get through. The guy before him had taken one look at the gun and the look on my face and pissed himself in terror. I hardly had to utter a word for him to understand he had picked the wrong kid to mess with. He was curled in a ball on the floor of his pitiful one-room apartment in tears when Jules and his boys arrived right behind me with a warrant for his arrest. He was actually the one that gave up the location of this hidden trailer, deep in the valley and almost impossible to find. Luckily I had more time to make a point with him, since words would be wasted.

I sighed again and reached for the weapon. I made it disappear into the back of my pants and rose to my feet. The other man’s eyes went up … and up some more as he took in my height and the set of my shoulders as I crossed my arms across my chest. I had to ignore the pull in my still healing shoulder. It was going to have to suffer through far greater strain by the time I was done with this guy.

“My little brother isn’t going to be little for very long.” I watched his Adam’s apple bob up and down as he tried to straighten. I had several inches on him, but he was stocky and there was no telling how fear and alcohol would make him react.

A sneer worked across his face. Hatred was ugly. Hatred for no reason was silly. I felt my lips twitch and took a step to the side as he suddenly lunged at me.

“Get outta my house!” The words were furious and loud but they lost some of their power when he hit the edge of the already trashed coffee table and was thrown off balance. I shot a hand out so I could latch on to the collar of his T-shirt and used his momentum to drag him towards me.

He struggled in my grasp, hands lifting to pry at my wrists, but I was bigger, angrier, and sober.

“You were looking for me, you found my brother instead. You put a beating on a kid for a few bucks and because you’re a racist fuck. You wanna lay all that shit on someone, you lay it on someone that’s the same size as you so they can fight back. You lay it on a grown-up who has the experience to know the world is full of assholes like you.”

The hands continued to claw at mine as his eyes went wide and his stank breath started to wheeze in and out of lips that were making sounds but not words. I gave him a shake that snapped his teeth together and hefted him up so that just the toes of his boots were touching the filthy floor of the trailer.

“If I was a different kind of man, if I was a man like you, you’d have a bullet between your eyes. You understand the point I’m making?”

The man’s watery eyes blinked at me slowly as he tried to jerk himself free. “It weren’t like that.” His words were garbled because of my hold, so I gave him a shove backwards that sent him flying across the narrow living space. His arms pinwheeled and faltered but nothing could stop him as his big body hit the wall opposite me. He landed with a thud and then slowly slid to the floor with his legs extended in front of him.

“I didn’t want to get dragged into that mess with those boys from Sassy’s but I didn’t have a choice.” He rubbed his elbow and scowled up at me. “I knew that kid wasn’t the right target, but those idiots wouldn’t listen to me. They were so fired up to get some cash and to make some kind of fucked up point.” He shook his head and rubbed his eyes as I continued to loom over him, hands on my hips. “The sheriff’s son … the fucking sheriff. Doesn’t matter what color he happens to be, you don’t go messing with a lawman’s kin. Idiots, all of them.”

I cocked my head a little bit and narrowed my eyes. “Why did you go along with it if you knew you had the wrong guy?”

He threw his head back and let out a dry and bitter laugh. “Drink too much. Gamble too much. Don’t got any family or any money. Got myself in deep with Sassy and her crew. It was go along with the lynching or get myself a new asshole torn. Do I look like a man that makes good choices?” He threw his hands up in the air and let them fall. “I ain’t got nothing good in this life, so I let all the bad stuff take over.”

I stared at him in silence for a long minute realizing I’d been really close to being in the same boat. It got way too easy to ignore the scrapes of good when they came because the bad felt so consuming and encompassing. I knew moving forward I had to make the effort to focus on what mattered and not what may or may not be lurking on the horizon. My stance shifted as my phone vibrated in my pocket letting me know that it was time to cut out before Jules’s boys showed up to issue the arrest warrant.

I stepped over his legs and gave him one last look as he stared up at the stained, dented ceiling of the trailer. “Goes without saying that you end up in a situation where you have to come after a member of my family again it isn’t going to end well for you.”

His eyes rolled to mine. “Don’t think it’s gonna end well this time either.”

He wasn’t wrong, but I didn’t have even an ounce of sympathy to waste on him.

I made my way down the back embankment behind the trailer and down to a little creek that ran behind it. Jules’s truck was parked behind a moss-covered outcropping of rocks and well out of the sight of the incoming cavalry. He was going to chew my ass when he saw the mud caked on the tires but I figured when I told him I was giving serious consideration to taking his suggestion and walking in his footsteps it would smooth things over.