Busting Broncos Pt. 07

Then I remembered the car window breaking. It was no accident.

The nurses were clustered around Bennie and a doctor arrived at the same time that the sheriff appeared. While the doctor made his assessment, I filled the sheriff in on the afternoon's events.

When the doctor stood up from the table, the sheriff asked, "How is it?"

"Not really bad at all, considering." the doctor said "There's a lot of blood but the bullet passed straight through. There may be some muscle damage but I doubt it, he looks pretty healthy and he should heal okay. A couple of inches to the right, though, would have been a whole other story."

"Can I talk with him?" the sheriff asked.

"Sure. I'll come back and close him up when you're done; the bleeding actually helps clean the wound. You just come get me when you're done."

He ushered the nurses out and pulled the curtains around us. Bennie had his eyes closed and he looked pale but otherwise not too bad.

The sheriff stepped over to the table and cupped his hand over Bennie's cock and balls.

"Any damage I should know about?" the sheriff asked.

Bennie opened his eyes and smiled at us. "Nothing but my fucking shoulder, everything else seems to be intact."

"Praise the lord, then." the sheriff said. He rubbed Bennie's crotch and said, "There'd be a couple of real unhappy people in town if anything too severe happened to you."

He dropped his hand and became business like, drawing a pen and pad out of his belt. We both told him what we remembered happening while he took notes. When we were done, he didn't look pleased.

"There's probably nothing to find up there and whoever did this is long gone but I'll go up and take a look around. Is there anybody you can think of who'd want to shoot you?"

"Yeah, but nobody with the balls." Bennie replied.

The nurses came back in then, obviously wanting us to get out of their way. I walked with the sheriff down the hallway to where we saw the doctor was standing and told him that we were finished.

"We're going to keep him overnight, just as a precaution, but everything looks fine." the doctor said. "He's lucky he had so much muscle to take the impact."

The sheriff left and I went back down and peeked around the curtains. Bennie was sitting up and they were slathering what looked like iodine all over his shoulder and chest.

"I just wanted to let you know that I'll go and tell Ronnie and the guys what happened and where you are." I told him.

"Tell them to bring me some beers, my shoulder aches like a motherfucker." he replied.

"You'll tell them no such thing." the oldest nurse said to me, then turning to Bennie she said, "And you'll watch your language in front of my nurses."

Bennie just muttered, "Yes, ma'am."

Driving home the shock must have worn off because the more and more angry I became. By the time I pulled into our drive, I was at the boiling point. I got out of the car, slammed the door hard enough to break the hinges and stomped into the kitchen.

Tony had just taken another batch of cookies out of the oven. He looked up and took in my mood and the bloody hospital gown I was still wearing.

All he said was, "What happened?"

"Someone shot Bennie and I'll bet it was that little fucker Kevin." I said. "As soon as I lay hands on him I'm going to kick his nuts up into his throat."

I crossed the kitchen, intending to change clothes and then go find Kevin. As I got halfway across, Tony said, "Wait just a minute."

I ignored him and had reached the hallway when, in a voice I'd never heard before, Tony said, "Stop right there."

I turned around to look at him and in the same cold voice he said, "Sit down. Now. Listen to me."

I was so surprised that I did as I was told, sitting across from him at the table.

"Kevin expects you to come looking for him." Tony said in his normal voice. "Is Bennie alright?"

"He will be." I said.

"Good, then there is plenty of time. Kevin is smart, we need to be smarter."

"I need to beat his head into powder." I said.

"No, you have to play his game and outsmart him at it."

"I honestly don't know if I can." I said to Tony. "I've tried to think of ways to handle this but I can't come up with a plan. He needs to be stopped."

"He will be." Tony said. "Do you trust me?"

"Of course."

"Then do as I say. I have a plan, just do as I say."

I didn't feel good about the whole idea but I nodded my head in agreement.

"Good, now go take a shower and get that blood off of you. I'll bring you some cookies, you missed dinner."

In my room I phoned Ronnie and related the recent events. He said that he and the guys would go immediately to the hospital and someone would stay with Bennie night and day until he was released. I at least felt better about that.

A couple more days passed. Kevin seemed to have disappeared; no one I asked had seen him. I'm sure he knew that I was looking for him. Bennie was released from the hospital the day after the shooting and I'd been going over to his place in the morning and afternoon, just to reassure myself that he was doing okay. By the second day he was up and around with his arm in a sling.

I was coming back from visiting him one afternoon when I saw a car parked in the drive when I pulled in. I parked and went indoors.

Tony was sitting at the kitchen table and across from him sat Kevin.

Before I could say a word, Tony said, "There you finally are. I just about gave up on you."

"What's he doing here?" I asked, staring at Kevin.

"Just be nice." Tony said. He was staring at me with a clarity that I'd never seen on his face before. "I invited Kevin. It's time to stop all of this nonsense." I couldn't read the look on his face.

"How does that happen?" I asked.

"That's your surprise." Tony said, lapsing back into his usual self. "I packed a picnic lunch for the two of you and I want you to spend the afternoon together burying the hatchet."

"This," I thought to myself, "is Tony's plan? A picnic?"

"Just do as I ask." Tony said to me. That strange look had come back into his face. "Go, have a picnic and I bet everything will be worked out before you get back."

"Where are we supposed to have this picnic?" I asked.

"Why, at the old picnic grove." Tony said, lapsing once more into his bubble headed self. "Where else?"

Kevin was sitting staring at me the whole time, a smirk on his face.

"Come on, Andy, it'll be fun. Tony went to a lot of trouble."

I couldn't tell if he was being sarcastic or if he was serious.

Tony was bustling around the room and he handed a big basket up onto the table.

"Look, Kevin, I got all special food that you can eat safely. I even got a bag of your favorite cookies and some milk for dessert." He was proudly showing off all of the contents of the basket.

"That's really nice, really considerate to make so much effort." Kevin said. His voice had a snide note that made me want to grab him by the throat.

Tony handed him the basket and gave Kevin a hug and then he followed us out to Kevin's car. Kevin loaded the basket into the back seat while Tony leaned against the front fender, then walked around and got behind the wheel. I climbed into the passenger side and Tony looked down at me with that strange look on his face.

"Trust me, Andy, this is the best way." he said.

"Let's get this over with." I said to Kevin and we pulled away as Tony waved goodbye.

"That brother of yours is one of a kind." he said to me.

"Let's just make him happy." I replied.

As we drove I said, "A good friend of mine got shot the other day."

"Really? How is he?"

"A lot better than he could have been." I said. "It really pissed me off that someone would do that."

"You just never know who you can trust these days." Kevin replied. "Have you thought any more about my offer?"

"To move away with you and live happily ever after? I told you, Kevin, that's never going to happen."

"You can't blame me for hoping that you'd changed your mind." he replied.

We didn't speak again until we had pulled into the picnic grove. It was hard to identify it as such; it was a clearing in the middle of a bunch of trees and overgrowth that needed cut back. It looked like no one had been there in years.

"Well, this is appropriate. It's a shit hole." I said.

"Oh, Andy, it will be fun." Kevin said with that same sneering tone. "I've got blankets in the trunk, you unload the basket."

We got out and I opened the back door of the car at the same time as he opened the trunk. I was just standing back up when Kevin said, "Oh, look what I found."

When I looked at him, he was pointing a gun at me. I knew it was a .357 magnum.

"Carry the basket over to that tree." he said.

"Or what, you'll shoot me?"

"That's a definite option. Then I'd have to go back and kill Tony since he's the only one who knows we're together."

"If you hurt my brother I'll kill you."

"Not at this point." he said. "Just do as I tell you and no one will get hurt." He pulled a pair of handcuffs out of his jacket pocket and tossed them to me. "Put the cuff on one of your wrists and then put the basket over by that tree like I told you."

I closed one of the cuffs on my wrist and walked over to the tree.

"What do you intend? To kidnap me? To hold me hostage until I change my mind?"

"I intend for you to listen to what I have to say." Kevin said. "Now, sit down with your back against the tree, put your arms behind it and put the other cuff on."

"And if I don't?"

"First I shoot you and then I shoot Tony. Maybe a few other family members if they get in the way."

"You're just crazy enough to think you could get away with it." I said.

"I've gotten away with more than that. So have you."

I reasoned that if I did as he said, there might be some way out of this. Dead, I had no other option, so I sat down and put the cuff on my wrist. He walked over; the gun pointed at my head the entire time, and checked to see that I had really done as told. Then, he stood up and looked down at me.

"Jesus, you really are a dumbfuck, aren't you. If you had tried to fight me or something, I might at least have felt sorry for you but you're dumber than your retarded brother You actually trusted me."

He sat down next to the basket, well out of reach of my feet and put the gun in his pocket.

"Here's what's really going to happen, dumbass." he said. "I'm going to leave you here attached to this tree. Then, I'm going back to your happy little home and I'm going to kill your entire family, one at a time. Your brothers, your father, your uncle, your little hired hand...I think I'll even kill the horses. And when I'm done, I'm going to come back and tell you all about it. And then, I'm going to put this gun under your jaw and blow your brains out so it looks like you did it yourself. Then I'll take my handcuffs off of you and go home. Of course, I'll call the sheriff's office and report hearing gunfire out here, anonymously. When they go out to tell your family, they'll find them all massacred. Then, through floods of tears, I'll tell the sheriff how I'd been at your place a couple of times in the past few weeks and you were fighting with your family and how your father had asked you to leave.

You'll be famous for a little while. Murder/suicides make big news. Maybe they'll even dig into your past and find some things that will reinforce the idea. What do you think?"

"Someone will find out the truth." I said.

"You really are dumb; it's a real miracle you haven't been caught already. I burned my family up when I was just a baby and no one ever suspected. No one ever suspects me. No, I won't get caught. You'll get the blame, you fucking idiot. We could have gotten out of this town altogether. The two of us could have even gone into business and sold our services. We would have been unstoppable."

"You watch too many movies. I've been in the business; it's nothing like what you think."

"And yet, you're the one chained up."

He sat smirking at me. I wasn't about to show any reaction or beg him.

"Have you ever noticed how hungry it makes you when you're getting ready to kill someone?" he asked. "It must be some kind of life affirmation or something."

He poked through the picnic basket until he found the bag of cookies that Tony had bought for him and tore it open. Then he opened one of the pints of milk. He took two of the cookies out of the bag and made a sandwich of them, popped them into his mouth and began to chew. He washed them down with a gulp of milk.

Immediately, his eyes bulged and a look of panic came on his face. He grabbed his throat as his face began to turn red. He felt in his jacket pocket, and then began clawing at his throat. His feet were drumming up and down against the ground. His eyes were straining in the sockets and his face was darkening, going from red to purple to almost black. With his hands still clutched around his throat, he fell over on his side, rolled onto his back, kicked his legs a few times and then lay still.

I sat there, dumbstruck, looking at him. I was aware of movement and when I looked up, my brother Tony stepped out of the undergrowth with a rifle cradled in his arm.

"Tony?" I said.

He walked over and looked down at Kevin.

"Is he dead?" I asked.

Tony kicked him in the side and then said, "Either dead or just about." He picked up the cookie bag and said, "People are so stupid. They see that the top opening is intact but they never turn the bag to the bottom to see if it has been tampered with." He turned the bag bottom toward me.

"You planned all of this this?"

"I told you I had a plan. I had to buy unrefined walnut oil from some hippie-dippy organic company on line to set it in motion. The refined kind removes the proteins that people like Kevin are allergic too. Then I had to make passable cookies so that he'd eat them without noticing anything. That's what I've been working on."

He stood up and walked over to where I was sitting.

"This would be a good opportunity for me to pay you back for the scar on my head, wouldn't it." he said.

I didn't reply, afraid of what was coming.

"God, you should see your face.' Tony laughed. He walked over to Kevin and went through his pockets until he found the cuff keys, then unlocked them from my wrists.

"Did you hear what he said?" I asked as we both looked down at Kevin.

"Sure. I wasn't surprised. He always was sneaky but he's never had very good impulse control. Should I leave his antidote needle here or take it with us?" He held up the Epi-pen. "I slipped it out of his jacket pocket when I hugged him. Let's take it; it will be more feasible that way."

I was unsure even what to say to Tony, so I just said, "You just killed him."

"He had it coming, don't you think?"

He looked at me with that fully conscious look I'd seen earlier.

"It must be something in our genes." he then said and started to walk away. "You're carrying the picnic basket; I've done enough work today. And don't forget that bag of cookies, I can feed them to my Elderlies this weekend, they love ginger snaps. Oh, I almost forgot."

He walked over to the front fender of Kevin's car and took a small object out from the wheel well.

"I had to stick this on earlier, I was afraid he'd go somewhere other than here. It's a tracking device I bought on Amazon. It works on your phone. Pretty neat, huh?"

"What's the rifle for?" I asked.

"If he'd tried to hurt you I would have had to shoot him. It would have been harder to explain but I didn't have much choice."

I felt chastened in all sorts of ways so I silently picked up the food and followed Tony back through the brush to where he'd parked.

We got to the car and I loaded in the basket, and then took the passenger seat. We drove for a few miles and I finally managed to say, "You saved my life. You saved all of us."

"So? You'd do the same thing." he replied.

We drove a little farther and I asked, "Why do you always act like you're a space cadet? You're obviously not."

Tony gave a wry smile and said, "Self-protection?"

I didn't understand and he could tell from my expression.

"Steve used to beat on you every time you came to visit. Who do you think he beat on the rest of the year? That bastard made my life a living hell until I learned to just act dumb and follow his lead. I'd still like to beat the fucking shit out of him."

It really pissed me off that Tony had gone through what I'd gone through, only more and longer. The accumulated anger of the day bubbled up in me.

"That fucker deserves to be beaten for what he did to us."

"He's always been bigger than me or I would have." Tony said. He was getting angry, too.

"There are two of us, now." I told him. "We should both beat the shit out of him."

We were home and Tony was pulling into the drive.

He looked at me and said, "You're right. Let's both kick the shit out of him once and for all."

He stopped the engine and jumped out of the car with me right behind him. When we reached the kitchen door, Steve was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and Will was standing at the sink.

Tony stepped across the room, said, "You motherfucker." and punched Steve full force in the side of the head. Steve fell over sideways in his chair and the table turned on its side. Will turned pale and slipped out of the door behind me.

Tony was now straddling Steve's chest and pinning his arms to the floor with his knees while swinging his fist back and forth, hitting Steve in the face with one side of his fist and then backhanding him with the other. I couldn't get close enough to punch Steve so I settled for grabbing his foot and twisting his leg as hard as I could.

"You son of a bitch, you picked on us our whole lives. Why did you have to be such a bastard?" Tony said as he slugged him again.

Steve had been open mouthed with shock but he heard what Tony said and he suddenly began to cry with loud sobs.

"I was jealous, alright?" he sobbed.

Tony stopped his fist in midair and turned to me. I stopped twisting his leg, too.

"Jealous? Of what?" Tony asked, clearly puzzled.

"Jealous of you two. I was always jealous of you."

"Why would you be jealous of us?" Tony asked. He was sitting on top of Steve, looking down at him.

"Because you were always the favorites." Steve said, still sobbing. "It was always, 'Isn't Tony the prettiest baby?' and 'Isn't Tony the sweetest child?' No one ever called me cute."

"That's because you were a brat." Tony said.

"Even later, when we were in school, everything was so easy for you. I knew that you were smart, all you had to do was read something once and you learned it. I had to struggle with everything. And you grew up so pretty. You had everything."

Tony relaxed on top of Steve and said, "But I always wanted to be you." He had started to cry, too.

"And you never had any reason to be jealous of me." I said.

"Like fuck." Steve replied. I crawled up the where Tony sat and looked down at Steve.

"You had Mom." he said. "She hated me so much that she left us rather than put up with me. She didn't want anything to do with me."

Now I started tearing up as I said, "You weren't why she left. Uncle Cody told me all about it. She walked in on him and daddy in the hayloft and saw what they were doing. She gave daddy an ultimatum, either Cody left or she would. Daddy said he couldn't make that kind of choice and the next day while he was working, she packed up a few things and took off."

"It wasn't me?" Steve said.

"No, not at all. It had nothing to do with you. Although later, you were such a little asshole whenever she saw you that she finally gave up." I was crying full blast by now. "Is that why you were jealous of me?"

"I had all kinds of reasons. You were always the smartest; you did all of the sports, won all of the contests. Daddy always said that he'd never have to worry about you, you'd always come out on top. And I was just an idiot; all I could ever do is ride a horse. I always felt like two cents."