Now DJ and Pastor were the only remaining elders. Pastor himself was the only remaining Founding Elder. DJ had taken his father’s place after Waylon’s untimely demise. To this day no one suspected he’d killed his father.
Because I’m damn good. He didn’t leave loose ends.
At least none that he’d known about until a month before, when he’d learned that the woman he’d thought he’d killed thirteen years ago was still alive. He could have sworn Mercy had been dead when he’d left her bleeding in front of a bus station.
Mercy Callahan. Gideon’s sister. Except that she’d been Mercy Burton when she’d lived in Eden. She’d been Ephraim’s wife until DJ had let her and her mother believe he was helping them escape. He’d wanted them to hope.
He should have shot both women in the woods outside Eden, but he’d been young and stupid and focused on his cartoon-villain revenge plot. Mercy’s mother was definitely dead, and he’d brought her body back, but he’d been interrupted in the middle of killing Mercy. Someone had come and he’d run, leaving her behind. He didn’t see how she could have survived the two bullets he’d put into her body, but she had.
Which left him a huge mess to clean up now. He’d told Pastor that he’d buried Mercy himself. If Pastor ever found out that she’d survived, DJ would lose everything.
So he had loose ends to take care of. He’d almost done so a month ago, but a second shot had damaged the nerves in his left arm, leaving him unable to shoot and bleeding profusely. He didn’t know who’d fired the shot, but when he found out, the fucker was dead. He’d barely made it back to the compound alive. He’d barely managed to stay conscious long enough to tell Pastor they had to move. Immediately.
Luckily Pastor trusted him implicitly. The old fool.
DJ had only let him live this long because the old fool was also a crafty fucker. He’d memorized the account numbers and passwords to the online bank accounts that held Eden’s fifty million bucks.
DJ needed those passwords before Pastor kicked the bucket. The old man was still in decent shape, though, goddammit. He was seventy-two, but his heart still beat soundly in his chest.
Coleen glanced at Pastor, technically her husband. Coleen had gone through three husbands in the thirty years she’d been at Eden. Two had died of natural causes. One had been murdered.
Not by my hand. Although DJ had longed to kill Ephraim’s brother, Edward, more times than he could count. No, the thanks for Edward’s death had to go to Gideon Reynolds. Gideon had claimed it was an accident, and DJ had believed it. At thirteen, Gideon had been a goody-goody. And strong enough even then to best Edward McPhearson in a fight.
When DJ met Gideon again, he’d kill him slowly, making sure it hurt especially badly. Partly for denying DJ the satisfaction of killing McPhearson himself, but mostly for escaping. For having a life, when DJ had been stuck in this hellhole, serving a narcissist with a god complex.
Even putting all of those reasons aside, Gideon would have had to die, simply for becoming a goddamn FBI agent who had apparently been searching for Eden since the day he escaped.
Pastor cleared his throat gently. “You seem agitated, DJ. Are you not healed enough to take this excursion?”
“I’m fine,” DJ snapped, then blew out a breath at the unamused look on Pastor’s face. It was never a good idea to make Pastor angry. “I’m sorry. It does hurt, but we need supplies.”
And I have loose ends to snip.
He needed to find Gideon and put him down like the dog he was. He needed to find Mercy and make her suffer the way she should have suffered thirteen years ago.
And then he’d find Amos Terrill, Eden’s former carpenter and Gideon and Mercy’s stepfather. The month before, that bastard had smuggled himself and his young daughter out of Eden in the back of DJ’s pickup truck. Which Amos had then stolen. Asshole.
Hopefully he’d find Amos in a graveyard somewhere, because one of DJ’s bullets had struck the man in the throat. He’d need to die eventually, because he’d found Gideon and Mercy and had probably updated them on everything about Eden since they had left. For that, if he was still alive, he’d pay.
And then I’ll come back, force Pastor to give me those damn account numbers once and for all. He’d stayed in the same toxic pattern, serving Pastor for far too long. He hadn’t realized how much time had passed until he’d been shot.
Nothing like a near-death experience to reset one’s priorities.
“It’s all right,” Pastor said evenly, making it clear that DJ’s outburst wasn’t all right. The fucker. “Will you locate little Abigail? She may have been taken into the foster care system.”
Because he’d told Pastor that he’d killed and buried Amos after finding him hiding in the back of his pickup when he’d stopped in the next town. He hadn’t mentioned Abigail at all. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was because she was a child and he hadn’t considered her a threat. Pastor had assumed she’d escaped.
“I’ll try,” he said.
Pastor’s lips pursed, a sign of his displeasure. “She’ll tell someone about us. Luckily she’s so young that no one will believe her, and luckily she’s the only one to have gotten away.”
For a career criminal, Pastor was damn gullible. He actually believed that all the escapees had been rounded up over the past few years. To be fair, DJ had used surrogate bodies, like his father had before him. When the escapee couldn’t be found, he found a random person—usually homeless or a runaway—about the same size and coloring, then killed them, mutilating the body so that it couldn’t be identified.
Pastor believed that no one had ever escaped Eden.
Pastor was an idiot.
“Luckily,” DJ agreed. “I’ll get the supplies, scout out a new location, and search for Abigail Terrill. Is there anything you’d like to add?”
Pastor shook his head. “No, but I would like you to fix the satellite dish before you go. I haven’t been able to get online since we moved here to the caves.”
A move that had been necessary because Amos Terrill had been thick as thieves with the FBI. If Ephraim hadn’t spilled his guts, it was almost certain that Amos had. So they’d moved the community to their ultimate safe space, a series of caves just outside the border of the Lassen National Forest.
It had been DJ’s storage spot for their drug harvest for years and his father’s before that, the rock shielding their stash from government eyes in the sky. Neither conventional satellite imagery nor infrared cameras could find them here.
“I’ll try,” DJ promised, but he was lying through his teeth. There was no way he was fixing the Internet. He hadn’t allowed Pastor online while his wounds were healing, claiming he was too weak to manage it. But the truth was that Pastor could not know that Mercy and Gideon were alive, and, given the shoot-out the month before, they could still be in the news. “But the dish was damaged in the last move.” DJ threw an accusatory glance at Coleen. “She didn’t pack it correctly.”