“D-Dad . . . ?” she whispered.
“Pop-Tart,” Salty said, his voice cracking, tears filling his eyes.
Salty started running toward her, not even realizing P.G. was unlocking his handcuffs.
Plowing through the plastic slats, he embraced his daughter, Melinda, pulling her close, one of the cuffs still hanging from his wrist. The impact knocked her scarf from her head, tumbling across her shoulder. Salty closed his eyes, hating to see her bald, but still thinking she was the most beautiful girl in the world. “Pop-Tart,” he repeated, starting to sob. “I’m here, I’m here, I’m right—”
Click.
Salty heard it before he felt it. Something cold at his neck.
He started to turn. P.G. pushed harder, pressing the barrel of her gun into the back of Salty’s head. There was another click as Titus did the same to Salty’s daughter, pointing his gun at her pale bald skull.
Salty took a breath through his nose, slowly raising his hands in the air. He knew things had been going too well. “This is why everyone hates the feds,” he said.
“Y’know, as a white nationalist piece of trash, you really shouldn’t look so shocked that you bring out the worst in people,” P.G. said. “Now step away from your daughter.”
“Titus . . . both of you . . . Be smart. Whatever you want, I can pay. I’ve got money.”
“We know you do, jackass. Just like we know what you two were planning for this little meeting—since it clearly wasn’t just about her cancer. Now . . .” P.G. cocked her gun and gripped the trigger, pressing it even harder against Salty’s head. “Titus and I have a proposition for you.”
76
Grafton, New Jersey
Today
“So it was a lemon drop,” Roddy said.
“Lemme say it like this,” Elijah began, getting up from the table with his empty water glass and heading for the wall of taps. “Lemon drops always smell like lemon drops.”
“I’m lost,” Zig said, taking his own sip of beer. “What the hell’s a lemon drop?”
“Special delivery—when you try to sneak something to someone, especially something sweet,” Roddy explained, glancing out the front window, eyeing the twentysomethings up the block, who were still zipping on scooters up and down the street. “Looks like a normal meeting—two guys saying hi—but what you don’t see is that as they go in for the bro hug, they pass a note, or a phone . . . In jail once, we caught a mom trying to pass her son a diamond stud earring that she was hiding in her mouth.”
Elijah approached the tap on the far left, closest to their table, and there was a beep beep as he poured a cider named Suicider. “It was the same with Salty and his dying daughter.”
“So the daughter really had cancer?”
Elijah finished his pour and didn’t say a word until he returned to the table. “Stage four leukemia. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy,” he finally explained, glancing over his own shoulder for a quick scan of the bar. Everyone was lost in their own conversations. “But that night at Grandma’s Pantry, Salty didn’t give two turds about his daughter’s cancer. His real goal was his very own lemon drop. As he hugged her goodbye, he was going to secretly whisper in her ear the bank account number for the twenty-two million in arms profits he’d been hiding from the government.”
“Son of a bitch,” Zig said.
“Literally and figuratively. According to the warehouse’s security cameras, at 11:43 p.m., all four of them met up inside the walk-in freezer. Six minutes after that, the freezer door opened. Salty and his daughter were both dead at the Marshals’ hands. Multiple bullet wounds to the head and chest.”