Title: Hostile Takeover, Hillbilly Style (2/10)
Author: Romantique
Email:
Classification: Raylan/Winona Drama/Romance
Rating: T for coarse language, violence, suggestive sexual situations. No worse than the show.
Summary: A brand new Justified fan, this is my first Justified fic. What happens next?
Disclaimer: SPOILERS: Takes place immediately after 'Bloody Harlan.'
Legal: These characters do not belong to me. I'm just a fan and have not made a dime. Please email me to obtain permission to post.
"Hey, Raylan? Are you in there?" a voice yelled from the other side of the door. "It's Boyd Crowder."
"Just a minute," Raylan yelled back.
Winona scrambled to find her robe, as Raylan struggled to regain his composure. He slowly sat up on the side of the bed and, even more slowly, reached down to the floor for his sweatpants and stepped into them. Then, he grabbed a gun from the top drawer of the nightstand and turned off the safety. Art had taken his service weapon at the scene of the shooting, as was standard procedure after any shooting involving an employee of the Marshal Service. With his finger poised on the trigger, he made his way to the door in his sweats and bare feet, and quietly slid the unlocked chain on its track.
Being shot had a way of making a man become even more cautious than usual.
Once the door was chained, he opened the door a couple of inches and peered out to see who was there. It was, indeed, Boyd.
"You alone?" Raylan asked.
"Yeah, it's just me," Boyd said.
Hoping Boyd was telling the truth, Raylan unhooked the chain and opened the door only a little more, allowing Winona time to head for the privacy of the bathroom. He decided it best not to invite Boyd inside.
"How are you comin' along?" Boyd asked upon seeing his sometimes old friend and sometimes nemesis, referring to his recent gunshot wound.
"I'm comin' along," Raylan answered, taking a trained look around the parking lot and seeing it was all clear. He held his gun, at the ready, with his left hand behind the door. "How's Ava?" he asked, referring to her gunshot wound, as well.
"She's comin' along, too," Boyd answered. "Thank you for askin'. She sends you her best."
"As do I to her," Raylan acknowledged Ava's good wishes by nodding.
Atypically barefoot and bare chested, it was obvious Raylan was not ready to receive company.
Then, looking up at Boyd with a glance from the side, Raylan asked in an irritated tone, "Boyd, why are you here?"
"I'm sorry to bother you, but the hospital said you'd been released." Boyd was his usual polite self.
As a sunbeam hit Raylan square in the eyes, he squinted and responded with a cool, "You could have called."
"I'm lookin' for Arlo," Boyd quickly explained.
Raylan shook his head with a hint of irritation. "I haven't seen Arlo in over a week."
"Didn't he visit you in the hospital?" Boyd asked, with a tone of disbelief in his voice.
"C'mon. This is Arlo we're talkin' about," Raylan tried to make light of his relationship with his father. "Why are you lookin' for him?"
Boyd explained, "Word has it that Dickie Bennett is in jail makin' all kinds of noise. He's claimin' now that Mags and Doyle are deceased, he's the legal heir of the money from the sale of the easement rights to Black Pike. Not to mention, he's tryin' to run the Harlan weed business from inside a jail cell."
"Is that right?" Raylan's voice sounded as disinterested as he was.
Boyd would not allow Raylan's disinterest to deter him from the reason for his visit. "But then, I heard Arlo say that Dickie becomin' the next 'King Pin of Harlan County' would happen over Arlo's dead body."
The disinterested expression on Raylan's face did not change.
Boyd continued, "Yeah, Arlo said somethin' about that paperwork that he and Mags signed, that transferred ownership of the Indian Line property, would somehow up and disappear. That would make the deal Mags made with Black Pike on behalf of herself and all those land owners she represented become null and void. Then, Black Pike would move in on Dickie and the others under eminent domain and leave all of them with nothin'."
Raylan looked Boyd square in the eye, pulled his right lower eyelid down with his index finger to expose his eyeball and dryly said, "Do you see anybody in here who gives a shit?"
"Well, you should," Boyd insisted, smiling at Raylan's little joke. "Because if Arlo is the rightful owner of the Indian Line property ... with the Bennetts out of the way, you're gonna be involved ... especially if Arlo sells everyone out. He would do that, sell out all his neighbors in order to rub Dickie out. That would make Arlo, and you, 'Public Enemy Number 1 and Son.' You see, Raylan, no matter how far you try to distance yourself from your father, you're still a Givens, whether you want to be one or not."
"Not accordin' to Arlo," Raylan countered about being a Givens. "And that's not true about me bein' involved," he went on. "I don't have anything to do with Arlo's businesses, if that's what you want to call them. At the Marshal Service, we refer to them mostly as Ponzi schemes and instruments of tax evasion and racketeerin'."
"Federal law is the least of our worries. With Coover, Mags, and Doyle gone, and Dickie sittin' in jail, there's a power vacuum in Harlan. We need to find Arlo, or all hell's about to break loose." Boyd's tone was foreboding.
The marshal clenched his jaw at the thought of having to go look for his daddy. "Right now, I'm not technically a marshal. I'm out on medical leave."
Raylan told himself that this was not his problem. Was he trying to convince Boyd or himself?
"Marshal or not, medical leave or not ... that doesn't have anything to do with the winds of change that are about to descend upon us all here in Harlan County," Boyd pontificated, as if he was reading a prediction straight from the Bible.
Raylan's eyes narrowed, and he glared at Boyd. His hand tensed up around the gun handle, his finger ready on the trigger. "Is that supposed to be some kind of a threat?"
"No, not a threat," Boyd glared back. "It's a fact. As bad as your family becoming 'Public Enemy Number 1' could be, you'd better hope that Arlo's right about the money. Dickie just put out a jailhouse contract on Arlo's head. And yours, too." Then, Boyd tightened his jaw. "You should have let me kill him when I had the chance."
"You know I couldn't do that," Raylan reminded him. "He was my only link to Loretta."
"Loretta's fine now," Boyd reminded Raylan. "I'd like nothin' better than to put the word out on the street, today, that Dickie is tellin' all kinds of tall tales about his worthless estate. That and to take back the weed business. If you're not a marshal at the moment, I'd appreciate it if you didn't remember a word of anything I just told you."
Looking away in disgust, Raylan took in a deep, painful breath of exasperation and slowly let it out. "Give me five minutes," he said.
Then, he closed the door. As he turned around and relaxed his trigger finger, he noticed that the overhead lights in the room had been turned on, and Winona was standing there in her robe, just outside the bathroom door.
"How much of that did you just hear?" Raylan locked eyes with hers. He did not particularly want to repeat the conversation he had just had with Boyd, one he wished she had not heard.
"Enough," she said, wrapping her arms around herself to keep her bathrobe closed. "So much for deserving to be happy."
A little while later at Arlo's house ...
It was dark by the time Boyd and Raylan arrived at Arlo's place. No one answered the door when Raylan knocked. He then checked the door knob and found that the door was open. Slowly, carefully, he placed his hand over his gun as he opened the screen door, and then the door, and stepped inside. Arlo was sitting there, in the front room, with a sawed-off shotgun in the ready position.
After being shot, seeing a loaded gun pointed at him gave Raylan a bit of a start. He was surprised at his reaction.
Steadying himself and his breathing, he then calmly asked, "Arlo. How are you doin' there?"
"I see that bullet didn't get the better of you. You're a lucky son-of-a-beetch, you know that? To come outta that gun fight in one piece," the older man acknowledged his son's presence.
"I'm like a cat with nine lives, or so I've been told," Raylan returned the banter.
"Who's that there with you?" Arlo sensed his son was not alone.
"That would be Boyd Crowder," Raylan said.
At that moment, from the porch outside the screen door, Boyd said, "Hey, Arlo."
After Arlo returned Boyd's greeting, Raylan asked Boyd if he could have a few minutes with Arlo, alone. Boyd said that would be fine and left to wait in his truck.
Once they were alone, Raylan said to his father, "Boyd stopped by my place to let me know Dickie Bennett is claimin' he's now the sole heir of the money his momma received from the big land sale from Black Pike. That and ... he's tryin' to control the weed business from a jail cell." Then, after a beat, he added, "Oh, yeah. And word on the street is Dickie put a contract out on you. And on me, too."
"That's bullsheet," Arlo responded. "You got to have big cash to put out a contact, even from jail. Dickie don't have any to speak of."
"And just how do you know how much cash Dickie has or doesn't have?" Raylan raised a skeptical eyebrow.
Arlo laughed. "Because I'll be damned if I let that little weasel, Dickie Bennett, take over Harlan."
"And exactly how do you think you could prevent that from happenin' or not?" Raylan skillfully tried to get his talkative father to talk a little more.
"I'm tellin' you nothin', marshal," he glared at his son with steely eyes. "The less you know, the better off we'll both be."
Raylan took a hard swallow. "I'm not a marshal right now. I'm out on medical leave. They confiscated my service piece after the shootin', and I'll have to be reinstated and re-qualify for my gun when the doctors say it's alright for me to return to work." He then, walked a little more inside the room and leaned against a chair. "I think you better tell me what's goin' on."
"Raylan, you best not be blowin' buckshot up my ass," Arlo sparred with the crass remarks, referring to Raylan's marshal status.
"I'm not," Raylan verbally sparred back. "And you'd best not be blowin' any up mine. Now, tell me what the hell's been goin' on since I've been away in the hospital, and don't leave anything out."
A couple of hours later ...
The ride back with Boyd had been a relatively quiet one, as the typically chatty Boyd had talked himself out over at Arlo's. It seemed that Boyd had told the truth, after all.
Both these men were satisfied with the outcome of their little visit with the old man. Raylan predictably remained vehement that he did not want to know any of the details of Boyd's business dealings with Arlo, or who was involved in the convenient disappearance of the signed agreement between Arlo and Mags for the Indian Line property. All Raylan needed was to see Arlo in order to know if Arlo was telling the truth. As much as his father enjoyed skirting the truth, Raylan could tell his father was being truthful ... about this. Knowing the truth, at least Raylan could deal with the situation with no surprises.
After Raylan had finished speaking with his father in private, he invited Boyd back inside. That is when Arlo also told Boyd precisely what he did to screw Dickie out of his inheritance. Raylan then overheard Boyd get on his cell phone and tell Devil and his boys that Dickie was lying about having the funds to pay for the contracts he'd put out on Arlo and Raylan. Boyd knew that once fellow prisoners got wind that Dickie had put out an unfunded hit, Dickie's days would be numbered. Without saying a word, it was understood that Raylan, Boyd, nor Arlo had a problem with that distinct possibility.
Over the next hours and days, the hit contracts would become less and less an issue, and they only needed to lay low until that happened. Now, Raylan was more concerned about the Givens name becoming lower than dirt all over town. For now, Boyd needed Arlo, and Boyd called in some reinforcements from neighboring towns to protect the old man from his neighbors while they started up a new weed distribution plan with Dickie soon to be out of the picture.
Raylan's private thoughts moved to Winona. When word got out that those Green Mountain Project families would receive ultimately nothing in compensation, there would surely be hell to pay, and the pay would surely come out of his and Arlo's hides. It would come out of Winona's, too. Anyone Raylan cared about would be fair game. Then, Raylan's thoughts immediately went to the baby. No one knew that Winona was pregnant, and it needed to stay that way.
Soon, Boyd and Raylan were back at the parking lot outside of Raylan's motel room.
"Watch your back, law man," Boyd warned, as he stopped the truck to let Raylan out.
Raylan's injured side pulled upon stepping down the extra foot, out of the pickup. Before closing the door, his eyes narrowed. "Is that a threat, Boyd?"
"No, not a threat," Boyd answered. "It's a promise. You take care, Raylan."
Now that the two had a quiet understanding, at least for now, Boyd allowed the law man to be on his way.
Raylan had a heightened awareness of his surroundings and kept his index finger on the trigger of his holstered gun, as he slowly made his way up the steps to his motel room. His pain meds had worn off about an hour ago, and he was hurting pretty bad. All he wanted to do was take a pain pill and antibiotic and get into bed. He quietly opened the door to find the lights in his room dimmed. Winona was already in bed, asleep.
So as not to wake her, he quietly locked the door and then, went into the kitchenette to eat a couple of crackers before downing his pills. Next, he secured his gun and hat and toed off his boots before making one last stop in the bathroom. He emerged a few minutes later, when his left side gave an angry pull as he bent down to ease himself under the covers. Once he managed to get himself into a horizontal position, it felt good to know that he didn't have to get up or down again until morning.
"Raylan?" Winona stirred.
"Shhhhh, go on back to sleep," he whispered.
"What happened with Arlo?" she asked with her eyes still closed.
Adjusting his pillow, he again whispered, "It's a long, Arlo story I'm too tired to repeat tonight." Closing his eyes, he added, "I need to see Art in the mornin'. Wake me up so I can ride into work with you? I'll tell you all about it on the way in, over a cup of coffee."
"Alright," she answered with her eyes still closed, and she moved closer to him to feel his warm body next to hers.
Raylan reached over and placed his hand protectively over her lower abdomen, and they soon drifted off to sleep.
To be continued ...