Page 16 of Fight
Once he’s finished, the room is silent as we all stare at him in shock before, almost at once, everyone seems to burst out laughing at the sheer absurdity of his speech.
As soon as it's calmed down a bit, Rome replies, “Actually, that sounds like an excellent idea, but I want in. This thing still haunts my fucking nightmares.”
Cecil nods and starts to stand up, “You got it.”
“Cecil,” Dexter stops him, which he seems to do a lot of as he says, “you can’t blow it up now. We’re supposed to be being incognito while we wait for the kids to deal with Daniel.”
“Oh fuck, I’d forgotten about that,” he replies with a grimace and then adds, “I am not having that in the house while we’re all here though; it’s going out on the pile of shit to burn in the yard at least.”
“It won’t take us long to deal with Daniel, and then we can celebrate by burning all the tacky shit in this house,” I suggest.
“Excellent idea,” Cecil agrees with a smile.
“Did you find anything out about Silas?” Ruth asks Rome curiously.
Rome nods, “Yeah, he’s smuggling something into the town like clockwork every two weeks. Heavily armed people are then in the town for two days, scaring the shit out of the locals before they leave again.”
Mason Sr frowns heavily, “That’s some serious shit to be messing around in. How are we going to get them out of the town permanently?”
“We’re perfectly capable of handling that, don’t worry. By the time we’re done, this town will be completely free of anything to do with the smugglers, and you guys will be in charge of rebuilding the town back to what I remember it being like when you were around when we were kids.” Rome replies.
“Are you sure you can handle this?” Francis asks, looking just as concerned as the rest of the grandparents.
My smile is sharp and matches the dangerous one on Rome’s face as I reply this time, “Absolutely, this sort of thing is what we’re comfortable with.”
Their looks of worry quickly turn into being impressed, although I still sense a small amount of doubt in the room, which is understandable. We’re only in our early twenties, after all. That’s relatively young to have all the experience that we have.
Pride shines in Dexter’s eyes as he looks at Rome and asks, “Do you have any idea what he was smuggling into town?”
Rome shakes his head, crossing his arms over his chest as he replies, “No, the others are just searching his office. We’re going to go over everything next door, and we’ll let you know what we find. Either way, we’ve got ten days to come up with a plan to deal with it before they come back, and we need to take the twin's father out of the equation first.”
Dexter nods, “Sounds like a solid plan to me. Let us know what you find. We may not be directly involved, but we’d like to stay in the loop.”
“Of course,” I smile as I reply.
“Thomas is preparing lunch for everyone, and we’ll have some brought into the room next door when it’s ready,” Ruth adds.
“Thanks, Grandma,” Rome replies with a smile and making his grandmother practically melt.
“We’re going to start adding to the pile of stuff to burn in the backyard; I just want to check that there’s nothing here that you want to keep?” Dexter asks Rome.
Rome vehemently shakes his head, “Hell fucking no, you can burn it all if you want.”
All of their eyes fill with understanding as Dexter nods, “Understood. We also won’t burn anything until you’ve given us the go-ahead and can light it up yourself.”
Rome grins, “Thanks, I appreciate that.”
“We’ll let you know if we find out what he’s been smuggling,” I say as Rome and I leave the room.
When we enter the room next door, it’s to see that the others have already spread out everything that they could grab on the table and are already starting to look over it.
Jynx looks up and smiles as she sees us, “Hey, we’ve grabbed everything that we could carry that looked important. I’m sure that we missed some things, but I thought we could go through this lot first, and then if we didn’t find anything else, go and get the rest.”
Rome smiles as he goes over to her and kisses her senseless before replying, “That sounds good to me, Koroleva.”
Rome and I take seats at the table and grab a stack of papers each. There’s so much that I’m sure we’re going to be here for a while.
“So, how did it go with the painting?” Mason asks with a grin, already anticipating what Cecil could’ve said.