Page 80 of Penn

He shakes his head. The color drains from his cheeks, leaving him a sickly shade of gray. Sweat beads along his hairline and drips down his temple. “I can’t give you that. If Butch finds out I talked, he’ll skin me alive.”

Pacino grabs him by his collar and lifts him onto his feet. “And what the fuck do you think we’re gonna do to you? Butch ain’t here, so the only people to be scared shitless of right now is us.”

Bending down, Kannon grabs Stephen’s ankle and rips off his leather loafer. I scrunch up my nose when I see he’s not wearing socks. It’s eighty degrees out already this morning, and he’s wearing shoes without socks. “Gross.”

“Yeah, I agree. His feet smell like ass,” Kannon says, pulling a pair of pliers from his pocket. The metal glints in the bright sun. “Now, you have a choice. Give us names, or I pull out your toenail. Then I’ll move to the next one. By the time I reach your pinky toe, I suspect we’ll have everything we need, including your mother’s maiden name and bank code pin.”

“I don’t have a written list!” he screams, his high-pitched voice cracking as he squeals. His whole body trembles, his legs jerking against Kannon’s hold, but neither Kannon nor Pacino loosens their grip. “I swear it! And most of the guys are only reachable by Butch once I set up the business.”

Kannon clamps the pliers onto his toe. Stephen whimpers, trying to yank his foot back. “See, that’s not giving us anything to save yourself with, Patterson.”

“I swear, I don’t know anything!”

The pliers move to the edge of his big toenail, and Kannon slowly pulls, dragging out the pain. Stephen screams and tries to kick Kannon away, but Pacino drops a heavy boot on his other loafer, pinning him against the house and unable to move.

A few people walk by on the sidewalk, and Capone and I just turn and wave our gloved hands at them. Their brows lift, but two of them actually wave back at us.

“Friendly neighborhood,” I say. “Maybe I should look at moving out this way.”

“Nah, you aren’t the type to have neighbors this close. Plus, you’re kind of a ways out from the clubhouse. It would be an annoyance.”

“Plus, you’d miss seeing all of our shiny, happy faces every day,” Kannon says, yanking even more until a little blood appears at the cuticle where the nail bed is ripping.

“I know where the chemical shipments are brought for the new drug they’re pushing!” Stephen screams. “I don’t have exact coordinates, but it’s out in the desert by an old, abandoned quarry near the state line.”

Releasing his toe, Kannon looks up at me as Stephen breathes heavily, tears in his eyes. “There are a lot of abandoned quarries in the fucking desert, especially along the state line. That’s at least five hundred miles.”

“Depends on the state line we’re talking. East or west. Or north. We’re looking at more if he means California,” Pacino says.

“It’s two hundred miles east of here. Almost straight east. It’s the largest snake pit they have, and Butch pays the authorities to ignore anything that goes on out there,” Stephen spits out, words tumbling over each other.

“Like what? Giant shipments of chemicals being used to make shit for people to shoot into their fucking veins?” I snap.

“Like explosions. They’ve had four accidents already. These are hardcore chemicals, and I wasn’t setting up dealers for that shit. Only Venom Dust. I swear on my kids’ lives,” he says quickly, nearly tripping on his words.

Pacino continues holding him by his collar with Kannon far closer to his foot than I’d be comfortable with. He’s not in a position to lie. We’ll kill him either way, but we’ll make it worse if he’s not giving us the truth.

“How many men guard it?” I ask.

“Four or five during the day,” he says, slumping back down when Pacino finally releases him. “More at night, but I’ve never been out there then. I don’t know anything more. If I did, I’d tell you.”

I watch him carefully. His eyes dart to the side for just a second too long. His jaw twitches. “You do have a list of the dealers.”

“What?”

“You were too specific. You don’t have them written down. But you have them saved somewhere else,” I say. “Where?”

Stephen’s chest puffs up for all of three seconds before deflating completely. His shoulders sag. “They’re saved on a USB drive. It’s under a loose floorboard in my office.”

Knocking on the door, Pacino says, “We should take that toenail for lying to us.”

“Technically, it wasn’t a lie. But who writes shit down anymore anyway?” I ask.

“I do,” the other three say in unison.

Of course they do. I forget Zep and I are the only ones who grew up almost fully immersed in the technology age.

Caroline opens the door. “Yes?”