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whiskey soaked liver was slowly dragging him to the grave, I still couldn’t stomach the idea of living with him. Dad’s failing health and Dane’s lack of common sense had brought me back to Blackthorn. I knew once the old man kicked, Dane would not survive on his own, or worse, the town might not survive an unsupervised Dane. Not that I gave much of a damn about this town. They’d been judge and jury in my life since the day I was old enough to stand. I’d been born into a family with a tarnished reputation, and that stain had followed me wherever I went and no matter how hard I tried to scrape it off.
    Through the shredded screen door, I heard laughter and nearly decided to forget the beer. I stepped inside and ignored Draven and Rocky, Dad’s two sketchy business partners, as I walked past the front room to the kitchen. Dad was leaned against the kitchen counter talking quietly into his phone. He looked up as I stepped into the room and quickly walked out speaking so low it was a wonder the person on the other end could hear him at all.
    I walked to the fridge, pulled out a cold beer and sat at the kitchen table. A secretive call meant he was about to deal in some shady shit. After all these years, I still had no fucking clue who was holding my dad’s puppet strings, but whoever it was, they had never loosened the hold. I knew Dad and the two clowns leaving their stink on the front room couch dealt in stolen goods, whatever was hot and valuable at the time, but I had never known any more than that. I was thankful he’d kept me out of it. Dane had been more involved when we were younger, running errands and helping move goods, but my dad had soon realized that his loose-lipped son who rarely ever processed any rational thoughts was more of a liability than an asset. I, for one, was glad when he’d pushed Dane out of the business.
    Of course, my dad’s fall into the world of black market trade could easily have been blamed on the town. In his teens, he had worked for the lumber mill like everyone else. His dad had left when he was six, but his mom, our grandmother, had been respected in town. After the accidental death of Dad’s high school girlfriend, the town jumped into their usual vigilante mode. They’d decided it was easier to despise him than trust him. No one would hire him. No one would give him the time of day. Any normal person would have taken the hint and left, but even after his mom died of heart failure, my dad, Alcott Wolfe, stuck around town just to spite everyone. Or at least that was what he’d told Dane and me.
    Dane’s mom had died of suicide, a drug overdose, when Dane was two and I was still only a flicker of movement in my mom’s belly. My mom had me and then split the town for good, leaving my dad, a man whose parenting skills were right up there with all of his other life skills, in charge of a toddler and a baby.
    Even though Dad had been, according to him, a ladies’ man in high school, his tragic track record with women didn’t exactly make him a catch. His despair at having nothing but two boys, including one who wasn’t quite put together in the head and one who found every reason to rebel against him, had grown so great, he’d tried to kill himself.
    In the fifth grade, I was sent home early for talking back to the teacher, and I walked in on my dad’s makeshift gallows. He’d climbed up into the rafters in the garage with a rope and jumped off with a noose around his neck. I’d stood there for several seconds wondering if I was just watching some imaginary movie play out in our dusty, cobweb covered garage. His legs were twitching but his face was beet red. He gurgled his last few breaths of air as I raced over to him. Back then, he outweighed me by a good hundred pounds, but I lifted his body up high enough for air to flow back into his pipes. He was out cold for a good hour, and there was no one around to help. I held him up, keeping his windpipe free of rope until my