Stood over the bleeding Roland Spencer in the hue of Spencer's Tires and Rims blue neon lights was Billy Brown. For the past twenty minutes he had watched whilst one of his men had beaten Spencer until he could barely stand, instructing him to avoid the face. For the most part the muscle-bound brute had managed followed his instructions until a punch glanced off of Roland’s shoulder blade and split open his lip. Roland had never seen a man look so terrified in his life. Billy simply tutted and gestured to the man to leave then alone, which he did, silently thanking God that Brown was in a good mood as he left them. 

Unfortunately for Roland, Billy was not in such a good mood with him. A distraught Roland had come to him on the phone to Scott Andrews pleading with him to release Antwan. Billy had got the boy released but he was far from happy with Roland.

“You know, there was a time when I thought you were a clever man.”

Past tense. Not that Roland blamed him. It made him sick to admit it but this was one beat down that he probably deserved.

“When you came to me with your business plan for this place all those years ago I was ready to laugh you out of the room,” Billy said gesturing around Roland's business. “But you convinced me, Roland, you made me change my mind. That’s not something that happens often.”

Billy leant against the desk at the front of the showroom and looked down at Roland, who was bleeding freely from his lip and holding onto his torso to stop the pain. It wasn’t doing him much good and he knew nothing he could say would do him any good. Instead he watched in cowed silence as Billy vented.

“But giving the boy drugs? What possible reason could you have to do that? I have racked my brains all goddamned night trying to figure out what could possess you to think that was a good idea and I’m still no closer to figuring it out.”

Roland’s stared down at the small patch of blood on the group beneath him where his lip had been dripping, desperate to avoid Billy’s gaze. 

“Why on Earth would you give the boy drugs, Roland?”

Again Roland said nothing and kept his eyes locked on the ground. Billy shook his head in frustration and knelt beside, grabbing Roland by the hair and slapping him across the face. It wasn’t hard enough to cause him any real damage, though it stung against his lip, but it was certainly enough to grab his attention. 

“What’s wrong? You can’t speak all of a sudden?”

“The boy asked me for the weed,” Roland muttered, “He said he’d been stressing out, he seemed like he was in a bad way, so I figured it wouldn’t do him any harm to relax a little.”

He should have known better than to trust those out of towners. They'd promised him they would be discrete but once word came back about Antwan being caught with the weed it had taken all of five minutes for Billy to found out where he’d got it.

Billy leant in close enough that Roland could feel the warmth of his breath against his face. “You don’t have the authority to make that kind of decision, Roland. You never did.”

“I understand that now.”

Billy released Roland’s head and stood up. He strode over to the desk and reached for some napkins atop it, wiping his hand clean of the specks of blood from Roland’s lip. Once he was satisfied they were clean he turned back to Roland and placed his hands on his hips.

“Do you think it was easy for me to get them out of the Sherriff’s Department? To get good, hard-working lawmen to turn a blind eye to cover for your fuck-up? You think that kind of thing comes free?”

Roland shook his head, “I can’t imagine it does.”

“It costs me capital,” Billy said, his voice dripping with contempt. “Capital that I might need down the line and find that I’m left wanting because of this little stunt of yours.”

Roland dabbed his lip with the sleeve of his shirt to quell the bleeding and Billy tutted again, grabbing some more napkins from the side and throwing them on the ground beside Roland. 

“You were a clever man once. I’m not sure what happened to change that but I sure as hell won’t tolerate any more mistakes from you. Don’t make me come back here again. You hear me?”

Roland nodded.

He watched as Billy walked towards the exit without so much as a glance back. He made sure to wait until he heard the sound of tires screeching off into the distance before attempting to lift himself to his feet. He barely made it to his knees before he collapsed to the ground again in pain, resting his head on the ground with a heavy sigh. He laid there, his breathing laboured and uneven, whilst he damned the heavens for having entered into business with Billy Brown. Roland had climbed into bed with the Devil without a second’s thought and, having escaped with his soul once, went back for more. This time it was different though, his soul wasn’t his own to win back. 

It was in the hands of a seventeen-year-old boy.