EFF IT! ➸ jj maybank

012.

No, she was thinking about Scooter Grubs' boat.

And what was on it.

Admittedly, Sonny was embarrassed she had stayed up all night thinking about the Pogues' search. She'd never stayed awake all night thinking of anybody — so, when she couldn't get the very infamous JJ Maybank, John B Routledge, Kiara Carerra and Pope Heyward out of her mind, she had a bad feeling it meant more than she wanted it to.

It meant something. Something that she had tried to avoid. Something that bugged her so freaking much, that she could almost scream her head clean off, forcing her brain out her ears. Graphic, but still true.

It was like an itch.

Tingling her skin, begging to be scratched. It tickled and it pinched her, and Sonny found it hard to resist the craving to dig her nails in, to rub the skin raw. It travelled all the way up her neck and onto her cheeks, desperate to not be ignored. It was bothersome, irritating, like a pest. If you tried to flush it, its nest always seemed to breed more. Until you underwent a full fumigation, they wouldn't go away, there would always be more. Maybe Sonny needed to commence a fumigation. She wanted to get rid of her itch, so she had to either eradicate it, or give into it. Neither were ideal.

Sonny didn't want to admit defeat. She wasn't sure when it was she was last defeated.

Maybe when a family of rats had taken over the basement downstairs and Sonny's father had called a fumigator to deal with the infestation. Sonny had cried the whole time, given it was when she was nine, and that was the week she decided it was wrong to kill animals.

Getting rid of the rats had felt wrong; they were innocent animals, not pests. They just ended up in all the wrong places.

Like the Pogues.

Pogues. Pogies. Bottom of the food chain. Kids that got up to no good, who Sonny had never been affiliated with before this, who were making her itch.

When they stumbled across Scooter Grubs' boat, they had stumbled across something bigger. And it was making Sonny itch like a mad woman, no matter how hard she had tried to resist. It was insufferable.

She tried not to itch, to protect her bubble.

Sonny had told them she didn't want to be involved; she'd removed herself from the equation as quickly as possible. All she'd wanted was tell the boat's owner that she had found it, but instead Sonny ended up in an old motel with cash and a gun, and four assholes she couldn't get off her back now that the owner's body had been found— Scooter Grubs was dead, and it was only Sonny and the Pogues who knew the location of his Grady-White, that he had a room and a gun in a shitty motel, and that there might have more on his boat than they originally anticipated.

Preserve your bubble. Don't get involved.

But Sonny already was involved. JJ was right.

And maybe her bubble didn't need preserving. Maybe she had already popped it.

    "Jesus," she sighed, itching her forehead.

And so it begun.

Had John B survived the dive? Had they found anything? What was Scooter smuggling? And why had he been doing it during one of the worst hurricanes they'd had in years? What was he doing? And why?