I Shall Not Want by Julia Spencer-Fleming

’cross the pastures and take shelter in one of Donald’s barns.”
    “Stealin‘ stuff,” Donald added.
    “We should turn out the rest of the boys.” Bruce turned toward his brother. “Where’s your phone?”
    “Whoa up, there.” Russ held up one hand. “I’m not sending anybody out as a searcher whose got a hair in his ass about immigrants.”
    Donald stepped toward him. “You think you can keep us off our own property?”
    Bruce thumped him again. “Hush.” He looked at Russ. “We don’t want anything different than you do, Chief. Get these guys off our land. Take ‘em to the hospital or send ’em back to Mexico, dun’t matter to me what you do with ‘em once we’ve cleared ’em off. Hah?” He glanced at his brother. “Hah? Play nice?”
    Donald rumbled deep in his chest but nodded.
    “Okay,” Bruce went on. “We can call up some of our cousins and they can help look. Or if you don’t want ‘em to help that way, they can camp out on the other side of this forest. That’s Donald’s place, off’n Seven Mile Road. Head off anybody who comes outa the woods.”
    Russ took off his glasses and polished them on his blouse front. Seven Mile Road was a hell of a long way away by car. This stretch of the mountain’s spine was bigger than he had thought—a lot bigger. “Okay,” he said, replacing his glasses. “You can assist. You and your cousins.” He knuckled his hands on top of his rig, making himself larger and emphasizing his sidearm. “But I’ll warn you. Once. If there’re any problems, if it looks at any point like one of you messed with one of the missing men, I’m rounding you
all
up. And we’ll let the DA sort out who did what to whom. Shouldn’t take her more’n a couple weeks.”
    Donald rumbled again, more threateningly this time, but Bruce nodded. “Deal.” He held out his hand to his brother. “Gimme your phone.” The larger Christie reached into his side jacket pocket, a movement uncomfortably reminiscent of someone going for a shoulder-holstered firearm. “How many of these guys you got missing?” Bruce asked.
    “That’s a good question. Let’s go see what my officers have come up with.” He took a step back, swinging wide so the Christies would walk beside, rather than behind him. To his left, he heard the solid
ca-chunk
of a door’s closing, and the rear lights of the Corinth ambulance flared red and white. It crawled off the crushed patch of ground it had been parked on, paused at the shoulder, and then, blue lights springing to life, surged onto the road. Leaving behind a solitary figure in desert camo, who turned, spotted him, and jogged over. “Russ,” she called.
    “In a minute,” he said. They all converged on the Millers Kill ambulance at the same time. Karl and Annie, the paramedics, were positioning an inflatable cast on the arm of a young Latino, whose closed-off expression may have been due to pain, or to an extreme reluctance to engage with Knox, squatting on the ground next to his pallet.
    “
Por lo menos dígame si cualesquiera de sus amigos estuvieron lastimados
,” she was saying. The injured man ignored her. She stood up, turning to Russ.
    “Hel-lo, baby,” Donald said. He sucked and smacked his lips. Kevin Flynn, standing spread-legged behind Knox, flamed up. He opened his mouth.
    “If I
were
your baby, asshole, I’d probably be stupid enough to find that flattering. But I’m not, and I don’t. Get lost.” Hadley looked at Russ. “The only thing I can get out of him is that his name is Amado and he claims to be legal. He’s got some sort of guest-worker permit thing. He’s happy to flash that around, but anything else, forget it.”
    Kevin was staring at her, his expression a mixture of admiration and shock. Russ kept his mouth in a straight line. “Thank you, Officer Knox.” He got down on one knee—squatting had gone out of his body’s vocabulary four, five years ago—and looked at the kid. He was young, barely out of