they harbored no love for Ragsdale and Bock, but that wouldn’t matter. Out here all alone in the hills, they couldn’t afford to piss off Ike Rucker or the cattlemen and cowboys thereabouts. Farmers and ranchers alike depend on the goodwill of their neighbors. Bob and Lottie wouldn’t have a choice.
It would be a sad thing to see, all this cozy camaraderie brought to such a swift end. But I had my silver lining in sight: a future that was far, far removed from the smell of goats.
“Here’s the thing,” Gustav said. “I come back to find the man who killed Adeline. Find him and see justice done…if I can, and it looks like you’re the last folks I can turn to for help.”
Bob and Lottie looked at each other long and hard. It wasn’t at all the sort of look I’d been expecting, though—one filled with fear and regret and self-recrimination.
No, it looked more like simple surprise, at first, and then maybe…relief?
Lottie reached out to take my brother’s hands in hers. “You can count on us, Gus.”
“That’s right,” Bob said, and he put a hand atop the others in the middle of the table. “There’s nothing Lottie and me won’t do to help you. Nothing .”
14
Stonewall’s Second Job
Or, Lottie Gives Us a Lot to Chew on, but It Doesn’t Go Down Easy
Gustav thanked Bob and Lottie for their willingness to help.
I cursed them.
Silently, of course, and with feelings that went so far beyond mixed you could call them scrambled.
Did I want my brother to find Adeline’s killer? Certainly, yes.
Did I want him settling down to raise goats ? Dear Lord, no.
If this selfishness in any way betrayed itself upon my face, no one seemed to notice. Old Red and his friends just huddled in closer around the ranch house’s rickety table while I rode out a churning in my gut that was only half due to hunger.
“Why come back now?” Bob asked. “After all these years?”
“I’ve picked up a trick or two lately,” Gustav said. “Had a few experiences along the lawman line.”
Usually here he’d evangelize a bit on behalf of his hero. Yet he made no mention of Mr. Holmes—and, what’s more, he shot me a glare that warned against jumping in with any embellishments of my own.
“Before that,” he went on, “it didn’t even occur to me that I could do anything about Adeline. Now…well, I still don’t know if I can, but at least I know how to try.”
“You said we’re the last people you can turn to for help,” Lottie said. “Who else have you talked to?”
Old Red’s eyes met mine again, though this time he wasn’t gagging me but whipping the gag off.
“Brother,” he said.
As is his way, he was leaving tale-telling to me. Though it made me feel like a phonograph machine for him to crank up and switch off as he pleased, I obliged.
It took me fifteen minutes to talk it all through: our first run-in with Ragsdale and Bock; Milford Bales’s words of warning; the solitary nugget we were able to mine from Big Bess (that another chippie from the old days, Squirrel Tooth Annie, still worked at the Phoenix); the trap Stonewall and his bosses had sprung on us; the breakfast we’d (unintentionally) bought for Ike Rucker; Suicide’s help getting us to the Lucky Two; and my brother’s inexplicable interest in raising stock animals that smelled like outhouses with mange.
Actually, I kept that last item to myself, more or less, merely concluding with “And then we followed our noses here.”
“It’s too bad it was Big Bess you bumped into instead of Squirrel Tooth,” Lottie said when I was through, her face puckering with disgust. “I could’ve told you that fat bitch was trouble.”
Bob placed a hand on his wife’s shoulder, a gesture that said either a comforting “There, there, dear” or a more reproachful “Your petticoats are showing.”
“Well, you won’t get another shot at Squirrel Tooth now, that’s for sure,” Bob said to Old Red. “You were lucky to get away from the
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