LITMIR.BIZ

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      “I was a Ranger. I have connections. People tell me things, let me know what’s happening on the rodeo circuit.” Dane finished the chicken and started on some watermelon. “Sure. When he got stomped, I checked in on him at the hospital. Don’t think he knew I was there. He was out of it for a while, but I did see him pat the nurse’s ass. And he didn’t get his hand slapped.”

      “I didn’t know about Jack being in the hospital.”

      “You weren’t stateside much.”

      That was true. But even if he had been home, he wouldn’t have known much anyway. “So since you hear things, fill me in on Pete.”

      “He slipped into my house in Watauga about a year ago. I thought I was going to have cardiac arrest when he sat down at my breakfast table with me. I hate that spy crap secret agent voodoo thing he’s got going on.”

      Gabriel grunted. “Thought Rangers had sonar hearing and X-ray vision.”

      Dane laughed. “We’re not quite superhuman, jarhead.”

      He wasn’t a jarhead anymore. Since he’d gotten his discharge, his dark hair had grown out some. He’d expected a bit of gray, and saw a few strands mixed in. No bald spot or thinning hair, though, which made him think he might just keep growing the stuff. It felt strange long. Old habits died hard. “So what did Pete have on his mind?”

      “Just checking in. He was on his way somewhere. Didn’t say. Said he was getting tired.”

      They were all getting older. Even Gabriel felt the gradual march of time slowing his body down, his need for action yet speeding up. Not military action. Something else he hadn’t quite put his finger on.

      “I don’t know if I can live out here for a year,” Dane said. “Watauga seemed like hell to me, but this would be worse.”

      Gabriel took Dane’s plate to the sink. “Do any of us really have a choice?” He walked back to the fridge and tossed Dane a beer. “Look. We have to do this. For the sake of our own futures. Pop’s crazy, no doubt, but crazy like a fox. Remember? He was always working a deal.”

      Dane cracked his beer and focused on the label. “I know you’re right but it still stinks. I resent Pop for controlling our lives with a snap of his thin fingers.”

      “Look,” Gabriel said, “what if the old man died?” He looked at Dane with a serious expression. “He’d get the last laugh, man. We’d be holding the whole damn bag of emotional dirt.”

      Dane shook his head. “That’s too ‘tortured soul’ for me.”

      “Well, think it over because it’s true.” He sighed and leaned back in his chair, not wanting the conversation, not really wanting the beer, not wanting anything but a flight to Tokyo, maybe. Away from here. “So we’re going to do this. And what about Suzy?”

      “Now that isn’t anything I have to deal with. Whatever mess Pop made, I just have to make certain some money changes hands, some responsibilities are seen to and that’s it. I live here for a year, a paltry three hundred and sixty-five days, and then my time is done.”

      He thought about Laura. “So cut-and-dried.”

      “So cut-and-dried.” Dane nodded. “You got that right.”

      “Good game plan. I’m turning in.”

      Gabriel rose, poured the beer into the sink and headed upstairs, mulling over Dane’s game plan. It was fairly detached, and Gabriel liked detached and unemotional.

      It just might work for him.

      LAURA FROWNED AT THE NOTE that had been stuck to the front door of her small house. Hey, baby, be by to see you later.

      Chills ran through her. Nobody baby’d her—no one except her father. She didn’t want to see him. Didn’t want him near her children. The fact that he’d found out where she lived made her want to move far away, as fast as she could.

      He was her father by blood, but Mr. Morgan had acted more fatherly toward her. There was something wrong with the man whose genes she bore—Ben had problems with thinking the world owed him something. A chip on his shoulder kept him from being the responsible human he might have been.

      Laura wanted no part of him.

      She took her children inside and locked the door. Penny went straight to her stuffed animals, so Laura put Perrin in his playpen before she sank into a chair at the kitchen table to think.

      There was a reason Ben had chosen this moment to filter back into her life. Months ago, Ben had claimed Mr. Morgan had done him a disservice, which the old man had denied. Ben had told her that Mr. Morgan had cheated him out of money. She didn’t think Mr. Morgan was the cheating type but after Dave died, he had put that money into trust for her kids. Was it guilt money? At the time, tired and grief-stricken, she’d assumed it was exactly what he’d said it was, a gift of college education for kids whose company he’d enjoyed. As a teacher, she’d certainly appreciated the gesture. A lot of people had been very generous after the funeral. In fact, the Jeffersons had helped pay down the mortgage on this house so that Laura wouldn’t have to struggle so much. It was just the type of caring thing Laura had seen done many times over in this town.

      She hadn’t thought about guilt money. And Ben had always been the kind of man who whined. It was part of the reason she was determined to shoulder her burdens without complaining, without relying on other people. She wanted independence and that didn’t come by whining and blaming.

      She thought about Gabriel. He seemed very independent, too. He wouldn’t blame other people for any misery he incurred. She’d heard from Mr. Morgan that none of their family was close, a fact that disheartened him. In his twilight years—he’d started to say he was feeling his age—he had hoped to knit his family back together.

      He’d never said exactly what the problem had been.

      Laura wanted a family for her children, though. If she ever remarried, she would want a man who was close to his kin. Penny and Perrin deserved a father who didn’t have skeletons rattling in his closet; they had enough bones with Ben. Although they’d never met him, it was only a matter of time before that family skeleton made a nuisance of itself with some whiny rattling.

      She tore up the note and threw it into the trash, pushing it down deep before closing the shutters and checking the locks on the doors.

      TWO HOURS LATER, LAURA had the kids in bed. She’d been spending some time making plans for the upcoming school year; it would be her second year teaching seventh-grade science. Laura had plans for setting up some conservation composts and doing a rocket launch. If the students were ready, she planned to jump right into some in-class science projects that they could record data over the course of the whole year.

      She’d completely put Ben out of her mind.

      Someone knocked at the door, and the dreaded prickles ran up her back. She closed her eyes, reminding herself that Ben was her father, that he had never been violent. He just hadn’t liked Dave and had been disagreeable and opinionated about him.

      It was Mr. Morgan he’d really been at odds with. Maybe she’d been influenced by those stories.

      Yet there was the money. Funny that Ben would be showing up in her life when he knew that her children had been the recipients of various gifts of goodwill from the town. Ben wasn’t a coincidental kind of man; he planned everything almost down to an obsession. Then again, she’d heard through the grapevine that Ben had picked up heavy drinking in the town that bordered Union Junction.

      The knock sounded again. Now was as good a time as any to face her father. Then again, it could be Mimi.

      Mimi would call first.

      “Who is it?”

      “Gabriel Morgan.”

      She put a hand to her chest to still her thundering heart,

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