by D. J. Butler
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
About the Author
Also by D. J. Butler
Immortal
Immortal Works LLC
1505 Glenrose Drive
Salt Lake City, Utah 84104
Tel: (385) 202-0116
© 2020 D. J. Butler
www.davidjohnbutler.com
Cover Art by Ashley Literski
http://strangedevotion.wixsite.com/strangedesigns
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For more information email [email protected] or visit http://www.immortal-works.com/contact/.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN 978-1-953491-05-3 (Paperback)
ASIN B08KDPQPN2 (Kindle Edition)
This book is for
Carolyn and Dave Westergard,
who gave me much, much more than just
two characters in a book.
“Ever serve process on a horse?” I asked.
Michael P. Fellows raised an eyebrow at me and twisted his mouth into half a grin. His face was thin and angular, he had a high forehead, and his hair was swept up like a crown. He had the kind of blond good looks and comfortable-in-your-own-skin vibe that can be really useful at trial or at getting new clients in the door. He was also clean—clean-shaven, manicured nails, straight tie, crisp charcoal suit. I mean, you’re supposed to look nice for job interviews, right? But this guy looked too nice. He looked like the cleanest person in Howard County.
He also looked amused. I got it, I understood. He’d come expecting to talk to a lawyer named James, and instead he was being interviewed by a sixteen-year-old girl with a ponytail.“I’m sorry,” he said. “The woman outside told me your name was Bucky.”
“Rebecca McCrae. Friends call me Bucky.”
“I see.” He laughed. “Sue a lot of horses here, do you?”
Smart aleck. “No,” I said, “but some places around the county you can’t get to by car. You get involved in a dispute between ranchers in the Ups, you’ll find yourself carrying court papers in your saddlebags.”
“No way you’ve done that, Ms. McCrae.” He grinned his grin again. “I bet you aren’t even eighteen.”
I gave him my hard, shrewd look. “My experience is not the point, Mr. Fellows. If you really want to join the Law Offices of James F. McCrae as an associate attorney, you’re going to have to show me you’re up to the job.”
Fellows’s eyes wandered across the framed certificates on the wall behind me. I wished they were a little straighter. “I guess I just expected I’d be talking with Mr. McCrae himself,” he said. “And not his…are you his daughter? Kid sister?”
“Office manager.” I could have said paralegal, messenger, billing specialist, secretary, filing clerk, publicist, and sometimes even investigator, but I didn’t. “And recruiter. This is a screening interview.”
“Right.” Fellows straightened up in his seat and smoothed out his jacket. The gesture was as fake as it could be, like when you pretend to drink the imaginary cup of tea a four-year-old hands you. He was humoring me. “I’ve never served process on horseback, Ms. McCrae.” He pointed at the liquor license on the wall behind me. “Nor have I ever tended bar. I do, however, like to bowl.”
As if to punctuate his words, I heard the crash of a ball slamming into pins.
“You think it’s funny that Mr. McCrae owns both a bowling alley and a law practice?”
“In the same building. A law practice and a bowling alley. Yes. Yes, I do.” The grin was less charming now that he seemed to be laughing at me. “A bowling alley that serves alcohol.”
“In compliance with state and local licensing requirements.” Michael Fellows was starting to get on my nerves. “Well, I imagine this is all very different from what you’re used to in New York City. Maybe you should think twice about whether you really want to be joining this practice.”
“Hey, I already said I like bowling.”
“Around here we have a serious boredom problem. McCrae’s Fun Lanes is a business, and it’s also a service to the community.” I resisted the urge to wag my finger at him like Mrs. Anderson, the Principal at Howard High.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. When you’re sixteen years old in the middle of nowhere, there’s not that much to do for fun. If you’re lucky, you’re one of the nerdy ones who can’t get enough Dungeons and Dragons or World of Warcraft, or a car nut who can spend hours in the garage. Otherwise, you can only watch so much television, and after that it’s sex, guns, and crystal meth.”
“Sounds like a band name.”
“Ha,” I deadpanned. “So a bowling alley—a cheap bowling alley—is a place where kids can stay out of trouble. And before you say anything snarky about the bar, you should consider that the bar means kids and their parents can hang out in the same place on an evening. Everybody bowls a few games, mom and dad have a Bud to unwind. This is an establishment for families.”
And now I was in fact wagging my finger. I stopped, sat back, and smiled, trying not to show my teeth.
“And family law.” He smiled again, disarmingly.
“Whatever a client needs, Mr. Fellows. Water rights, criminal defense, land disputes, tort or commercial lawsuits, incorporation, writing a stern letter to a tenant, finding a lost dog, writing a will, or yes, family law.” I grabbed the open Howard County Register with both hands and rustled it, smelling the newsprint smudging onto my fingertips. “This is the kind of practice where I read the newspaper every day to see if anyone is suing any of our clients, or if any of our clients has organized an LLC without us, or taken a job with the County, or died.”
“And have they?”
I jabbed my finger into the paper. “Aaron Wilding.” I had never seen Aaron Wilding in life, but his photo showed him to be a handsome man, though his face was a bit too angular. “He’s a client, and he’s passed away. Natural causes—and that’s no surprise, the guy had a stroke just a couple of weeks ago, Dad told me—survived by his wife Marilyn, who gets quoted in the story.”
Fellows’s face grew serious. “Sounds like just the practice for me.” He scooted to the edge of his chair and leaned forward, clasping his hands together between his knees. I half-expected him to invite me to huddle and hear him call the next play, or join him in a moment of prayer. Fortunately, Dad’s broad, scarred walnut desk—a remnant of his days of being a big firm lawyer in Boise, along with the oversized filing cabinets in the corner that held the Old Files—put some space between us. “I get small towns,” he said. “I spent a couple years in Lost Bend as a kid.”
Lost Be
nd isn’t even a small town, it’s a hamlet. It’s a village, above the Dam and out past Hooper, deep in the sticks in pine tree country. We don’t have a good word in American English to describe a cluster of trailers and cabins around a gas station as small as Lost Bend. Lost Bend only exists so loggers, hunters, and people who are on their way to better places can stop for a ham sandwich starting to go yellow at the edges, and a Slim Jim for the road. “You could hang out your shingle there,” I suggested. “Wouldn’t be any competition.”
“Wouldn’t be any clients, either.” He grinned. “Maybe I could set up my law office in the back room of a gas station.”
“Don’t knock it. People share a lot of news at a corner store.”
“And everybody needs gas.”
“You know a lot of Native Americans when you were a kid?” I asked him. “Up there in the sticks?”
“Sure.” He shrugged. “Why? You practice Indian law, too?”
“When we get the work.” It was a lie. Indian law is a specialty, and mostly practiced by lawyers who are connected with the tribal organizations. So mostly Indians, and fair enough. “What were they, Umatilla kids? Nez Perce? Wachigonk?” I did my best to keep a casual expression.
“All of the above.” He leaned back out of his offer for a prayer huddle. “But I don’t know any tribal law.”
“Didn’t learn that with the Kings County District Attorney, I guess.” Pins crashing again.
“Nope,” he said. “Mostly I busted bored kids on drugs. So maybe Brooklyn and Howard aren’t so different after all.”
“Bet the kids in Brooklyn weren’t cooking meth in doublewides.”
“Bet the kids in Howard County don’t kill each other in gang fights.”
“Maybe. When was the last time a tractor in Brooklyn chopped off anyone’s arm?”
“Touché.” He held his hands up in surrender. “When the moment comes that I have to learn a little Indian law, I’m happy to do it.”
“That’s the right answer,” I said, and it was true. In a practice like the Law Offices of James F. McCrae, you take whatever work comes along and you figure out how to get it done. The learning curve is constant. It didn’t matter that he was right about Indian law, though, just like it didn’t matter that he was clean and good-looking and had a case-winning grin. I was going to tell Dad not to even talk to the guy.
Because Michael Fellows was an obvious liar.
“I’m staying at the Motor Inn. Probably easier to reach me on my cell than on the land line.”
He handed me his card and I tossed it onto the desk without looking at it. I already had his cell phone from his resume, and besides, I only planned to call him later that evening to turn him down. “South end of town. Good choice. You’ve got Ernie’s Pool Hall there, plus the Pie Hole makes a decent pizza. Can’t really buy it by the slice here, though.” I’d never been, but one thing I knew about New York City was that you bought pizza by the slice there. I stood up to signal that the interview was over.
He stood up too, unfolding a lanky body out of the chair and reminding me that he was a good six inches taller than me—and I’ve always thought of myself as tall. I caught a glint of black inside his jacket that had to be a pistol. That wouldn’t have bothered me at all if I trusted him; Dad kept a pistol in his desk drawer and one in the glove compartment of the Taurus and one under the seat of the pickup truck and carried another with him. You can get rough clients out in the sticks, and sometimes the nearest cop is hours away. Heck, people walk around Howard County openly carrying weapons, and that’s fine, too. But Michael Fellows was a liar, and the fact that he was carrying only made me more uncomfortable.
Without meaning to, I rested my hand on the desk surface, just above the drawer with the pistol—Dad’s nine-millimeter Beretta.
Fellows looked at my hand and raised his eyebrows. “That’s fine,” he said. “I’ll go run a few miles and then just eat a whole pie myself.”
We shook hands and I looked him sternly in the eyes. “I’ll give you a call soon to let you know.”
“When do I meet your…when do I get to meet Mr. McCrae? Will he be here later?”
“You in a rush?”
“Nope.” He shook his head. “I’m booked into the Motor Inn for a few days. Figured I’d do some hiking.”
“See old friends.” I said it neutrally.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Talk about old times.”
The Law Offices of James F. McCrae have their own exit from the building, but Dad saves that for the occasional client who needs to be extra discreet and for the times when he wants to pop out the back without being noticed. I opened the door into the Fun Lanes and Fellows loped out. He nodded to platinum-bleached Gladys, who sat resting her ankles behind the front counter and mending a tear in a kid’s-sized bowling shoe with tight little stitches of fifty-pound test line. She nodded back.
“I look forward to the call.” Fellows waved to me over the gumball machine and the shoe cubbies. Then the bell at the top of the door tinkled and he was gone.
I heard rattling pins again, and then whoops of joy and swearing. There was a cluster of teenagers on lane eleven—I didn’t know them, which might mean they went to St. Joe’s instead of Howard, or it might mean they came from out in the county somewhere. Farm kids or sagebillies.
Gladys looked at me over the top of her reading glasses. “That man,” she said, “belongs on TV.”
I laughed. “That’s not what you really mean.”
“Nope.” She shrugged deeper into her red cardigan and punched another stitch into the shoe. “It ain’t. But you’re not of age, young lady, so I can’t tell you where he really belongs.” She inhaled through her nostrils with a dreamy expression on her face. “I don’t know what that scent is, but you can’t get it in Howard.”
I drifted over to the door, sucking on my teeth. “Nope. You surely cannot.”
“Mind you,” she added, “your Evil’s none too bad-looking, himself.”
“He’s not my Evil.”
I looked out the glass door at the gravel parking lot and watched Michael Fellows drive off. Blue Corolla; looked like a rental car, no bumper stickers or decals or visible dents; California plates.
I took out my phone and typed out a text. Nice try, Dad. Guy’s a dud.
I looked up to see a man lurching toward the door. He had long hair and a beard, and both were matted and dirty. He wore a too-small brown corduroy jacket over a long white shirt, both splotched with dirt, jeans, and hiking boots. Loops of colored beads hung around his neck. He might have been a backpacker—June through August, Howard sees a lot of those, and also fishermen—but I didn’t see any gear.
He reached for the door, saw me, and stopped, his eyes bulging.
Not a backpacker, I thought. A bum, with a face full of pure crazy.
I grabbed the metal bar across the door. I wasn’t one hundred percent sure whether I wanted to push it open or hold it shut, but the bum made up my mind for me. He whipped around to the side, staring at something in the parking lot I couldn’t see and twitching like a rabbit that had been mainlining caffeine.
“Bears,” he muttered. “Bears and balloons.”
Definitely going to hold the door shut.
But I didn’t have to. Mumbling something I couldn’t quite hear through the glass, he turned and shuffled away, into the thicket and trees behind the Fun Lanes.
I stepped outside and looked after the bum, holding the door open. The bright sun of the August afternoon hit me. It wasn’t quite hot, but it was warm enough that the red flannel shirt I wore open as a jacket felt like just a little bit too much.
Yeah, I was wearing a red flannel jacket, like a lumberjack. What can I tell you? Howard is not one of your fashion metropolises. I was also wearing hiking boots.
The bum was gone. He’d disappeared down into the river bottom, and with any luck he was sloshing across it and into the empty land on the other side. I wasn’t sure who owned that, probably the Fo
rest Service, but there was nothing over there but pine and tall yellow grass and once in a while a kid on a dirt bike.
There were two new cars in the parking lot with the multi-colored pickup, Gladys’s battered old metallic blue Grand Marquis, and the cars the kids from St. Joe’s had come in. The drivers had to be here to see James McCrae or bowl in his lanes, because we don’t exactly have neighbors. There’s the highway, the trees, and the river. We’re a little bit out of town on the west side, our nearest neighbors being Yukon Video and the Comfort Lodge, both at least one hundred fifty yards away. There’s a denser downtown part of Howard, and we’re not in it. Cheaper rent, Dad would joke, and no hassle about zoning restrictions.
One of the cars stood out like ten sore thumbs. It was a canary yellow H3, you know, a Humvee for the rich-people-with-bad-taste market, and as I looked at it the vehicle chunked open a door and spat out a client.
I recognized her from around town. She stared at me. Her face was a little too made up, in that tight way that tells you that someone really wants to put on a good appearance. Well, no wonder. Her husband had died.
“Hello, Mrs. Wilding.” I held the door. “I’m Rebecca McCrae. My father is James McCrae.”
She nodded. “Is your father here?”
“He’s meeting some other clients right now,” I said. “Please come in and let’s see if I can help you. If nothing else, I can schedule another time that’s convenient for you.”
A man climbed out of the other car, a white new-model sedan. He was dark-haired and had thick eyebrows and a tan that made me think he might be Greek or Persian. He wore a red turtleneck and sunglasses, that kind that skiers sometimes favor, with leather wrapped around the sides and a string behind the neck. As Mrs. Wilding passed me and entered the building, he stood on the edge of the boardwalk made of two-by-eights and looked it up and down.
