“They can. I love ‘em anyway.”
“I could tell last night. Just the way you are with them. And those women. Holy smokes.”
“What about them?” he asked.
“They’re like…I don’t know. Unreal. Smart and kind and gorgeous and….” She tipped her head sideways and said, “They’re like what I imagine when I try to remember my mom. And like what I envision when I think about who I want to be.”
He was gonna have to remember that compliment and share it with the Brand half of the clan. They would appreciate it. “You close with your family, Kiley?”
Her smile turned false. She picked up her second half muffin, took a big bite and shook her head left and right to answer his question without saying a word.
That was okay, he thought. She’d tell him about herself when she was ready. There was no hurry.
Some little voice in his head insisted that there was a hurry. That he was in danger of getting a little bit too fond of her, maybe already was, and she was still keeping a whole lot of secrets. He could see them in her eyes, and everything in him wanted to know everything about her.
He ate in silence for a while, waiting for her to pause between bites, and then he decided it couldn’t hurt to try to nudge her just a little bit. “I don’t even know where you’re from, you realize that?”
“Yes you do,” she said. “I’m from here. Oh, hell, look at the time. I gotta run. Busy day!” She got up, took a big gulp of her remaining coffee and ran right out the front door, finger combing her hair on the way.
He’d pushed too hard. Miss Kiley Kellogg was a mystery to him. Maybe that was what was so attractive about her. He’d always had a curious mind.
His phone bleeped. He picked it up this time, frowning to see that Selene had texted him a photo of a WWE wrestler… or someone who looked like one. Frowning, he read the message that followed.
Dude was just in diner. Flashed pic of Kiley. Asked if we knew her. Rude, impatient, angry.
A rush of protectiveness pushed him up out of his chair, and his brain went dark and beamed out the message: That guy gets within a mile of Kiley and I’ll kick his oversized ass back where he came from.
He tried to tell himself it wasn’t an overreaction, even though a part of him knew it was.
He was from Texas and he lived in Oklahoma, two places where it was still okay for men to be protective of women. Besides, she was his business partner, and he hoped, his friend.
Who was he kidding? He hoped for a lot more than friendship.
Her dilapidated car had already gone bounding away down the road, out of sight, and he wished she’d told him where she was going so he could make sure she’d be safe.
He hurried through the rest of his breakfast and threw the dishes into the sink for later attention. It occurred to him that this guy must know something more about Kiley than he knew himself. It would be an invasion of her privacy to give him the third degree. But that didn’t mean he might not volunteer something before Rob kicked his ass out of town.
Once he found him, but finding him wasn’t going to be a problem.
In Big Falls, there were two kinds of people. Locals and tourists, coming for a meal or a beer at The Long Branch in between visiting the ghost towns nearby. The big guy was neither, and would be as noticeable as the stripe on a skunk’s back.
Chapter Six
* * *
What Kiley needed right then was money. Just a little bit, just enough for gas and so she wouldn’t look like a pauper to the Brands and McIntyres if some occasion came that required her to pony-up a few bucks.
Yes, she wanted to go straight. And she was going to! She just needed a little bit, just to keep her afloat until the ranch started making money.
She dug through the car in search of anything she could use to make some scratch. There was a clipboard in her backseat. The prescription bottle was still in her purse, and so were her phony baloney-black rimmed glasses.
Okay, she thought. It’s on.
Twenty minutes later, her hair bundled up, glasses in place, clipboard holding an oil change receipt she’d salvaged from the glove compartment, she was knocking at the front door of a massive farm about twenty miles north of Holiday Ranch.
The woman who answered the door was rosy cheeked and friendly, with hair that looked like she was going for ginger dreadlocks, but maybe just looked that way naturally.
“Hi! I’m Ms. K, from Farm-Labs over in Tucker Lake,” Kiley said, letting her natural OK twang win the woman’s trust.
“Well, hey there. Aren’t you a pretty thing? What brings you all the way out here?” Her smile was infectious. It reached her eyes. She was probably forty-something, round and happy. Not one bit unwelcoming.
“We’re a brand new lab in Tucker Lake, and we’re going around offering a big discount on soil testing to all the farmers in the area.”
She lifted her brows. “Well, my husband’s the dirt expert, but I can listen to your offer and pass it along. What do you test for? Contaminants or—”
“Well, that would show up, yes, but our main goal—”
“I’m sorry! What am I thinking, letting you stand here on the porch? You wanna come inside? I just made a fresh pot of coffee.”
Her brain went, Huh? She had to wrestle it back from trying to compute the invitation, so she babbled. “Oh, no, really, um—” She’d been away too long, living in places where people didn’t just invite strangers in for coffee. “I’m not s’posed to go inside,” she said, coming up with something at last. “Company policy. Besides, this is, um...”
“Now I’ve gone and thrown you off your game, haven’t I hon?” she said. “I’m sorry. Are you nervous?”
Yes, she was nervous as hell, she realized. She was never nervous before a con. Terrible at them, failed at them more often than not, and felt like crap when she succeeded, but she had never been nervous before or during a con. And a tiny little game like this was barely even enough to qualify as one.
“I’m...new. It’s my first day, really. And I just really need to do well.”
“Aw, isn’t that sweet? Okay, go on. I’ll shut up and let you give the pitch. Your soil test’s goal is to look for...”
“Um, right. Minerals and proteins.” Were proteins a soil thing? “Our test results tell farmers exactly what their soil has in it and what it needs, optimized for your intended crop. In a couple of weeks you get a full report in the mail.
“Isn’t it awfully late in the year, though?” she asked.
“We do it now so you can add...um...supplements after the fall harvest. Then you’ll have prime ground come spring planting.”
“Supplements, huh?”
Kiley got the feeling the woman was starting to see through the act. “Most of our clients double their crop yield when they follow our recommendations.”
“Double? Well, I’ll be.” She took a deep breath, looking Kiley over thoroughly, then looking past her.
Kiley resisted the urge to turn around and see what her car looked like from there. She’d deliberately left it on the side of the road out front, coming up the driveway on foot.
“How much?” the mark finally asked.
“We’re doing it for cost, just to show people in the area how good our service is,” she said. “It’s only fifty bucks. It’ll go up next year, but that’s the introductory rate.”
The farm woman looked at her for a long moment, right into her eyes, in the most uncomfortable way. Then she seemed to come to a decision. “You hold on just a sec, sug.” And she walked away from the door, but left it standing open.
Kiley didn’t know what to do. She was pretty sure the jig was up, and for all she knew the woman was calling the police right now.
Before she could decide whether to run, though, she was back with two twenties and a ten in one hand, and a plateful of big, steaming, melty chocolate chip cookies in the other. She handed Kiley the cash.
“Oh. Um, thank you,” she said, taking it and clip
ping it to the clipboard, because that seemed more official than stuffing it into her pocket. “And, um, I already have your name and address, so we’re all set. You won’t regret this.”
“No, I’m sure I won’t,” she said. “And if anything should happen and those test results aren’t gonna show up after all, you can leave that fifty right in the mailbox there.” She nodded toward the end of the driveway. “You know, whenever you can.”
Kiley looked that way, saw the mailbox on a post.
“Now take a cookie for the road. I just baked this batch.”
“I shouldn’t.” Her mouth was dry, her stomach knotted up or something.
“No, you really should. I make the best cookies around. You can ask anyone.”
She had the prettiest green eyes, Kiley thought. She hadn’t looked at the woman’s eyes, she realized, until just then. There was something...beautiful in them.
“Go on, take one. I’m not letting you leave until you do.”
Kiley took a cookie. The knot in her stomach pulsed, sending waves out into her chest. It was a new sort of feeling. She pushed it back down to be considered later. “Thank you. Everyone around here is so...nice.”
“So are you, honey.” No, I’m not, she thought. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here.”
That caught Kiley’s attention. “What do you mean?”
She just smiled. “The old folks say this part of Oklahoma chooses her residents. Oh the folks south of us in Big Falls, say it’s their town, but the old folks considered this entire part of the state to be…kind of special that way. People meant to be here find their way here, and even if they never intended to stay, somehow, they always do.”
Kiley didn’t remember ever hearing anything like that. Then again, they’d left Big Falls when she was only twelve.
“You have a beautiful day, now,” the farm woman said, and then she closed the door.
Munching on the cookie as she walked back toward the car, Kiley looked around her at the spread. The white farm house was sprawling and immaculate. Its full front porch had hanging baskets of flowers between every post. There was a gigantic barn that looked new. It stood beside an older one that was now being used to house equipment. Through wide open doors, she could see tractors and other hulking hunks of machinery she couldn’t have named if she’d wanted to. The car in the driveway was a big SUV, brand new, American made, top of the line. There was an in-ground pool off one side of the house, just past a sprawling deck.
They had money. This was a very successful operation. Fifty bucks wouldn’t even cause a ripple in their financial well-being. For her, it was survival.
Then why did it feel so awful? Why did it always feel so awful? And why was this time worse than ever before?
As she drove home, her father’s voice whispered through her memory.
A conscience is a very dangerous thing, girls. It makes you a patsy. Makes you weak. Makes you put the well-being of others ahead of your own, and folks who do that don’t make it very far in this world. You just remember that. You start feeling any kind of discomfort inside when you’re running a game, that’s what it is, that’s a conscience trying to take hold of you. And once it gets you, it won’t let go and then you’re done for. You fight it, you hear?
Kiley nodded at the voice, dear and beloved and familiar, inside her head. She hadn’t visited her father at the Oklahoma State Penn since she’d found out about her sister’s death. She’d written him a long letter instead; told him that the ranch was gonna be sold at a tax auction, and that she’d decided to go home to try to get it back. She’d told him she wanted to go straight after that, and that she was sorry she was such a miserable failure at what, for him, was the family business. Jack Marian Kellogg was one of the greats among grifters. It was a source of pride to him.
Turning her back on the life was like a rejection of everything he was. But she poured her heart out in that letter, to try to make him understand.
He hadn’t written back.
* * *
Rob was at Armstrong’s garage, located right at the busiest crossroads on Main Street, at the very east edge of the village. He was sitting on a cinder block retaining wall, talking to Edie’s husband Wade and watching the vehicles that passed for signs of the stranger. Finding the hulk who’d been asking about Kiley was his real reason for coming into town. He’d been all through the village with no luck, and decided to stop at Wades’ to talk about his barn find.
“It’s an old El Camino,” he said. “Not rusty, either, which is a small miracle.”
“Low humidity,” Wade said. “Old cars love Oklahoma.”
“I don’t know if it even runs.”
“You find a key for it?” Wade asked. The block wall they were sitting on lined the parking area in front of his shop. It was in the shadow of the building, protecting them from the brilliant, blazing sun.
“They were in the ashtray, believe it or not,” Rob said. “Battery’s dead though.”
Wade nodded. “Is it accessible?”
“I can get it that way with a couple of hours and some elbow grease.”
Wade nodded. “I’ll bring a tow truck out and haul it back here. Sounds like a fun project.”
“You’ve gotta charge me, Wade,” he said. “You know I can afford to pay.”
Wade shook his head. “What you can afford doesn’t have anything to do with it. Family only pays for parts.”
“I get that, but it’s not exactly for me.”
“Ah. For Kiley, then?”
“She’s in dire straits. That car she’s driving—”
“Yeah, I’ve seen it. Heard it, too.” He gave an expressive shudder. Then he looked right into Rob’s eyes and said, “According to Selene, we might as well start calling her family.”
“I don’t…it isn’t… I’m not really….”
“Yeah, I can see you’re not. I’ll get on it today then.” He slid off the stone wall.
“Wait, what do you think Selene meant by that?” He slid off the wall, too.
“Does anyone really know the meaning of anything Selene says?” Wade asked. He reached to shake Rob’s hand, but when Rob glanced up he saw the guy he’d spent the morning looking for and froze.
The man from Selene’s photo was on the other side of Main Street at the gas station, pumping gas into a jacked-up, orange Charger.
Rob took a single step in that direction, and Wade clapped a hand onto his shoulder and said, “That him?”
He nodded. “I need to talk to him.”
“I need to come with you.”
“No, you really don’t, Wade. It’s all good.”
“You sure?”
“Sure I’m sure.”
“He’s pretty big,” Wade said. “How about I come with you and just watch your back? You know, from a distance?”
Rob glanced over his shoulder at his stepbrother-in-law. “You don’t think I’m up to it?”
“I didn’t say that.” Wade looked at the guy again, grimaced a little. “Do you think you’re up to it?”
Rob watched the guy pumping gas for a couple more seconds. “Why don’t you just watch my back? You know, from a distance.”
Wade clapped him on the shoulder and Rob started to walk away, then turned and said, “Don’t send out a bulletin just yet, okay?”
Wade, who already had his phone in his hand, slid it back into his pocket. “Sorry. Gets to be a reflex, once you’re in the family for a while.”
Rob crossed the lazy street to the gas station, walked up to the fellow just as he replaced the gas pump nozzle, and said, “Excuse me.”
The guy turned, straightening to his full height as he did. He was 6’6 in his socks. “What?” he asked, and not in a friendly way.
Rob cleared his throat. “I heard you were asking around about a friend of mine.”
“You know where she is?”
“Not at the moment, no. What do you want with her?”
The big guy’s brows went up. He looked R
ob up and down once, then shook his head. “None of your business.” Then he turned away, heading around his car toward the driver’s side.
Rob waylaid him between the headlights, grabbing his arm and pulling him to a halt. “Not good enough, pal. So I’ll ask you again, why are you looking for her?”
He turned slowly. “You really want to do this?”
No, his brain whispered. You really do not want this. “What I want is to have a conversation.”
“You’re about to have a conversation with my fist.” The stranger lifted said fist, and Rob thought he was just showing it off, until it hammered his jaw with the approximate force of a wrecking ball.
Rob went down like a sack of feed, rubbed his jaw, which was, incredibly, still attached, and then got up again. “That was uncalled for.”
The guy grinned and lifted his fist again.
Rob ducked the blow this time, and drove a good one right into the thug’s middle. The stranger might be big, but Rob was quick, and just as strong. He bobbed beneath another strike, then delivered an uppercut to the chin when he popped up again. After that, he couldn’t really keep track of who hit who. The pain in his face and body was about equal to the pain in his fists, so he figured it was a pretty even match. A couple of whoops of encouragement from passersby let him know he was doing okay, and then somehow or other, his two brothers were grabbing him and dragging him a few yards away.
Jason handed him a handkerchief and said, “Nose.”
The other dude was still back by his car. Wade had him by one arm, and Caleb, in his suit and tie, had him by the other. Guy was thrashing to get free until Big Falls police chief Jimmy Corona came running from the station a few hundred feet away.
He stopped in front of the stranger, touched his gun and said, “Don’t make this harder than it has to be, friend. Just settle down.” Then he glanced Rob’s way. “You okay?”
“Fine. He’s the one who needs a paramedic.”
“In your dreams,” the stranger said.
“That’s enough.” Jimmy had been promoted to chief when the old one had retired last year. He was Kara Brand’s husband, and he had the leadership gene in him. Peopled respected him. The uniform helped. “Here’s what’s gonna happen,” he told the guy. “You’re gonna man up, answer a few questions and more likely than not, get back into this sweet ride of yours, and drive right back where you came from. Are we clear?”
Oklahoma Moonshine (The McIntyre Men #1) Page 7
