Bull Rush

ELEVEN

Ramsey

I resign myself to doing the one thing I’ve been avoiding since I got here—seeing my family. My brothers, Grant and Levi, run the local casino hotel, The Avarice. It’s on family land that abuts the ranch. It was my grandfather’s, and then my uncle’s originally, then my dad’s when he died with no children, and finally, a shared venture between the eldest Stockton brothers. They’d taken a lot of liberties with it from what I’d seen on the website when curiosity got the best of me—modernizing the hotel rooms, adding a huge restaurant and rooftop pool, and even having entertainment in on the weekends.

Kit and the other staff at the inn told me it was becoming a bit of a thorn in the side of the town. Drawing business away from the inn and the other shops on main street during the day and dragging drunken hordes of tourists up into the bars for late night barhops—creating the perfect storm of misery for Purgatory Falls business owners and its small emergency services department. The inn was suffering the worst of it. Many of the visitors who had once come up to stay were now more excited about the all-in-one resort options The Avarice offered. It had made my brothers less than popular with my wife and her friends, but I doubt they care when they count their millions at night.