Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
E than flinched when the truck hit the guy. His body bounced off the hood onto the far side of the road and rolled into the deep ditch as the truck’s tires skidded and squealed. Everything went still and the scent of hot rubber filled the air.
Ethan ran into the street, crossing in front of the pickup, which was Willow’s, he realized. She got out and came to the front, shouting, “I didn’t see him! Jeeze, he ran right out in front of me! Where is he?”
“Went in the ditch,” Lily said, pointing.
The three of them went to the edge of the road. Ethan had his phone out, flashlight app on, aiming it into the deep gulley alongside the road, but there was nothing moving down there.
“Come on, there’s water in the bottom,” he said, sliding down.
It was only six feet or so to the bottom of the ditch, but as soon as his boots splashed down, he realized the water was shallow.
Not deep enough to hide a whole human. He aimed the light up one way, and down the other. “Well, where the hay did he go?”
He was looking up at the women when he heard a vehicle starting up from the distance. He scrambled up the bank and joined them in time to watch a set of taillights about a hundred yards farther up the road, and fading fast.
“Son of a—” Willow opened her truck door.
Lily put a hand on her arm. “Maybe let him go,” she said. “He’s hurt.” And she nodded at the pavement, where there were dark smears. “I think that’s blood.”
“He moved too fast to be hurt very bad,” Willow said. “Besides, I can’t do that. I’m a deputy. I can’t hit a pedestrian and not report it. If he’s hurt, that’s even worse. Who the hell is he, anyway?”
Ethan said, “We don’t know who he is. It looked like somebody’d been sleepin’ in the shed, so we waited up to catch ‘em and find out who.”
“And do what? Add him to the menu?” Willow nodded at the weapons they were still carrying, a rolling pin and a meat hammer, then lowered her head, shaking it.
“Let me get the truck out of the road, and we’ll check the shed.
If I can get some prints and he has a record, it might be just that easy to ID him. ”
She got into her truck to move it into the parking lot.
As they walked back across the street, Ethan noticed Lily shiver and automatically slid an arm around her shoulders.
She looked up at him, and he thought her expression was grateful.
Then she pressed a little closer to his side, and he squeezed a little more.
The shed door still stood wide open. Willow shut her truck off and came to join them, then flicked on her Mag Light and aimed it around the inside of the shed.
There was still a sleeping bag and pillow, a bottle of water, and a granola bar. All the same things as before. Except for two new additions, hanging from a nail on the wall. A large Mexican style hat and a woven poncho.
“Holy crap,” Lily said. “It’s Gringo Sombrero.”
Willow moved closer, examining the articles and nodding slow. “I’m pretty sure you’re right. At least I can get a description out with the APB. Six-two, maybe six-three, long hair, full beard, both dirty blond. Electric blue eyes. Missin’ his hat.”
“ Electric blue eyes?” Lily asked.
“Sure, you’ve seen him. Keeps that hat low, but not low enough to hide those eyes. They’re kind of…intense.”
“I heard him described as chiseled,” Ethan said, and Lily elbowed him for teasing her.
“Did either of you see what he was driving?” Willow asked.
Just as Ethan was opening his mouth to describe the old brown Buick, Lily said, “Nope,” and clasped his hand hard . He figured she had a reason, so he kept the car to himself.
“All right,” Willow said. “So what happened, tonight, exactly? Before he ran in front of me?”
“We saw him movin’ around in the shed from the upstairs windows,” Ethan said. “We sneaked outside to confront him,” Ethan began.
“But we triggered the motion-sensing floodlight,” Lily put in.
Ethan nodded and completed the tale. “He panicked, and ran?—”
“—and bam ,” Lily said.
Ethan noted the curious look in Willow’s eyes as her gaze shifted from him to Lily and back again, following the conversation.
“Huh,” Willow said.
Ethan heard more than the three letters of the word.
“Well,” she went on, “he ran fifty yards in the time it took us to check the ditch for him. He can’t be hurtin’ too bad. I’ll get that APB out and file a report. Maybe you should give Manny a call, see if he knows anything about the guy.”
“Will do.”
“You think this was connected to that shakedown attempt?” Willow asked.
Ethan pushed out his lower lip and shook his head.
“Don’t see how it could be. That guy’s dead.
This feels like a fellow without a place to sleep.
I wonder if Manny’s been lettin’ him use the shed the whole time?
How long have you been noticing him at the Cantina?
” he asked, addressing both women. He wasn’t home often enough to know for sure himself.
He felt kind of ashamed when he thought on that.
“As long as Dad and I have lived here,” Lily said, “So at least a year.”
Willow nodded. “Yeah, I’d say right around the time Lily and her dad moved down here. Maybe a month or two longer. Maria will know for sure. She gets tacos at least once a week.”
“She’ll be going through withdrawal while we remodel,” Lily said, shaking her head sadly.
They left the shed without disturbing any of the stranger’s belongings. Willow used her jacket sleeve to pull the door closed. “I’ll call this in. Get the guys out here with a kit so we can check for prints and?—”
“I really wish we didn’t need to do all that. Make it all official and everything,” Ethan said. And he didn’t know what made him say it. There was something about the guy that got to him. Hell, he’d written a song about him. “Seems like he’s havin’ hard times. I don’t want to make them worse.”
Willow looked from him to Lily, as if she might be able to explain.
Lily said, “I kind of agree. Could we keep this off the books, Willow, just until we find out more about what’s going on?”
Willow sighed, then said, “I have to put in a report, but it can wait a day or two. I’m still gonna get his prints. I need to go get a kit from the office and hope he doesn’t come back for his stuff in the meantime.”
Ethan said, “We can watch the shed until?—”
“No. You two get the hell out of here until I come back, so I know you’re safe.
Go…go over to the Waterin’ Hole.” She nodded in the direction of the local dive bar, three quarters of a mile away, in the middle of the Mad Bull’s Bend business district.
“Get a beer and some pretzels. I’ll text you when I’m back. Stay outta trouble, okay?”
“Sure,” Ethan said. “We can do that. Can’t we, Lily?”
She shrugged and tried to stop worrying so much about the stranger, and the brown paint, and the dead crime lord who’d been trying to make Ethan sell the place to him. And it wasn’t hard, not when Ethan Brand was holding out a hand and had a mischievous glint in his eyes.
“Sure we can,” she said. “Long as you’re buying.”
Ethan figured his cousin the deputy was right.
He had no business risking Lily’s safety by trying to ambush a squatter, and he was a little embarrassed that he’d tried.
The notion of spending the night on surveillance with her had probably kept him from thinking about much else.
He’d been equal parts excited and terrified at the notion.
Besides, Willow wasn’t leaving until they did. So he shrugged and extended an elbow. “Shall we?”
“Yeah, but first I have an idea.” She ran toward the cantina. From the driver’s seat of her truck, Willow rolled her eyes.
Ethan followed Lily inside, expecting her to grab their jackets and her handbag off the bar, but no, she ran past those things, all the way upstairs. He saw lights glowing before she came back down.
“Turn on all the lights!” she said, as she moved back through the place into the kitchen to do just that.
He would have obeyed, had she not lit the place up like Christmas already. She came out of the kitchen and ran to the vintage juke box, patting herself down for quarters.
“Behind the bar. I put a jarful back there.”
“Smart.” She ducked behind the bar, and he heard the jar of coins rattle. Then she dropped a lot of them into the coin slot and poked buttons to select songs. Hank Williams came on first. “Long Gone Lonesome Blues.”
She came back to him at the front door. “Okay, great,” she said, full volume, because the music was pretty loud.
“With any luck, the lights and noise will fool him for a while and his stuff will be here when we get back. Front door’s locked.
We’ll lock the back one behind us on the way out.
Oh!” She moved past him and flipped on the outdoor lights, flooding the front parking lot before heading through the kitchen and stepping out the back door.
“We can take my car,” she said. “Leave your truck out front, so he thinks we’re still here.”
“Why not leave ‘em both and walk? It’s not even a mile.” Ethan closed and locked the back door. It muffled Hank, though.
They walked around the building on the side where the shed was. It was empty, dark, its door wide open. He glanced up at the motion sensing light. They were too close to the cantina to set it off.
“I got this,” Lily said. She walked toward the only plant on the lawn, an overgrown thorn bush.
As soon as she got near it, the light came on.
“Perfect.” She untied the scarf she’d used to cover her hair while painting and tied it to a thorn-covered branch.
The breeze made it dance, which kept the motion detecting light on. “There.”
“So he thinks we’re still here, and doesn’t dare take his stuff before Will gets a chance to look it over,” Ethan said. “Meanwhile, just in case he sees through the ruse, we’re safe over at the Waterin’ Hole.”
“More or less,” she said,
“Maybe your brother isn’t the only genius in the family,” he said.