“Wait!” Ethan called. “Jeeze, let me grab a weapon.”
She sent an over-the-shoulder scowl. “Sure we’ll shoot him for squatting in a vacant—” But she stopped when she saw the weapon he’d grabbed was a rolling pin. She almost grinned, but there were more important things to do. She grabbed a tenderizing hammer as she passed the utensil rack, just in case.
Ethan opened the back door. They tiptoed to the right side of the building from behind, toward the shed, then froze in their tracks when the motion-sensing spotlight came on from somewhere up high on the side of the cantina. She hadn’t even realized it was there. It blazed directly onto the little garden shed, illuminating a surprised face in the shed window. Then the shed door burst open, and a tall, bearded fellow exploded from it and ran full bore toward the road and right into the path of a pickup truck.
Chapter Eleven
Ethan 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.
