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.”
