Cowboy Logic - B.A. Tortuga Page 0,8

well, I lived here, and I was a pimply kid.” He sighed. “I ran off a drunk town bad boy with a shotgun, Mal.”

“No shit? Was there video? Tell me there’s video!”

“Mal.” He started laughing hard, just rolling. “There might be, if Bailey thought fast, but God.”

“What? I can make it into a game. Blam blam!” Mal was a video game designer, and a good one at that.

“I’ll ask Bailey, but I doubt it. He threatened her kids.”

“Oh fuck.” Mal went serious. “Is he in jail?”

“Not yet. He might be soon.” Logic had no idea how that was going to work. “But he’s gone, and I’m not leaving them until we know he won’t come back.”

“No, I hear you. If you need help, please call, okay? Or if you just need to gossip. I mean talk.”

“I will. I swear. I’ll need y’all. And you know Evan won’t water, so check on the plants. I haven’t even told the agent…”

“Uh-oh. He will eat you alive.” Mal was chuckling. Evil man.

“You joke, but he might.”

“I never joke about your agent.” Mal had been at a luncheon once…

“Yeah. You ended up going home with him, didn’t you?”

“Shut up.” Mal snorted. “Anyway, I hope it all works out for your sister.”

“Me too. She has four kids. Four.”

“Send pictures. You’ve never met them?” Mal asked, voice rising a little.

“They’ve come to me a few times for a day or two before her husband died. Not since.”

Mal whistled. “Well, get to know them. Spoil them with ice cream.”

“Right. Ice cream and video games. It’ll be fine.” Fine, dammit. He liked kids. They liked him.

His phone binged, and he looked. Bailey asking him to come talk to the deputy.

“Gotta go, man. Cops want to talk to me.”

“Don’t go to jail. That goes badly for guys like us. Later, hon.”

No shit. Especially in Tiny Town, Texas. He hung up, making his way down to join Bailey and Deputy Dave. There was coffee. And cookies. Bailey solved all things with cookies.

“Hey, y’all. How’s it going?” Lord, Logic sounded like he belonged here. His Texan came back so easily.

“Okay. Dave wants to go through it with you. I’ll go wait in the front room.” Bailey gave him a small real smile, so she must not have fared badly.

Easy-peasy. He heard his main character, Wyatt, in his head, “When you don’t lie, son, you don’t have to remember a fake truth.” Wyatt was really all that was good about cowboys, with just a few of their bad traits thrown in. Stubbornness. Vanity.

Logic sat and took the coffee she’d left for him. “Hey.”

“Hey. So how did you come to be involved?” Dave asked, head bent over his notebook.

Oh, nice lead-in. He loved to observe people at work, especially cops and other first responders. “Bailey called me.”

“And what did she tell you?”

“That there was a man here threatening the kids if she called the police. That he wouldn’t leave. That she’d never asked him to be here.”

Dave made more notes, probably unaware that he was nodding slightly. “And then you offered to come?”

“We agreed I would come help while she tried to get the kids somewhere else. She was afraid to leave him here with her horses and the house. Both are worth more than his sorry hide.”

“Did you know who it was?” Now Dave looked him right in the eye. Direct hit. If he’d been lying, the quickness would have made him look away. Well done, Dave. Instead, he met the gaze head-on.

“No, sir. It didn’t matter. This is my family.”

“Of course. So you arrived when?”

“About… an hour ago? A little more?” It felt like years. At least years.

“Where did you get the shotgun?” A little smile was curling Dave’s lips.

Shit. Had Dave asked Bailey? What had she said? “It’s legal. I bought it over the internet from a guy in Dallas.” He didn’t bluster, stayed relaxed, didn’t look away.

“How?” Dave blinked at him with patently fake innocence.

“A friend of mine owns it. He has a license. I’m considering a private sale and borrowed it to test it out here on the ranch.” God help him, he was channeling his felon of a father. Still, that was what Al had told him to say when he’d met the man outside DFW.

Whatever worked. They all knew the truth. They had to fake the law.

“Okay. Well, your friend will need to collect it. You can’t have it in your possession without a bill of sale, but I’m sure you didn’t know that.”

“No. I tend