One Night Standoff - By Delores Fossen Page 0,39
about. Not just the muscle, either. I didn’t know you’d ever hired any muscle. And as for anyone specific, I met dozens of people when I worked for you. Even more afterward, when I was working for James to bring you down.”
Quentin didn’t seem to have a reaction to that last jabbing reminder. “But you remember this guy. He came in a couple of times while you were still working for me. Or rather, pretending to work for me. A guy in his fifties, always wore a white cowboy hat with one side kicked up. He went out to dinner with us once.”
That was enough to jog her memory. Lenora did indeed remember a man like that, but she hadn’t known he was hired muscle. However, that wasn’t what bothered her now. It was that gleam in Quentin’s eyes.
Something about this wasn’t right on many levels.
She forced herself to think, to try to recall any details she could about the man. Lenora picked through the conversations she’d heard between Quentin and the man in the white hat.
And her heart nearly skipped a beat.
“Oh, God,” she said, and her gaze flew to Clayton. “I didn’t know. I swear, I didn’t know.”
Clayton looked at her as if she’d slugged him. “Didn’t know what?”
Lenora had to explain. She had to make him understand. “I only met him a time or two, and I didn’t make the association until just now.”
Quentin smiled. “What Lynnie is stumbling around trying to tell you is that the man she and I worked with was none other than Melvin Larson. Your dear ol’ dad.”
Chapter Eleven
The anger slammed like a fist into Clayton’s chest, and after seeing the look on Lenora’s face, he knew that Quentin wasn’t lying. Not about this, anyway.
“Get him out of here,” Clayton told Cutter and the other ranch hand, Ray. “And make sure he’s off the ranch and doesn’t come back.”
Clayton caught one last glimpse of Quentin’s smile. A smile he wanted to dissolve to dust, but he forced himself to remember that Quentin was just the messenger. Yeah, he could still be guilty all the way up to his eyeballs, but he wasn’t lying now.
He waited until Cutter and Ray had the man out of his sight, and Clayton yanked out his phone so he could call Harlan at the marshals’ office.
“I don’t want to answer a lot of questions about what I’m about to ask you to do,” Clayton said the moment his brother answered. “But I need you to find my birth father right away and bring him in for questioning.”
“All right,” Harlan said without hesitation. “And if he resists?”
“I hope to hell he does,” Clayton mumbled, and he ended the call.
“Let’s go,” Clayton said to Lenora. But he didn’t just say it. He snapped it and got them moving.
“I’m sorry,” Lenora repeated.
Clayton wanted to assure her that he didn’t blame her for what’d just happened, but his throat clamped shut, and he couldn’t speak. It didn’t help that the sun broke through the clouds at that exact moment and the pain stabbed through his head.
“Come on,” Lenora insisted, and she reversed the grip and took hold of him. “Let’s get inside.”
He did. They hurried across the narrow strip of yard and driveway and back into the house. Thankfully no one was in the kitchen or other rooms that they went through, because Clayton didn’t want to explain what he was still having trouble dealing with.
Melvin might have been behind these attacks.
The SOB could have killed not just him, but Lenora and the baby.
With Lenora right behind him, he stormed up the stairs to the ranch office where he’d had the earlier computer interview with Riggs. At the time, Clayton had thought that was enough hard news to swallow, but here he’d been given another jolt.
“I honestly didn’t remember your father until Quentin said those things,” Lenora told him. Her voice was frantic now, and she moved in front of him to force eye contact.
Every nerve in his body felt raw, and the emotion was at a rolling boil inside him. It didn’t help that Lenora looked as if she was ready for him to toss her out the door. Clayton was ready to do something, but he wasn’t sure what.
Before he could think—which should have been a big red flag that anything he was about to do would likely be a mistake—he moved toward her. And he made that mistake anyway. He latched on to Lenora, dragged her against him