their hands into the air, singing along so loudly that no one notices when I mess up the lyrics a few times. Ariana sings along, too, smiling ear to ear and holding her beer up like she’s at a rock show.
I’m having so much fun that I don’t realize until the song is over that Gareth and his goons have left.
Whether the Marty Robbins song got under his skin or he just couldn’t stand to see the people in his town rocking out to my music, something drove him out of here.
It’s not much, but I consider it a moral victory.
Chapter 36
THE NEXT FEW nights I have trouble sleeping. Every time I hear a noise, I jump out of bed, grab my gun, and look out the window to make sure no one is vandalizing my truck. When I do sleep, I dream some twisted variation of what happened inside the bank.
I miss the shot.
Or I’m too slow.
Or I’m paralyzed with fear.
In the most recent dream, the man with the AR-15 isn’t some masked robber.
It’s Gareth McCormack.
That morning Ariana and I sit in the conference room, looking for suspicious details in Susan Snyder’s business invoices. She catches me yawning.
“You getting enough sleep?” she says.
“The bed in that motel isn’t very comfortable,” I say.
Which is a lie. I can sleep on the hard ground on a bedroll if my mind is clear and I feel safe.
“I notice you haven’t taken up Tom and Jessica Aaron on their offer to stay in their studio,” she says.
I shrug.
We’ve done some discreet investigation into Tom and Jessica. We checked with the Texas State Board of Pharmacy to make sure there were no red flags in Jessica’s history. We asked around to see if there was any kind of bad blood between Tom and Susan Snyder. So far, nothing has stood out. But I’m still waiting to hear from Freddy about the blood test. Plenty of people in town knew about Susan Snyder’s allergy. The only reason Jessica makes sense as a suspect is if the EpiPen was faulty.
“Let’s go get some lunch,” Ariana says. “Maybe that will wake you up.”
For our first lunch together, Ariana and I pick up deli sandwiches to go. The counter girl greets us with a friendly smile and asks when I’ll be playing at Lobo Lizard again. Maybe I’m starting to win this town over.
When our food is ready, we walk down to the park. The day is hot, but there’s shade under a big bur oak, and we sit on a rock at the edge of the wide, clear river. Downstream, kids play on a rope swing, taking turns launching themselves out into a deep spot. Upstream, a man in waders is fly-fishing.
Ariana and I are quiet for a few minutes as we navigate the implied break from talking about the case.
“So,” I say, “how did you end up a detective in Rio Lobo?”
Ariana says that after studying criminal justice at Angelo State, she went to work for the highway patrol. The chief in Rio Lobo, who remembered her from high school, encouraged her to apply for an open detective position. The town council, however, was pushing for an outside applicant with more experience: John Grady Harris.
“The chief found the budget to hire two detectives in a town barely big enough to support one,” she says.
“So you were partners?”
“For a while.”
“How did you get along?” I ask.
“Just fine,” she says. “He flirted with me a bit until he realized I wasn’t interested, and then we developed a mutual respect. Up until recently, that is.”
She says the former chief, who was well past retirement age, drowned in the river a little over a year ago.
“He liked to canoe in the afternoons after work,” she says. “It was spring, so the current was pretty swift. I guess the canoe flipped. He wasn’t wearing a life jacket.”
Both she and Harris applied for the police chief job.
“We interviewed before the council in an open meeting that Tom Aaron covered for the paper, but the deliberations were closed. They picked Harris.”
“Was it unanimous?”
“One or two of them may have preferred me, but as a group, they decided not to go on record with any dissent. They made a public show of support for the new chief. Or maybe none of them thought I was qualified, and they were nice enough to keep quiet about it.”
“I doubt that’s the case,” I say.
I think she’d make a good Ranger.
We sit for a few minutes and