Minor in Possession Read Online Free Page A

on it. I had tossed that in the glove box along with my holster and my .38 before I ever left the airport. The Smith and Wesson is just like my gold card—I don’t leave home without it, and I hadn’t wanted to turn it over to someone else when I checked into Ironwood Ranch. Instead I had left it in the locked glove box of a locked car—which is fine as long as nobody else has the key.
    Now, stretching full length across the seat, I dug the keys back out of my pocket and unlocked the glove compartment door. It fell open at once and the tiny light inside switched on.
    I had put the gun in first and the rental agreement second, so the agreement should have been right on top. It wasn’t. The gun was.
    At first I didn’t think that much about it. I pulled the Smith and Wesson out, intending to put it on the seat beside me long enough to retrieve the rental agreement, but as I brought it past my face, I smelled the unmistakably pungent odor of burnt gunpowder. The gun had been fired, recently. Sometime within the past few hours.
    â€œWhat the hell has that goddamned fool been up to now?” I said aloud to myself. I swung out the cylinder and checked it. Two rounds had been fired.
    Shaken, I put the gun back where I’d found it and relocked both the glove box and the car, then I went looking for Lucy Washington.
    If Joey Rothman thought I wasn’t going to report his car prowl to the proper authorities, he had another think coming.

CHAPTER
3
    L ouise Crenshaw wore sobriety like the full armor of Christ. Her nails ended in long sharpened talons polished to a brilliant magenta. She consistently wore the kinds of dress-for-success costumes that would have been far more appropriate for hawking securities on Wall Street than they were for riding roughshod over a herd of hapless recovering drunks. Rumor had it that she had come to Ironwood Ranch as one of the first fulltime counselors, married her boss Calvin Crenshaw without much difficulty, and immediately assumed the throne.
    The lady’s age was difficult to determine. Her skin had that transparently fragile and stretched look that comes from having had more than one meaningful encounter with a plastic surgeon. Even the most skillful face-lift technique hadn’t entirely erased the road-map ravages caused by years of hard drinking and chain smoking.
    Her husband, Cal, was a pudgy dough-boy of a man whose group-session drunkalogue chronicled years of failure at everything from runningan auto dealership to selling computerized office products. He had finally sobered up and was wanting to help others do the same when his mother died leaving him sole owner of the aging Ironwood Ranch. Cal had decided to turn his inheritance into a treatment center. To hear him tell it, he was well on his way to screwing that up as well when Louise came along at just the right time and saved his bacon.
    Cal himself seemed content to hover vaguely in the background while his front-office wife appeared to be everywhere at once—overseeing admissions, dropping in and out of group-session discussions, personally directing everything from how the laundry was run to what went on in the kitchen.
    Louise was a formidable woman, particularly when crossed, but I was provoked enough myself that morning that I was actually relishing the approaching confrontation when I heard her high heels beating an angry staccato down the tiled hallway toward the office where I waited.
    â€œHow dare you!” she demanded shrilly as she strode into the office and slammed the door behind her. I may have been spoiling for a fight, but she was the one who set the tone of our meeting.
    â€œHow dare I what?” I asked, striking a deliberately provoking, nonchalant pose.
    Louise Crenshaw bristled, infuriated that much more by my offhand attitude. Setting her mouth in a thin, grim line, she stepped around to the other side of a plain oak desk and sat down facingme. She was making a