The Homeplace: A Mystery Read Online Free Page A

held the door open for two men in camo overalls and orange caps. “Get anythin’?” he asked.
    “Filled.” One of the hunters smiled a toothy grin. “Gonna have breakfast and head back to the Springs. Too easy this year.”
    Mercy saw a set of antlers in the back of the hunters’ pickup, but the man climbing out of the new Dodge in the parking lot made her smile.
    “Chase Ford,” Bobby Jackson bellowed out as the door swung closed behind him. He met Chase in the parking lot, and the two pumped hands.
    Mercy was untying her apron when Chase came through the door. Her feet moved before her mind told them. She was at the door in front of him with apron strings trailing from her fingers. She wrapped both her arms around his waist, and she pressed her face onto his chest. The top of her head touched just below his shoulders, like she remembered. She squeezed until she felt muscle and sinew. He was still strong, like he’d been all those years ago.
    In the next instant he held her at arm’s length and smiled down at her.
    Tears bubbled up from that place inside her and filled her eyes. Then Mercy did what she’d planned to do if she ever saw Chase Ford again.
    “Ass”—the sound of her hand smacking his face filled the diner, and every head turned to look—“hole.”
    *   *   *
    Very few things about his job made Deputy Paco Martinez uneasy. He’d told Marty that. Paco showed his nervousness by jabbering. Marty thought of Deb and their three kids. And prayed that no one would ever come knocking on their door with this kind of news.
    How do you tell someone that their wife or husband, son or daughter, is dead?
    You just told them. Paco had taught him that two weeks after he was hired on the Sheriff’s Department. Be ready for them to break down, cry, faint, or lash out. But just tell them. That was all you could do.
    It was bad enough when that loved one had been killed on the highway or in some farm accident. But Jimmy Riley had been shot in the head.
    Paco steered the department’s car off the highway that divided Brandon into two equal halves and pointed the car toward the grain silos near the railroad tracks. The Pioneer House sat on the town side of Front Street. Once the railroad had put crews up for the night in the old hotel. Now workers in the oil patch rented rooms by the week. New company trucks sat on the street with an equal number of worn-out pickups. Friday night’s beer bottles littered the yard.
    “You been here before?” Paco tipped his bald head toward the building.
    “Too many times,” Marty answered. “Noise complaints, drunk and disorderlies. Once two old boys were goin’ at each other in the street at two o’clock in the mornin’. That turned into a real rodeo.”
    Paco tapped a finger on the steering wheel. “Four years ago, I got called here on a shots fired. The vic had a hole in his beer gut but wouldn’t say who did it. Paramedics hauled him to the hospital in Hugo. I think he lived.”
    They parked in the gravel lot at the silos and crossed Front Street to the boarding house. Paco’s first year on the job had been Marty’s senior year of high school. If Marty had to pick any of the deputies in the department to pair up with, it would be the old man. He looked like a fireplug with a potbelly, but Paco was a darned good cop.
    The deputies climbed the empty stairs to an apartment on the second floor that Jimmy shared with his father.
    “Smells like the burritos they sell at Town Pump,” Paco said.
    Marty thought the building smelled more like cat piss.
    The only light socket in the narrow hall had a broken bulb. Whatever carpet wasn’t stained dark with oil crunched with crusty red dirt, and gravel bounced from their footfalls.
    Paco tapped on the door marked with a number eight. “Mr. Riley, Officers Martinez and Storm with the Sheriff’s Department. Can we have a few words, sir?”
    “What the hell’s this about?” A hoarse voice rasped from inside the