Long Time Gone (3 page)

Rankin stared back, unsmiling. “You had your say already, Mayor, now it’s time for our discussion. We’ll have to ask you to leave.”

Hilton narrowed his eyes. “I understood that I’d be allowed to remain in chambers for the vote.”

Rankin gave him a bland smile. “Nope. Sorry. Rules are clear. Council members only for personnel decisions unless there’s been a request for an open meeting.”

Hilton’s jaw ached again. He should have had Brinkman check the rules more closely. If he demanded time to look at them now, everybody would be pissed at him for holding things up. He managed to push his lips into one more supremely insincere smile. “All right, then. I’ll trust to the wisdom of your deliberations.”

Actually, of course, he didn’t trust their wisdom at all. Somehow, although Rankin and Friesenhahn had gotten into bed together, it was Hilton who’d gotten screwed.

Morgan arranged one last load of glasses in the tasting room dishwasher. Summer was a busy season, with tourists showing up for three-day vacations and antique runs. She’d been pouring wine since eleven in the morning, giving her spiel and smiling until her cheeks were numb. At least half of the people said they weren’t wine drinkers and only wanted tastes of Bluebonnet Sue, Cedar Creek’s dessert wine. Morgan had tried to push a little Muscat Canelli, too, but for a lot of the drinkers even Muscat was too dry.

She sighed. They’d sold a lot of Bluebonnet, but that wouldn’t make Ciro happy. Of course, not much made Ciro happy where she was concerned. Right now he was checking the receipts.

“Nobody bought any Malbec.” Ciro raised an eyebrow. “You give them any tastes?”

Morgan shrugged. “I tried, but a lot of them won’t drink red wine unless it’s sweet. They think the Malbec’s too heavy.”

Ciro grimaced. “It’s not heavy. The balance is great. Cliff and I worked on that sucker for a year to get the balance right.”

“You know it and I know it. But we’re still drawing a lot of new wine drinkers, Ciro. They’re afraid of dry reds.” She pushed a few more glasses onto the shelf, trying to sound nonchalant. “You know, we could probably sell more dessert wines—reach a few more customers. Maybe we should try a port.”

Ciro narrowed his eyes. “I’m not wasting any of our grapes on port wine.”

“We could always buy some juice from California and use that.”

“Bite your tongue,” Ciro snapped. “We’re a Texas winery. We use Texas grapes. Period.”

“Other people are buying from California, even from Australia and South America. There’s a grape glut. Maybe we could put out a line of cheaper stuff—Castleberry has a whole house-wine line based on California juice.”

Ciro threw the receipts back into the drawer. “Did you hear what I just said? We’re not Castleberry, goddamn it. We’re a premium winery, Morgan. Don’t you understand what that means? And don’t even mention that to your daddy. You’ll give him a relapse.”

Morgan wasn’t sure how you could get a relapse with a broken leg, but she knew her father would probably agree with Ciro. And she needed to do more research before she talked to Dad about it. “Don’t worry—I won’t say anything. I’ll finish closing up. You can go on to dinner.”

Ciro folded his arms across his chest. “Carmen says you should come over and get a meal. She’ll have the food on the table in fifteen minutes.”

“Thank her for me.” Morgan fitted the last glass onto the shelf. “I’ve got some stuff I have to do in town. I’ll grab dinner there.” The last thing she wanted to do was spend dinner hearing a catalog of all the mistakes she’d made over the past week, in stereo.

“You going back to the Dew Drop?” Ciro’s voice simmered with disapproval.

You are
not
my father, damn it.
“I’m meeting with Allie Maldonado about the volunteers’ luncheon. I don’t know where we’ll end up.” She held his gaze for a long moment, willing herself not to blink.

Ciro looked away first. “Yeah, well, make sure you get a meal someplace. You got a lot of work ahead of you tomorrow. Can’t have you getting sick.” He turned and walked out of the tasting room, heading toward his sprawling ranch-style house on the far side of the west vineyard.

Morgan blew out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. At least she’d been spared an evening being picked apart by both Ciro and Carmen. She might even go into town and see Allie—she actually did have some details of the volunteers’ luncheon to work out.

And maybe Officer Grouch would be around to glare at her, although she couldn’t think why she needed somebody else to disapprove of her choices.

Of course, he hadn’t actually glared last time. And he had been the first one to understand the whole “Bored Ducks” thing. And he’d been really…competent when he’d been taking care of the drunken driver.

In fact, there’d been something sort of sexy about that. About the commanding way he’d dealt with a troublemaker. Morgan didn’t really need protecting, but if she ever did, Erik Toleffson looked like the right man for the job.

She wondered how competent he was in other areas.

Okay, enough.
Clearly, she’d been celibate for far too long. Unfortunately, it didn’t look like she was going to be changing that situation anytime soon.

Certainly not with Officer Grouch.

Erik sat in his booth at the Dew Drop, waiting for his brothers and staring at the bar. For one of the few times since he’d quit drinking, he felt like jumping off the wagon. Hiding in a bottle had a certain attraction right now.

Chief of police. Of Konigsburg, Texas.

Acting chief of police, actually. Rankin and the other council members had made it clear—he was on probation for now. But if he didn’t screw up, after a couple of months he’d have the job for real.

The question was, did he want the job for real?

He’d be the first to admit he hadn’t been thinking of actually being hired as chief when he’d submitted his application. It was just a last-minute attempt to keep Linklatter from taking over—he and Nando had both applied, and he found out later that Peavey had too. Hell, Helen Kretschmer might have put in her own application. He and Nando had figured the more applications the council had to go through, the more they could slow down the process, maybe get enough time for somebody from outside Konigsburg to apply. But Hilton Pittman had tried his best to move things along at light speed.

They’d all known what would happen if Linklatter took over, but they’d also known they had almost no chance in hell of stopping him, short of some kind of miracle.

But now here he was, chief of police. He’d be in charge of the whole damn department, people would be depending on him. He tried to think of a time when he’d been in charge of anything anywhere, but he came up dry. He was everybody’s favorite second in command, somebody who could work on his own and get the job done, then come back for another assignment. The idea of keeping track of other people and making his own assignments so they could get jobs done for him made his stomach contract into a knot.

Ham hadn’t taken it well. When Rankin had opened the door to the council chamber, Ham had clearly expected to be invited inside. Instead, Rankin had nodded in Erik’s direction. “Come on in, Toleffson, we got some things to discuss.”

The last thing Erik had seen as he turned toward the door had been Ham’s rigid face, the crown of his new Stetson crumpled in his fist.

Pete slid into the booth across from him. “Is it true?”

Erik thought about asking him what he meant but decided not to be an asshole. He nodded. “Yeah.”

Pete smiled a little cautiously. Of Erik’s three brothers, he was the only one who still seemed to see through him to the full-on bully he’d once been. Possibly because Pete was the one who’d ended up on the wrong end of his big brother’s fists more often than Lars or Cal. “Good deal.”

“Don’t start celebrating yet,” Erik said drily. “I’m only acting chief for now. There’s a two-month probation.”

Someone pounded on his shoulder and he looked up to see Cal grinning down at him. “Way to go, Bro. Horace told me when he got back to the clinic. Sounds like Friesenhahn came down on your side all the way.”

Erik shook his head, sliding out of the booth to let Cal in. “I don’t know why he would. I’ve never talked to Friesenhahn. I just know him by sight.”

“Considering the competition, that may have been enough,” Pete muttered.

Lars arrived and gave Pete an absent-minded shove to move him to the inside of the booth before he sat. “Erik, I just heard the damndest thing.”

“If you heard that I’m the new chief of police, it’s true. If you heard something else, I probably don’t know anything about it.”

Lars broke into an exact copy of Cal’s grin. “Okay! Way to go, Bro.”

“Why isn’t this man smiling?” Cal said after a moment.

Erik pinched the bridge of his nose. “Because I’m still in shock. I just applied for the chief’s job to try to head Linklatter off. I never thought they’d actually give it to me.”

Cal frowned. “But you’re qualified. Horace said you had three years with the MPs. In Baghdad.”

“It wasn’t all in Baghdad.” Erik shrugged. “Mostly Kuwait.”

All three of his brothers were watching him. “You were in the army? In Iraq?” Lars said. “I never knew that.”

Erik stared down at his hands. He desperately wanted this conversation to end. Talking about the past with his brothers was about as much fun as patrolling Fallujah. Most of their childhood memories were better left alone. “I didn’t tell anybody at the time.”

“Not even Mom and Dad?”

“I wrote them about it after I got over there. I didn’t want them to worry.” Which was a crock and a half, but maybe they’d let him get by with it.

“And you were a cop in Iowa?” Cal raised a questioning eyebrow. “I thought you worked for a private security company.”

“I did. Until I finished my degree in Criminal Justice. Then I worked for the Davenport police.” Erik wondered what Rankin had thought when he’d discovered Cal didn’t know anything about his older brother’s life. On the other hand, Rankin might know a bit about Cal’s life, which would explain why his little brother knew nothing about Erik, largely by choice.

Pete was the first one to look away. “I’ll be damned.”

“I hope not.” Erik signaled at the barmaid. “I’ll get this.”

“Like hell.” Lars slapped his wallet on the table. “You don’t pay for your own celebration around here.”

The next two hours were taken up with people Erik knew only slightly slapping him on the shoulder and shaking his hand. He began to get the feeling that nobody in town had wanted Ham Linklatter to take over, with the exception of Hilton Pittman.

Several people wanted to buy him a beer, and he passed them on to his brothers. Some seemed vaguely annoyed that he didn’t drink, but others gave him an approving nod, as if a non-drinking chief of police were a plus. Erik felt like telling them it wasn’t much of a moral decision, given that nobody wanted to spend time with Mr. Hyde, least of all him.

After an hour or so, Lars and Cal staggered off to their wives and children. A few minutes later, Pete’s wife, Janie, showed up to drag him home, but stayed to toast Erik.

“I knew the good guys would win,” she said, grinning. “I knew they’d pick you.”

Erik shook his head. “You knew more than I did, then. I’m still getting used to the idea.” He thought about questioning her definition of “good guys” but didn’t. He liked his sisters-in-law—they were one of the chief reasons he envied his brothers. And they seemed to like him back. Of course, the fact that he’d flattened one of Janie’s ex-boyfriends who’d tried to take a few liberties with her had helped shape her opinion of him.

“Everybody seems really happy about it.”

“I’m sure Pittman would have a few things to say about that.”

Janie frowned, staring at the doorway. “We may be about to find out.”

Erik turned to follow her gaze. Hilton Pittman was making an entrance, dressed to impress. He wore a dark suit that probably cost a lot, although Erik would guess it didn’t cost too much since Hilton wouldn’t want people to think he had any extra cash to spend on clothes. His hair looked a little like some new kind of plastic, perfectly groomed and unlikely to move, just the right shade of brown flecked with gray. His smile snapped into place automatically, as his right hand shot out to grip the hand of the nearest man at the bar. The astonished drinker put down his beer and started to say something, but Hilton had already moved on, pumping the next hand, grinning firmly.

“Look at him work that crowd.” Pete shook his head. “A real pro.”

“Yeah, but a pro what?” Janie took a sip of her beer. “I wish somebody would run against that man sometime.”

“Why doesn’t anybody do that?” Erik picked up one of several Dr. Peppers in front of him.

“Because nobody else wants to be mayor. It’s a lot of work and the salary is ridiculous. Hilton has pretty much gotten it by default for the past five years.”

Erik studied Pittman as he worked his way around the bar. For somebody who wasn’t making much salary, he looked pretty well kept. Erik glanced at Pete, the Assistant County Attorney.

His lips were set in a grim line. “Whatever he’s doing, he’s good enough at it that he hasn’t popped up on anybody’s radar. Yet. Supposedly he’s still running his car dealership.”

Pittman was rounding the corner of the bar, heading roughly in their direction. Erik tried to remember if he’d ever seen him in the Dew Drop before. He didn’t think so, but then he hadn’t spent as much time in the Dew Drop as his brothers had.

Pittman came to a stop beside their table, his smile glowing in the dimness of the bar. “Toleffson, I guess I’m not the first to congratulate you today.”

“No sir, but thanks anyway.” Erik shook the mayor’s hand, watching his eyes. Maybe he could pick up some pointers on talking to people he’d rather fillet.

“Quite a step up—from part-time officer to chief.”

“Yes sir.”

“Here’s hoping it works out for you. Not everyone could handle that much responsibility.” Pittman was still beaming, but his eyes had turned to smoldering cinders.