The Crimson Brand (13 page)

On the other side of the two-lane street Morgan saw the town preacher changing letters on his quaint little church’s reader board, saw the preacher noticing him, and paused in his stride long enough to give the man a smile and a wave.

The preacher returned both.

Even that man had his price, Morgan knew.  The magic number for which he would sell his own offspring.  Greed was simply human nature.

Except for Susan Taylor it seemed.

This didn’t trouble Morgan.  He liked a challenge.  If he kept raising the numbers and pouring on the charm, he would find Susan’s magic number.  Whatever the price was, it would be worth it.

A honk startled him out of his wandering reverie, and he turned to find a sheriff’s cruiser swinging into opposing traffic—well, there was no traffic at the moment, but the wrong side of the road was still the wrong side of the road.  The window lowered, and the flushed face of Sheriff Avery Price poked out as the cruiser pulled to a stop.

“Good day, Avery.”  Morgan put two fingers to his head in casual salute.  “Joey’s not causing more trouble is he?”

Beyond general complaints of poor service at the town-operated and Price-owned landfill, bad hygiene, and general creepiness, Joseph had behaved himself much better than usual.  Not that he had much of an opportunity for real trouble cooped up almost continuously in his camper at the dump.  Still, the good Sheriff Price had taken an immediate and strong dislike to Morgan’s son.

It happened a lot.  Joseph Duke had not inherited his father’s easy charm. 

“Nothing new,” Sheriff Price said, his ruddy face growing slightly redder at the mention of Joseph.  A large beat-up pickup approached at well over the posted speed limit, saw the back end of the Sheriff’s cruiser occupying its lane, and swerved at the last moment to avoid a collision.  The Sheriff seemed not to notice.  “Ernest was looking for you.  Said you weren’t home when he stopped by and that you won’t answer his calls.”

Morgan sighed.  Ernest Price had been growing somewhat irritable since Morgan’s arrival in town.  It seemed he preferred his silent partner more when they were separated by a continent.  Morgan felt much the same way.

“I’ve been occupied,” Morgan said, now having to work a little to maintain his ever-present smile. 

Smile and the world smiles with you
, his father had told him long ago,
fart and you walk alone
.

Charming man, Morgan’s father.

The Sheriff frowned.  “Can I tell him when he can expect to hear back?”

He runs you like a pack mule
, Morgan thought. 
Good to know
.

“Later today,” Morgan said.  He held up three fingers of his right hand like a boy scout.  “Honest injun.  I’m meeting Joey for a bite to eat.  Need my strength before I wrestle with your brother.”

He smiled even wider, showing two rows of almost perfect teeth.

 The Sheriff nodded and drove away without another word.

Morgan found Joseph sitting alone in Grumpy’s Tavern.  He’d picked a corner table, keeping his back turned to the unfamiliar regulars as he chomped his way through a burger the size of a dinner plate. 

Not even Joseph is glutton enough to finish that
, Morgan thought, cringing as a large dollop of Grumpy’s secret sauce plopped onto the table.

“How about you get a doggy bag for the rest of that?”  He patted his son’s shoulder and sat next to him, keeping far enough back that he wouldn’t be in danger of the boy dripping burger juice all over him.

“Ain’t you gonna eat?”  Joseph spoke through a mouth full of half-chewed burger, and Morgan decided to keep his eyes pointed toward the storefront window and the traffic outside.  Safer that way.

“Nope, not feeling all that hungry anymore,” he said.

A stick-skinny waitress in a catsup-stained apron appeared moments later with a check and a to-go box, as if she’d been waiting for the slightest excuse to get Joseph on his way.  The fine folks at Grumpy’s might just be living up to their name, but Morgan thought their special attention was just a result of Joseph just being Joseph.

The boy was about as charming as a rug burn. 

“I got it,” Morgan said, picking up the slip and rising to give Joseph a little more quality time with the horrendous burger.

The woman at the register was large, with a mass of thick brown hair twisted into a messy bun at the back of her head.  She greeted him with a smile, but it faltered when she read the ticket, her eyes flitting quickly to Joseph and back again. 

“You’re new in town,” she remarked, tapping the keys of her antique cash register.  “That’ll be twelve fifty, hon.”

Morgan passed her a ten and a five, accepting his change with a polite nod.

“You plan on settling here, or just passing through?”  Her smile remained in place, but it looked forced.  Her eyes flicked back to Joseph again.

“I’m still considering, darlin’.”  He turned up his smile to its full, substantial wattage.  When her eyes found him again, his natural charm did its work.  She relaxed, and her professional smile became a real one.  “I’m here on business, but I gotta say the place is growing on me.”

*   *   *

“That Susan’s pretty good-looking,” Joseph noted on their ride to the dump.  Crumbs fell from a week’s growth of beard.  He’d left Grumpy’s with a quarter of the burger in his to-go box and had finished it before they’d turned off of Main Street.

“She is a fine-looking woman,” Morgan conceded, then fell silent, hoping to discourage Joseph from further conversation. 

Joseph was not to be discouraged, though.

“You think she’s about convinced?”  He tossed the empty Grumpy’s box on the floorboard between his feet, pounded his chest with a closed fist, and belched his appreciation for a fine meal.  “’Cause I gotta be honest, you’ve been working on her a while and I’ve been holed up in that dump for too long.  I’m missin’ Florida more every day.  I can’t tell if you’re conning her or courting her.”

Morgan didn’t like engaging in business discussions with people too stupid to understand them, but he knew Joseph wasn’t going to let it go.  Either he could answer a few questions as vaguely as possible or let the boy hound him for the next five minutes.

“I’ve got her on the line, son.  Gotta give me some time to reel her in.”  He faced Joseph for a second, fixing him with the sternest look he could muster.  It usually discouraged argument.  “I don’t know what you’re complaining about, boy.  You are probably the highest-paid sanitation worker in the State of Washington.”

Joseph seemed set on having it all out, though. 

“I’d rather be the highest-paid anything else.”

“That may be so, but you’re working for me, and you’ll do what you’re told.”  He was beginning to wish he’d left the boy to carouse in Miami.  Anybody else would have been happy to just keep their mouth shut and do the job for the kind of money he was paying the boy.  Joseph, however, seemed to think he deserved a higher place in their working relationship.  If that was truly the case, he was in for nothing but disappointment. 

“I’m not your slave, you know.”  Joseph pouted out the passenger window.  His cheeks were burning red, his bottom lip pooched out like a little kid’s.  “If I wanna do something else, I will.”

“If you think you can find a better offer, be my guest.”  He turned to regard his son, a sardonic twist of the lips replacing his usual smile.  “I’ll let you go your own way with no hard feelings.”

For a few minutes silence reigned. 

It was a relaxing silence, just the wind outside his big truck’s window and the steady hum of his tires on the pavement as he drove toward the landfill.  He could actually think now, consider his next move.

But it was never that easy when Joseph was in the passenger seat.

“That little red-haired girl in town,” he remarked.  “She’s that Sinclair lady’s girl, ain’t she?”

Morgan didn’t like the new turn of the conversation.

“That she is.  Not that it’s anything for you to worry about.”

“Okay, here’s what I don’t get ….”

“Joey,” Morgan barked, finally out of patience with the boy.  “I suspect the list of things you
don’t get
is long, but that’s just fine.  I don’t pay you to
get
things.  I pay you to do what I say!”

Another short silence followed, and Morgan dared to hope, again, that his son was finished.

“No need to have a fit, Pa.  Just askin’.”

A few minutes later Morgan pulled into the landfill and let Joseph out.  A half-dozen cars and pickups were waiting behind the locked gate, a few of the drivers standing at the head of the line and sourly regarding the handwritten “closed for lunch” sign hanging from the gate.  The looks they turned on Joseph were positively evil.

When this was over he might just convince old Ernest Price to keep Joseph on for a while, Morgan thought.  Let the boy pay for his trip back to the East Coast himself.  Maybe then the boy would appreciate just how good he had it.

Morgan made a tight U-turn, offering the glowering faces in line at the locked gate his best
Howdy Neighbor
smile, and drove away in a pleasant silence.

*   *   *

Morgan looked back on his last encounter with Susan Taylor, a sweet and delightful woman really, and smiled.

Plan A was indeed taking longer than he’d expected.  Morgan had doubted Ernest Price when he’d said trying to deal with the Taylor woman was a waste of time.  On behalf of his silent partner, Price had tried for almost a decade to persuade Susan Taylor to sell, and for almost a decade Susan had refused.  Morgan’s clients normally did not accept
no
, but for almost ten years they’d continued to play softball with the woman. 

A delicate situation
, they had called it, requiring a
lighter touch
, at least for the time being.  They didn’t want his hand visible in the Clover Hill purchase unless the situation in Dogwood became critical.

His clients were a secretive bunch, his only contact with them was through a strange intermediary, Mr. Turoc.  Stranger in more ways than Morgan would have believed at the beginning of their professional relationship.  He had assumed they were foreigners, though it was impossible to place Turoc’s accent, and he had been right.  With each job he completed for them, Turoc revealed a little more of himself, things Morgan would never have believed if he hadn’t seen proof of them.  Still, strange or not, Morgan was happy to continue working with them.  They paid him well for his occasional services, usually in gold.  They paid well enough in fact that, except for a few personal projects, he had worked for them pretty much exclusively for the last five years. 

Everything else was on hold now, all personal ventures postponed or abandoned completely, because the Clover Hill situation was heating up rapidly.  In the past few months Clover Hill had become critical.  Something had happened to bring his clients’ full attention to this little slice of Washington State, so Morgan was here now to do what he did best.

Take people’s property away from them for fun and profit.

Of all the work he had done for them—securing one of the smaller Florida Keys, which they had graciously allowed him to use as a residence; a particularly harrowing piece of work in Uruguay; the destruction of a protected ruin in Ireland—the business in Dogwood was the most puzzling.  They’d certainly been more cautious than usual in their efforts to procure this property, allowing years to pass with no reward for their efforts, instructing him to work through that useless hayseed Ernest Price.

Well, not entirely useless.  He had important local connections, family and friends in local government.  Two years ago, Ernest Price had grown tired of Susan’s obstinacy and used his connections to try to find leverage against her.  Unpaid taxes, safety-code violations, anything his brother, Sheriff Avery Price, could use to force her out.  Price had even considered planting marijuana on her land to justify a drug-related seizure, but Morgan had put a stop to that plan.  It was far too risky; that would have meant dealing with the federal government and perhaps many years of legal red tape. 

Price never found the leverage he was looking for, but he had discovered something that neither Morgan nor his clients had known.  Price had contacted Morgan right away, and Morgan in turn had shared the new information with Mr. Turoc.  It explained Susan Taylor’s refusal to sell out, even at the grossly inflated price they had offered. 

Clover Hill and the land around it didn’t belong to Susan Taylor.  The land he’d been after all those years belonged to her childhood friend, Diana Sinclair.

Turoc had been surprised but not as surprised as Morgan.  He knew of the woman, knew her well enough to bypass the usual background investigation they did on their targets. 

They’d made other arrangements.

In the course of making these plans, Morgan finally met Turoc face-to-face and learned definitively just how strange, and foreign, his clients were.

*   *   *

The shock of meeting his boss for the first time had nearly killed him. 

Before, he had spoken with his contact over the phone, received audiocassettes with instructions, had on occasion even met with him through his hallway mirror—Morgan had assumed that Turoc and his associates had bugged it and replaced the glass with some high-tech video display.  Not that he ever saw much more of Turoc than the suggestion of a face through heavy mist

Morgan wasn’t even sure what Turoc’s relationship with the others was; associate, consigliere, familiar?  The last almost made him laugh.  Almost.  He was beginning to think anything was possible with this bunch.

Two weeks after his last report on Clover Hill, he’d dropped the bomb about Diana Sinclair and been told to cancel all plans and stay put at the estate on Macaw Island.  Morgan had grown restless.  He’d already turned Joseph loose.  The boy loved Miami and would spend weeks at a time bouncing from club to club and motel to motel.  He was about to begin the slow process of reaching his clients on his own when Turoc finally contacted him.  He’d been enjoying his morning coffee in the estate’s large sitting room when he’d heard Turoc’s voice coming from the hallway mirror.  He rushed to see what news there was.