Read Lone Star 01 for Free Online

up the man,” Jessica said, “and get a feel as to which side of the ambush he’d have been fighting on.”
    They parted, and Jessica strode along the boardwalk to the sheriff’s office. Even before opening the door, she could hear an angry voice shouting inside. Entering, she faced a fat, fiftyish man sitting tilted in a swivel chair, and the back of a younger man standing with his fists clenched on top of the littered desk between them.
    â€œHaul your ass out and put a stop to it, Quince!” the younger man was yelling. “My crew’s threatening to quit, and after that raid the night ‘fore last, when Rasmussen got shot dead and three others got winged, I can’t rightly blame ’em if they skedaddled. Just like all my goddamned rustled cows you can’t find went and skedaddled.”
    â€œEasy, Daryl, a lady’s present,” the fat man growled, seeing Jessica and straightening in his chair. “Yes, ma‘am?”
    â€œAre you Sheriff Oakes?”
    â€œDeputy Sheriff, yes,” the fat man answered, preening one end of the graying mustache that drooped around his pudgy mouth and jowls. A tobacco dribble stained his vest next to his tarnished star. “Something I can do for you, ma‘am?”
    â€œMaybe the same thing you can do for him,” Jessica answered, indicating the other man with a glancing nod.
    She judged the man, who’d now turned toward her, to be about thirty, six foot one or two, maybe two hundred pounds, with a hardness that didn’t come from riding a brass rail. Tousled hair the shade of dressed harness leather, brushed long under a wide-brimmed, flat-crowned Kansas hat. Big beak of a nose and an anvil for a chin. Magnetic eyes that appraised her squarely. His frayed range clothes were sweaty and dirty, and the Remington .44-40 stuck in his belt was a relic with cracked grips, but this was no saddle tramp; he was a man used to giving orders and having them obeyed. She liked him immediately.
    Regarding Deputy Oakes again, she continued, “You can track down and arrest these rustlers and killers hereabouts, that’s what you can do. But I gather you haven’t been much good at it.”
    Stung, the deputy frowned, puffing his cheeks. “Can’t say I place you, ma‘am. Forgive me if I ask just who you are, and if you’ve got any special interest in our local problems.”
    â€œI most certainly have,” Jessica retorted archly. “My name’s Starbuck, Miss Jessica Starbuck, and I’ve got a considerable interest in the Flying W.” Which, in a manner of speaking, was true enough.
    She left it at that, deciding not to mention the ambush. Even if Deputy Oakes acted on it, she figured he wouldn’t be able to do or prove much; Ryker was too clever not to have removed his dead gunmen and cleaned up any other evidence that might incriminate him. And the deputy didn’t look like the sort who’d bust a gut investigating; he looked like he’d been in that swivel chair a mighty long time, and was tired of hearing about trouble.
    Jessica’s name seemed to spark recognition in the other man, but if Deputy Oakes realized who she was, he didn’t show it.
    â€œPoor widder Waldemar, a shame, a shame,” the deputy murmured, then eyed Jessica glumly. “I’m not surprised she’s sold to an outsider, it’s a terrible lot for her to try running all by her lonesome. But like I was about to tell Mr. Melville here, I’ve been worn to a frazzle chasing one blind lead after another.”
    â€œWell, if you won’t do more’n you have,” Melville snapped, “then I reckon us ranchers will have to protect ourselves.”
    Oakes leaned back again, shifting uncomfortably. “It’s not that I won‘t, Daryl, it’s that all I’ve got is me and my night man. Sure’s I ride out to your spread, the coyotes are hitting the Double