Read St Kilda Consulting 01 - Always Time to Die for Free Online Page A

saved the locals a long detour and increased tourism greatly. The most recent excitement was years ago, in 1998, the four hundredth birthday party of New Mexico, historic land of many nations.
    Is this why I came back? Dan wondered. To read about how men and women from a rural county had to go halfway around the world to die?
    No matter who lives or dies, nothing really changes.
    Gus hung up and reached for the carton of pastries. “Thanks for the doughnuts. I’m starving. Marti was up all night with the youngest and my cooking is caca . Is Dad’s back still bothering him?”
    Dan turned and watched his foster brother take a huge bite out of a bear claw. “I’m starving, too, so save at least one for me. And if it’s still bothering him, it didn’t show. We hiked six miles yesterday.”
    “Yeah? Why?”
    “I felt like it. He felt like coming along.”
    “Huh.” Gus swallowed the last of one doughnut and reached for another. “Any coffee?”
    “Besides the sewage you keep in that pot?”
    Gus winced. “Yeah.”
    “Sorry.” Dan saluted with the mug he’d barely sipped from. “This is as good as it gets.”
    “I keep thinking if it’s bad enough I won’t drink as much.”
    “Has it worked?”
    Gus eyed the coffeepot warily. “Most of the time. But I didn’t get much sleep last night, so…” He shrugged and refilled the stained mug that rarely left his desk. “How’s the leg?”
    “Better.”
    “That’s what you always say.”
    “It’s always true.”
    Gus sipped, grimaced, and hastily ate more pastry. “Considering that your leg wasn’t worth much when you got here, I guess you’re right.” Covertly he looked at his older brother’s posture. Erect and relaxed at the same time. Must be some trick they taught in Special Ops, because the regular army sure hadn’t made a long-term dent in Gus’s habitual slouch.
    “Where’d you hike?” Gus asked.
    “Castillo Ridge.”
    “Pretty. In the summer.”
    Dan shrugged and ignored the question implicit in his brother’s words.
    Gus went back to the sweets. He’d learned in the last few months that when Dan closed a subject, it stayed that way.
    The phone rang.
    Gus picked it up, listened, and automatically glanced through a window into the adjacent room to see if one of the paper’s three part-time reporters was warming a chair. “Thanks. Someone will be there in ten minutes.” He hung up, hit the intercom, and gave Mano his marching orders. The reporter slammed a hat over his red hair, grabbed his jacket and camera, and hurried out.
    “Bar brawl?” Dan asked idly.
    “Cockfight. The sheriff busted Armando again.”
    “Sandoval?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I thought he was in the joint for running dope.”
    “That’s his older brother. His mama assures everyone that Armando is a good boy, goes to mass every day and twice on Sundays, yada yada yada.”
    “Is he dirty?” Dan asked.
    “Oh yeah. Never make it stick, though. The hispanos were here a long time before you Yankees, and the border is a joke played by mother nature on Uncle Sam. If the sheriff gets within ten miles of the Sandoval clan’s dope operations, bells go off from here to the poppy fields of Mexico.” Gus yawned and rubbed his face with one hand. “Every so often they throw the sheriff a bone and get caught with fighting cocks. Big honking deal.”
    “Sounds like the same old same old.”
    “Nothing changes but the names of the players.” Gus grinned suddenly. “I love it.”
    Dan hesitated, then asked, “Don’t you ever get tired?”
    “Of what?”
    “Crooks being crooks. Cops being cops. A big dumb mutt chasing its own dumb butt.”
    “Nope.”
    “But you don’t print even half of what you know. Doesn’t that get to you? Don’t you want to grab people and shake them and say, ‘ Look around you, fool. Everything you think is true is a lie. ’”
    Gus’s dark eyes widened. “No, I can’t say as I do.”
    Dan shook his head.
    “Look,” Gus said calmly.