Lawless. Diana Palmer
Judd being unconventional,” she added with a wicked grin. “We heard that you used the movie camera in your police car to film a couple in the back seat of a parked car up in San Antonio...?”
He chuckled. “Not the police camera—my own. And it was two local police officers I knew that I captured on tape. I made them promise to behave with more decorum before I gave them the only copy of the tape.”
“You make a bad enemy,” she pointed out.
He nodded, and he didn’t smile.
Around them, the band was just tuning up. It consisted of two men playing guitars, one with a fiddle and one with a keyboard. They broke into “San Antonio Rose,” and couples began to move onto the big dance floor.
“They’re pretty good,” she said.
“They’re missing their bass player,” he noted.
“I wonder why?”
“Oh, he’s in jail,” he said, smiling as the waitress approached.
“Why?” she asked.
“Some other guy was dating his girl. He chased them to her house in his car and made a scene. She called us.” He shrugged. “Fortunes of war. Some women are harder to keep than others, I guess.”
“Poor guy.”
“He’ll be out Monday, wiser and more prudent.”
“Hi! What can I get you?” the waitress, an older woman, asked.
“Pizza and beer,” Grier told her.
“Pizza and coffee,” Crissy said when it was her turn.
“No beer?” she asked.
“I’m not twenty-one yet,” Crissy replied easily. “And my...guardian,” she chose her words carefully, “is a Texas Ranger.”
“You’re Crissy,” the girl said immediately, chuckling. “I had a crush on Judd when we were younger, but he was going with that Taft girl from Victoria. They broke up over his job, didn’t they?”
Crissy nodded. “Some women can’t live with the danger.”
“Doesn’t seem to bother you,” the waitress said, tongue-in-cheek, as she glanced pointedly at Grier before she went away to fill the order.
Crissy chuckled as Grier gave her a meaningful look. “No, I’m not chickenhearted,” she agreed. “I worry sometimes, but not to excess. Judd can take care of himself. So can you, I imagine.”
“Well enough,” he said, nodding.
The crowd was growing as Crissy and Grier finished their pizza and drained their respective beverages. The music was nice, she thought, watching the couples try to do Western line dances on the dance floor.
“They give courses on that at the civic center,” Crissy told Grier. “But I could never get into it. I like Latin dances, but I’ve never found anybody who could do them around here, except Matt Caldwell. He’s married now.”
Grier was grinning from ear to ear. “Modesty prevents me from telling you that I won an award in a tango contest once, down in Argentina.”
She was staring at him breathlessly. “You can do Latin dances? Then why are you just sitting there? Come on!”
She grabbed him by the hand and tugged him onto the dance floor and up to the band leader.
“Sammy, can you play Latin music of any kind at all?” she asked the young man, one of her former schoolmates.
He chuckled. “Can I!” He and the band stopped playing, conferred, and the keyboard player grinned broadly as he adjusted his instrument and a bouncing Latin rhythm began to take shape.
The floor cleared as the spectators, expecting something unusual, moved to the edges of the dance floor.
“You’d better be good,” Crissy told Grier with a grin. “This crowd is hard to please and they don’t mind booing people who only think they can dance. Matt Caldwell and his Leslie are legendary at Latin dances here.”
“They won’t boo me,” he promised, taking her by the right hand and the waist with a professional sort of expertise. He nodded to mark the rhythm, and then proceeded to whirl her around with devastating ease.
She kept up with an effort. She’d learned from a boy at school, a transfer student from New York with a Latino background. He’d said she was good. But Grier was totally out of her class. She watched his feet and followed with a natural flair. By the time they were halfway into the song, she was keeping up and adding steps and movements of her own. As the band slowly wound down, the audience was actually clapping to the beat.
Grier whirled her against him and looped her over one arm for a finish. Everybody applauded. He pulled her back up, whirled her beside him, and they both took a bow. She was breathless. He wasn’t even breathing hard.
He led her back to their seats, chuckling. “Let Caldwell top that,” he muttered.
She laughed, almost panting from the exertion. “I’m out of shape,” she murmured. “I’ll have to get out of the house more.”
“Gosh, you guys were great!” the waitress said as she paused briefly at their table. “Refills?”
“Thanks. You bet,” Grier said, handing her his empty bottle.
“Me, too,” Christabel added, pushing her cup to the edge of the table.
“Back in a jiffy,” the girl said with a grin.
“Does Judd dance?” Grier asked her.
“Only if somebody shoots at his feet,” she returned, tongue-in-cheek.
“That’ll be the day.”
“That reminds me,” she said, and leaned forward. “I need your advice. I’m almost positive that somebody poisoned one of our young bulls. Judd won’t believe me, but I’m sure I’m right.”
He was all business. “Tell me about it.”
“We bought a young Salers bull in early September. The Harts have a two-year-old Salers bull, and Leo Hart was going to buy Fred Brewster’s young Salers bull, that came from the same batch ours did up in Victoria. But they found Fred’s bull dead in a pasture just recently, because Leo Hart called Judd about ours. Ours died before Fred’s, so we dragged ours out to the pasture behind the tractor and buried him with a borrowed backhoe.”
“You didn’t have him autopsied?” he asked.
She grimaced. “Cash, we were sitting pretty last year. But we had a drought in the spring and summer and cattle prices fell. Right now, it takes all Judd can make to keep me in school and pay his rent on his apartment in Victoria. We sell off cattle to pay for incidentals, and buy feed for the cattle when we don’t have enough grass for graze. He even works extra jobs just so we can make ends meet.” Her eyes were cloudy. “We’re having hard times. Once I graduate, I’m going straight to work to help out. I was a computer whiz already and I didn’t want to go on to vo-tech school in the first place. But Judd said I needed expertise in spreadsheet programs so that we could keep better records. He was right. It’s just hard to manage, that’s all. I imagine you know how that is.”
He didn’t. Nobody knew how much money he had in foreign banks from the early days in his profession, when he was doing highly skilled black ops jobs for various governments. He didn’t advertise it. But he could have retired any time he felt like it. Holding a conventional job kept his skills honed and people in the dark about his true financial situation. And his true skills.
“Anyway,” she continued, “he says that I didn’t check the pasture before I put the bulls in it, and they binged on clover and got bloat. Since we don’t use antibiotics as a preventative—and we certainly can’t afford to use vegetable oils for that, either—Judd said