Nothing Ventured by Roderick Price

Author:Roderick Price [Price, Roderick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Roderick Price
Published: 2020-12-10T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 30

It was only a twenty-minute drive back to Deep Lake Lodge. Larry was feeling pretty good about his day’s work. He decided to take the long way back, driving down Highway H south for almost ten miles to Delta, and then coming back up to Highway 2 on the backroads. It was another gray and dreary December day, and the cold drizzle on the windshield was slowly turning to slush as it collected around the wipers. Inside the car, though, it was warm and dry. Country 101 from Superior playing in the background. Larry was almost finished up. The only problem had been Melvin Baker, but there was always one. Newspaper article had read “Elderly Man Dies in Fire.” That had been the end of it.

Larry found himself looking back. He and Hilton Sinclair had been friends for a long time. Well, they weren’t friends, but they had known each other and worked together off and on for a very long time. They had made some money together, and Hilton had bailed Larry out a

few times when money got tight. Back in the early seventies, Hilton had run a startup exploration and production company. Oil had gone from about five dollars a barrel to thirty-five dollars, and every square inch of Texas and Louisiana was being leased up for oil drilling. Larry had started off as a landman with what used to be Gulf Oil before they were bought up by Chevron. It had taken him a couple of years to learn the ropes and know the right people before he had gone out on his own, kind of a “freelancer,” he had told people. Hilton’s company had focused a lot of their expertise around the Austin Chalk area, and Larry had gone to high school in Belleville of all places, basically right in the middle of The Chalk, as they called it. Larry had been scouting on his own and taking some of the prime tracts under lease in his own name when Hilton called him for the first time and wanted to have a meeting. They had started off at nine in the evening at one of the urban cowboy kind of bars and ended up closing down Allstar’s, one of finer gentlemen’s exotic entertainment establishments, also known as a strip joint.

Larry found himself smiling now as he reached Delta and turned north for the drive back. The Delta Lodge, Store and Restaurant had burned down about seven or eight years ago and now there wasn’t even a building left standing, but there was still a sign that read, “Delta” and then underneath in real small letters: “Unincorporated.”

That had been one helluva night. After they had been to the strip club for about fifteen minutes, Larry discovered that Hilton knew most of the girls, and Larry was asked at one point which one he liked the best. After some serious discussion, he and Hilton had agreed that the tall, leggy blond dancing over on one of the

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