Pardners by Chandler Roy F

Author:Chandler, Roy F. [Chandler, Roy F.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Katherine R. Chandler
Published: 2013-01-24T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

Dewey Lavender's condo was in North East, as far as he could get from his old home. Even after two years, he suspected his ex-wife of driving past and spying on him. The woman stayed crazy-mad, and he doubted he would ever get through the last of the lawyering she was laying on him.

When his ex-discovered his other woman, she had gone for his pistol. Fortunately, he had left it in his office. So she chose a kitchen knife, but by then, he was out the door and moving fast. The goofy broad who had called his home to describe how the husband was about to leave his wife and kids to take up with a new love was herself long gone.

Lavender wondered vaguely what he had ever seen in her? Unattached good-looking women always had something important wrong with them—which is why they were unattached.

His ex-wife had been a pliant and comfortable woman without strong positions on most things. Lavender had never suspected a spine of white-hot steel that appeared intent on ruining him no matter the cost. Attorneys began calling and papers came in piles. A private detective had been hired, and Lavender found his every secret exposed for his ex-wife's picking over. Always there lurked the threat to take his betrayal upstairs, and in Lavender's company, personal problems were never supposed to surface.

A decent government salary had supported the Lavenders for all of their marriage. With the kids still in college, money had become tighter, but that pinching would soon have passed.

Split more or less down the middle, with his half deeply invested in lawyer fees, the salary proved small, and Lavender had searched for a way to make extra money.

He had lived then in a cheap room above a noisy club in a less than desirable part of town, and his beat up old car was monotonously and ritually savaged where it parked along the street.

With his ex-wife's efforts to impoverish him never ending, Lavender's mind had turned desperate, and somewhere in the sweat of an August night memories of lying scared half to death among the bugs and pickers of jungley Mexico had passed through his mind.

Charlie had always suspected there had been more to the firefight than his partners had admitted. He had smelled gun smoke on them. Both had sat in blood, and Byrne had it in his hair. The simplicity of Alpha and Bravo's story had fueled unvoiced suspicions. Lavender had detected eye glances exchanged by the two military men that hinted something unspoken had occurred, but at that time, all he had cared about was getting far from all of it.

Lavender's mission report made the team sound solidly responsible, fast thinking, and clever in their escape from the guerillas' unexpected appearance. Still, Charlie believed there might have been more, and he had kept an eye on intelligence coming from that part of Mexico and from the south of the border drug business in general.

Surviving Santos relatives raged, but there were astonishingly few of them left.

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