The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holliday by David Corbett

Author:David Corbett [Corbett, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780578664057
Publisher: Suspense Publishing
Published: 2020-04-06T16:00:00+00:00

***

Tuck pulled up to the hotel with Rayella beside him, the two of them having exchanged scarcely a word or even a glance the entire drive. Tuck tried not to imagine what had happened to Giordano after they’d left, and figured the girl shared the same state of mind.

Lodging the car in park, he said, “You go on in. I’ve got a couple errands I need to see to.” Rayella didn’t move, not even to turn his way. Her backlit profile, small and soft and plain, reminded him just how young she was. “There some problem?”

“You tell me.” She glanced down at her hands, flexing them open and closed in her lap.

“Not sure I understand.”

“Oh, I think you do. I think you understand real well.”

A couple appeared from the stone walkway leading back toward the hotel lobby—sweethearts, maybe even newlyweds, judging from their laughter, their locked arms, the absence of sunlight between their hips.

“I think I’ve explained myself,” Tuck said. “Whatever you and your boyfriend may think is going on, behind the scenes or what-the-hell-ever, like I’ve got myself an agenda or somehow even planned this disaster, the truth is—”

“The truth?” She managed to spit out the word without raising her voice. “That’s funny.”

“Now listen—”

“Here’s the truth, you wanna hear it. I ain’t leaving your side. Not now, not later. Not till this thing is settled and done.”

“What—you gonna share my bed?”

“If it comes to that. Slept in worse places.”

Tuck couldn’t help but laugh at that. “This your idea? Or—”

“Don’t really see how that matters, do you?”

The amorous couple lurched toward their car, and Tuck felt sadly envious as the woman spun the man around, leaned him back against the trunk. Shortly that envy hardened into something else, a feeling on the dark side of hope.

Tuck returned his focus to Rayella. “So that’s how this is gonna be?”

She let silence answer for her.

“All right then,” he said, finger-drumming a taradiddle on the steering wheel. “Yeah, I want to head out to Littmann’s ranch, the Bristlecone. I want to be nearby in the morning when Rags and them come down off the mountain. No telling what they might run into, and I’m not just talking about three or four boneheads working security.”

She seemed to turn that over in her mind. “Like what? I mean—”

“That’s just it, I don’t know. But I want to be close in case anything, anything at all, comes up. Like I said, I grew up around here, I know these people, I know the terrain. And, given what’s happened, I feel obligated.”

She sat there perfectly still, barely even a sign she was breathing, the window beyond her hazed with late-day light.

“Here’s the problem,” he said. “Your lawyer’s most likely gonna want you in that courtroom tomorrow. Her case gets ten times stronger with you there in person, tell the judge everything they did to you. Show that cut and bruise on your face.”

She let out a ragged laugh. “If I cared even a little about what’s gonna

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