The Little Tombstone Cozies Box Set by Celia Kinsey

Author:Celia Kinsey [Kinsey, Celia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-04-08T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Three

I was startled by the screams, and so was Earp. I dropped the dog treat, and Earp skittered away around the corner of Nancy Flynn’s bunkhouse.

Nancy came out the front of the bunkhouse and stood on the porch looking very shaken. It takes a lot to shake Nancy. She’s seen a lot of life—she’s well past sixty—and not much of that sixty-plus years has been pretty. In fact, during my first weeks at Little Tombstone, Nancy had shot someone. There were extenuating circumstances, but I mention it because when a woman like Nancy comes out of a doorway with her hands clasped over her mouth and shaking like a leaf, one tends to sit up and take notice.

“What happened?”

Nancy didn’t answer, she just pointed inside. I came up on the porch and peeked through the open doorway.

It was a long, old-fashioned bunkhouse unaltered since the early days of the ranch except for the fact that someone had built a bathroom into one end of the long, narrow structure. The main room had eight bunks in it.

They were unoccupied except for one, which had a cowboy lying in it, with his face to the wall.

“Sleeping?” I said to Nancy in a hushed voice.

She shook her head. He was not sleeping.

I crept forward to look at the inert cowboy. I stepped back when I saw that his pillow was soaked with blood. He’d been shot in the back of the head.

My hand was shaking as I reached into the pocket of my coat for my phone. I had a hard time dialing.

“Who is it?” I whispered to Nancy, as I waited for dispatch to pick up. I don’t know why I felt the need to whisper; it was not as if we were going to wake him.

“I think it’s Jorge.”

While I was explaining to the 911 operator that the Flynn ranch had a dead man on the premises, Nancy went down to the other end of the room and gingerly nudged open the door of the toilet with the toe of her cowboy boot as if she was afraid she’d find a second body in the bathroom.

She wasn’t far wrong.

Nancy turned back from the doorway and motioned me over. I looked inside. There was no body, but there was blood: a little trail of blood across the black and white linoleum tiles. It couldn’t have been the man lying in the bunk who’d bled on the bathroom floor. He’d clearly been shot as he slept.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Nancy said and went out on the porch again.

I followed her out and handed off the phone, so she could speak to the dispatcher, then picked up Earp’s leash from where I’d dropped it and went around the back of the bunkhouse in search of him. I called out, but Earp did not come. I passed the small stable, the barn where Nancy parked her tractors, and continued on to the pig shed.

The pig shed was a recent development at the Flynn Ranch.

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