The Great Jackalope Stampede (2 page)

Since arriving in Tucson, Ronnie had been blowing her money on a silly post-divorce makeover. She’d had her salon-blonde hair dyed back to brown and trimmed into shoulder-length curls. She’d even bought vanity contacts to make her 20-20 brown eyes blue, which put the old song by Crystal Gayle in Claire’s head whenever Ronnie wore them.

“I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, Claire, but Jackrabbit Junction doesn’t have any of those fancy spa places Ronnie likes to go to.”

She snorted. “No shit.”

Gramps took off his faded U.S. Army hat and wiped the sweat from his brow. “The last thing I need right now is another pain-in-the-ass female nagging me to take her to town.”

“Ruby can take Ronnie to Yuccaville. It could be a weekly girls’ day out.”

Gramps grunted. “Ronnie is
your
problem. We have our hands full with a teenager whose father is scrambling her brains.”

Far from done with her campaign to get her older sister out of her hair, Claire let him change the subject. “Jess is giving you grief, huh?”

Gramps’s new wife had come with some hormone-laden baggage—a sixteen-year-old whose biological father had opted to pay child support in lieu of doling out love and attention.

“It’s not really Jess’s fault.” Gramps pounded in another nail. “Her dad is getting her all stirred up.”

“Is he still ignoring her letters?”

“It’s worse. He’s writing back.”

“What? Why the sudden interest?” Then it dawned on her. “Jess didn’t tell him about the mine stocks, did she?”

Gramps grunted again.

“Damn.” When was that red-haired, freckle-faced girl going to learn that talking about cash attracted all sorts of trouble? “Is he trying to get out of paying child support?”

Gramps banged away for several seconds, the echo ricocheting through the arroyo behind them. “He’s trying to get Jess to come live with him.”

“I thought his other kids were more important than her.”

“So did he until his wife left him and decided to sue for custody. Rather than pay two sets of child support, he’s set his sights on Jess moving in with him so Ruby has to pay him. Jess is convinced he’s finally come around to wanting her in his life, and you know how hard it is to sell her any truths when it comes to that horse’s ass.”

“How’s Ruby taking this?”

“She curses and throws things when Jess isn’t around.”

Claire grimaced.

“He says he’s coming down here soon to spend some time getting to know Jess.”

“Wow, he’s not messing around now that there’s money in it for him, is he?”

“Nope.” Gramps pounded in another nail with three hard blows.

Two older women strolled past wearing tan University of Arizona shirts, khaki pants, and Aussie hats with air holes in the tops. Claire recognized them from the campground General Store and waved.

The two dressed like twins, but according to Jess, they were just lifelong friends. They had lobbied Jess to join them at the site to learn all about archaeological digs. Claire had them pegged for volunteers, here to help the university catalog the cave dweller remains. Jess waged her bet on the two being visiting professors partly due to their age, but mainly because they kept trying to teach her stuff she had no desire to learn.

Claire waited until they were out of earshot before turning back to Gramps. “All of these new people around here make me nervous.”

“You’re paranoid.” He held out his hand for more nails. “Too much of that schooling you’ve had over the years has stirred up your brains.”

“No, my schooling has made me more aware of the value of the ‘goods’ stashed in Ruby’s basement. You guys need to be more careful letting strangers in the house.”

“That’s a little tough since the store is attached to the house, Miss Big Brains.”

“Maybe you should install a door between the two. That old curtain has seen its day and the velvet stinks like cigar smoke thanks to you and your army cronies.”

“We’re not putting a door there.” He emphasized his statement with a hammer blow.

“Fine, but you and I know that Joe was up to a whole lot of no good.”

Joe was Ruby’s dead husband. He had gone out in a blaze of greasy potato chips and cigarettes that had stroked him and his brain into the grave. Asshole that he was, he’d left Ruby in a pile of debt without any life insurance. Earlier that spring, she would have lost everything if it hadn’t been for Claire’s curiosity, Mac’s help, and Gramps’s cash cushion.

Joe’s lousy leftovers hadn’t ended there. He’d spent decades not only fencing antiques and random black market gems but also stealing goods from other fencers. Not just any goods—sweet, pricey pieces that drew trouble, including the killing kind.

Claire’s latest concern was a golden pocket watch she’d found in a hidden wall safe in Joe’s basement office. Her gut said the watch would bring bad juju down on Gramps and Ruby. What sucked about all of the strangers milling around was how easy it would be for the boogeyman to blend in and sneak up on them.

“All I’m saying is—” A loud, yapping dog interrupted Claire. She knew that bark. “Gramps, your damned dog got loose again.”

Gramps’s spoiled beagle, Henry, lived for three things—to lick Gramps’s feet, eat sour cream and onion potato chips, and to disrespect Claire.

“Catch him before he heads over to that Fleetwood again.” Gramps pointed the hammer toward a camper with pink flamingo lights dangling from the porch awning. “That woman has a Shih Tzu the old boy’s crazy about.”

Claire scrambled around the back of the building frame. When she caught Henry, she was going to go all Shih Tzu on his bony little ass. She headed the ornery beagle off at the pass. “Gotcha!”

Henry screeched to a stop. Then he backed up a couple of steps, pawed the ground, and barked at her.

“Quiet, Henry!” Gramps yelled from his ladder post.

The dog circled and whined, his leash dragging behind him and then barked at Claire again.

She lunged for the leash and missed.

Henry zigged around her and zagged through the two-by-sixes making up the back wall of the structure.

Claire followed, reaching between the boards, coming up empty. She grunted in pain as her shoulder connected with a board.

“Quit horsing around, Claire, and grab him!”

“I’m trying!”

Henry rounded the corner of the building with Claire on his tail—or at least reaching for it. She tried to step on the leash and missed.

“Damn it, girl! You’re gonna lose him.”

Cursing, she lunged again, sliding up to where Gramps stood on his makeshift watch tower.

“Quit your bitching and grab him.”

She caught the leash as Henry dodged under the ladder. “Got him!”

Henry turned and leapt back between the rungs, wrapping the leash around the foot of the ladder. He tried to sprint to freedom, but Claire held the leash tight. “No you don’t, you little bugger.”

“Claire!” Gramps’s voice sounded shaky.

She looked up as the ladder tilted to the side, teetering.

“Hold on!” Letting go of the leash, she grabbed for the ladder … too late.

She watched, cringing as Gramps flailed through the air and landed with a crunching sound on the hard, dry ground.

“Oh, shit!” Claire covered her mouth.

Gramps’s hammer bounced and came to rest on the dirt next to him.

Chapter Two

Friday, September 28th (one week later)

What was it about the Arizona sunshine that made Claire want to down a cold one?

Or maybe her urge to chug some alcohol had more to do with the surly old man with the broken leg playing drill sergeant from below, rather than the ball of fire high in the sky.

“Claire, where did you put my crutches?”

Glaring down from where she kneeled on the freshly sheathed roof, Claire shoved her hammer in her tool belt. “I didn’t touch your damned crutches.”

After being “supervised” all day by Gramps, who was sitting under the shade of a beach umbrella with that danged mutt panting at his feet, she wouldn’t have minded shoving one of his crutches where the southwestern sun didn’t shine so brightly.

Gramps shifted, adjusting his cast on the upturned five-gallon bucket he was using as a footstool. He puffed on his cigar, the smoke billowing toward Claire’s eyes, making her fingers itch for a cigarette to make this all better. “That last sheet of plywood looks a little off.”

Sweat trickled down her back, seeping into her already soaked underwear. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It means you screwed up again,” Chester answered from his lawn chair near Gramps.

Chester was one of Gramps’s old Army buddies. Bristly from the top of his silver hair and scruffy jaw to his hair-tufted toes, he’d rolled into Jackrabbit Junction last spring and had hung around for the most part just like the heat. Over the last six months, he’d had a fair share of women keeping him company. A surprising number of women actually, considering his favorite saying was, “I like my women how I like my nuts—swingin’ free and ready for a tickle,” which he usually ended with a belch.

“Maybe you should let your cousin finish the roof work,” Chester told Claire, grabbing a beer from the ice-filled cooler and cracking it open.

“He’s right,” Gramps piped up, taking the can Chester held out. “She’s better with wood than you.”

Chester snickered. “Mac might disagree with that.”

She yanked her sweat-ringed Mighty Mouse cap off her head and threw it down at the two ornery geezers.

Henry leaped up and barked at the hat, all two feet of killer guard dog that he was.

“You both can kiss my—” Claire started.

A shrill wolf whistle interrupted her. She knew the whistler all too well.

“What did I miss?” Manny Carrera asked as he unfolded the lawn chair he’d brought with him. He shielded his eyes and grinned up at her. “Besides Claire swearing.” His gaze lowered. “And soaking through her T-shirt. Why don’t you shuck that shirt,
querida
, and just wear a bikini top?”

“Stop ogling my granddaughter, Carrera,” Gramps growled and punched his other old Army cohort in the arm.

Chuckling, Manny took a beer from Chester. “I can’t help it—she’s wearing her tool belt again. You know how I get around women who know how to handle a tool.”

“And wood,” Chester threw in. “All you missed was Claire telling us to kiss her ass again. That’s the third time so far today, isn’t it, Ford?”

Gramps took a swig of beer. “I think it’s the fourth.”

“I’m game.” Manny dropped into the lawn chair. “But she’ll have to bare it first.”

Gramps socked Manny again.

“What?” Manny chuckled, saluting Claire as he rubbed his arm. “She knows I’m full of hot air.”

The old dog was quite toothless—protective even. Over the last few months, Manny had been the leading defender of Claire’s lack of a career. Where her mother crinkled her upper lip and called her thirty-three-year-old middle child a misguided wanderer, Manny patted Claire on the head and praised her untethered spirit.

“Besides,” Manny continued, “it’s your fault your granddaughters came out so pretty. You should have picked an uglier wife instead of stealing the love of my life after we got back to the States.”

According to Gramps, back when the three boys had been fresh out of boot camp, Manny was really popular with the girls, wooing them with his Spanish tongue and smooth dance moves. He was still velvet and liqueur, although Father Time had aged him.

The wood sheathing behind her creaked. “I see the third Amigo has arrived,” said Claire’s cousin, Natalie, sidling up to her. “I’m going to need some tequila to make it through this week with all three of them sitting down there.”

“Shots are on me at The Shaft tonight,” Claire told her. “It’s the least I can do to pay you back for racing down here to my rescue.”

After Gramps had received his diagnosis of a broken fibula, Claire had taken one look at the worry creasing Ruby’s face and picked up the phone. She’d called back home to South Dakota, explaining to Natalie what had happened and asking her if she and her tools felt like spending a little vacation time in the desert.

Natalie had grown up working alongside Claire and Gramps, building homes, outbuildings, and more. Unlike Claire, Natalie had followed in Gramps’s shoes, making carpentry look easy. She still worked as a “handy woman extraordinaire” at one of the resorts just outside of Deadwood.