The Homeplace: A Mystery by Kevin Wolf Page A

Coach would do that. Basketball and kids were important to him. All these years later, Chase realized the kids were the most important thing to Coach Porter.
    Especially a kid whose father never showed up for a single game.
    Chase should have told Coach he was coming for the weekend. Now, Chase wanted to be there when Coach found out Jimmy Riley was dead.
    But Mercy said the whole town would be at the pancake supper. He’d see Coach then.
    Chase left Brandon for the ranch. It was four hours until he needed to be back at Mercy’s house. He’d take his father’s rifle and slip out on the sage flats to watch for the big buck he’d seen that morning.
    *   *   *
    By the time Birdie had reached the top of the Butt Notch’s south hill she had used up every cuss word she knew three times and was partway through the list for the fourth. Weighted down by her pistol, her too-tight pants chafed her hips. Sweat soaked the armpits of her shirt and plastered her hair to the sides of her head.
    She scooped a bottle of water from the cooler in the back of her pickup, pressed it to her forehead, and used each of the cuss words still available on her list. Cell reception showed four bars and three messages. Two from Sheriff Dickweed and one from Marty’s wife.
    The first message from the sheriff said, “Call me.” The second said, “Call me now.”
    Birdie let the jerk wait and checked the message from Deb. “You’re comin’ to the Flapjack Feed, aren’t you? The boys want to see their Aunt Birdie. See you tonight.”
    Seeing the little boys would be fun. Birdie had spent the whole day at the place where Jimmy Riley had been found, or hunting for Ray-Ray Jackson and not doing what the state paid her to do.
    Besides, she could nose around at the pancake supper, talk with hunters who came in to eat, and get a feel for what was going on.
    She sipped the water and used her binoculars to scan the creek bottom one more time. Still no sign of Ray-Ray. She pressed the callback button on her phone and waited for Sheriff Shithead to pick up.
    First ring. “Where have you been, Hawkins?” Sheriff Kendall snapped.
    What? No Good afternoon, officer? Birdie gritted her teeth so tight she’d need to call the dentist for an appointment on Monday. She fought the urge to tell the turd-breath that she had been risking life and limb to track a dangerous criminal and simply said, “I didn’t catch up with Ray-Ray. Found where he shot a deer. Least I’m ninety-nine percent sure it was him that shot it. But never saw him.”
    “Listen, Hawkins, we got somethin’.”
    “I hope it’s good,” she muttered.
    “What’s that, Hawkins?”
    “Nothin’. Go on.”
    “When the processor in Cheyenne Wells started to butcher the first of Puckett’s buffalo, he found a rifle slug. He checked the other buffalo and found slugs in two more.” Birdie could hear the stubble on Kendall’s chin scrape over his phone. “The state is gonna do a full ballistics study and tell us what they can, but for now we can guess the buffalo were shot with a thirty caliber. The bullets were pretty tore up, but they’re guessin’ they were a hundred and fifty grains.”
    Not much. Birdie knew that half the farmers in the county had a thirty-thirty in their pickup, or barn, or behind the kitchen door. Those that didn’t have a thirty-thirty might keep an aught-six handy. A lot of hunters carried thirty-caliber guns, and a 150-grain bullet could come from any one of them. She sucked in a breath. “What about the bullet that killed Jimmy?”
    “Didn’t find it. Through and through shot. But from what the coroner can say so far, the entrance wound could have been from a thirty.” The sheriff paused. “Hawkins, what kind of gun does Ray-Ray hunt with?”
    She touched the cartridge case in her shirt pocket. “Forty-five-seventy. I picked up an empty by a gut pile down in the Notch. Sure it’s from Ray-Ray’s gun.”
    A long silence hung on the end of the