Ranchero by Rick Gavin

months ago and stole it. Meant a lot to him.”
    K-Lo had started in on a kind of ululation. It was part der Bingle and part, I guess, atavistic Lebanese.
    “Let me ask you something,” I said to K-Lo. “Did I just drive those fellows a ways?”
    He nodded.
    “Did I just keep them from breaking in here and busting your place all up?”
    Another nod.
    “Now don’t you feel like you owe me a little something?”
    K-Lo just looked at me. Owing wasn’t really his game.
    I bulled on ahead. “Here’s what I need—three hundred dollars in twenties, and this shotgun for a day or two. Maybe all your Riot Ready shells.”
    K-Lo winced. He muttered to himself. After a great long while, he nodded. He left me and Angie on the sales floor while he went back to get the cash.
    K-Lo gave me all the twenties he could scare up in the petty-cash lockbox. Not quite three hundred dollars, but close enough. The shotgun shells he just pointed me to. Then he plopped down heavily in his chair like he was weary and spent from having been all saintly.
    “You need to go home,” I told him, and he tried to wave me off until I promised him I’d call his wife to see what she had to say about it.
    Me and Angie helped him to his Civic and got him situated behind the wheel. We pointed him right and sent him off like he was in the Soap Box Derby. He lurched up on the curbing as he left the shopping plaza.
    “Will he make it?” Angie asked me.
    “Always does,” I said.
    I locked up the store and circled around with Angie to her Acura in the lot.
    “Hell of a gun,” she told me along the way, and took the thing out of my hands. “Don’t see too many Berettas in these parts.” It was clear from the way she handled it that she knew what she was about.
    “You hunt?”
    “Used to. Just ducks. Me and Uncle Gil.”
    “Don’t know that I’d have figured him for a hunter. How many hobbies can one guy have?”
    “It was more about me than him. He didn’t like getting in the water. Didn’t like sitting in the blind. Didn’t want to shoot anything he’d have to pluck and gut.”
    “So what did he like?”
    “A day with his niece.”
    We didn’t say much beyond that until she’d pulled to the roadside in front of Pearl’s and I apologized for all the tumult and thanked her for her help.
    “This is fine with me,” she said. “Pearl’d usually be making me go through her closet.”
    Luther was back into leisurewear at the kitchen table, not his circle-of-hell golfing ensemble but something else of Gil’s he and Pearl had turned up. The slacks were pleated and peg-legged both, which made Luther look like some sort of mobster genie at play. His shirt was ivory knit with a gray and pinkish argyle vest on top.
    “How’s it going?” I asked generally.
    To hear it from Luther and Pearl, things were going splendidly well.
    Desmond, for his part, told me, “He ain’t much help.”
    I fished the twenties K-Lo had given me out of my pockets and laid them on the table.
    “You’re not going to tell them what happened?” Angie asked.
    “Had to drive off some boys trying to break in at K-Lo’s.”
    Pearl made out to be aghast, but Luther and Desmond couldn’t be bothered. Thievery had long since become as common in the Delta as blues tourists or biting flies.
    We all went straight back to the business at hand. It didn’t look at first like they’d cut enough paper to make the illusion work, but once we’d started stacking it up and making bundles from it, I was persuaded we could probably get by.
    Pearl supplied us with rubber bands, some of them even unrotted, and we laid a twenty on top of each stack before we bound it tight. We ended up with eight piles of what looked, at first glance, to be uninterrupted money.
    Luther launched into an explanation of how crackheads and Delta junkies and even his uncle that Dubois would think it was more cash than it was because they never saw money in actual piles.
    We laid the stacks in a paper