Free Patience County War (Madeleine Toche Series) by Soren Petrek Page B

Sam. The guy’s not bad in small doses. He’s generally a homebody. A girlfriend is out of the question, unless she’s as bad as he is.”
    “Two people like that together would blow up before any real relationship could get going. I’m going to poke around a little.”
    “From what I hear it’s more like a lot lately,” Jenny said with obvious glee. “I heard Jim Taylor’s ex-wife brought over a pie and a six pack Saturday afternoon. Nice looking woman, especially in them short shorts.”
    “She was dropping an extra pie after the bake sale.”
    “My ass, Sam Trunce. What kind of pie?”
    “Cherry.”
    They both laughed.
    “I guess my life’s an open book now that my girlfriend’s gone.”
    “You can’t burn a woman in effigy at a keg party and not expect some commentary.”
    “Now that was the Masai’s doing. He’s always setting stuff on fire.”
    “Oh sure it is, Constable. Blame Nathan,” Jenny said finishing up the diaper and keeping a close eye on the children playing among the scattered toys on the living room floor.
    “You going to give me more of that shit now, or bring it in a wagon later?” Sam said.
    “I’ve got boatloads over at the bar. Come see us and tell Nathan I need some corn!”
    “You are a bad woman Jenny Turner.”
    “I may be bad, but never boring,” she said as Sam moved towards the door.
    “By the way, what’s the hamster’s name?” He asked over his shoulder on the way out.
    “Dah.”
    “Oh, of course,” he muttered.
    Sam made a few more stops, found that nobody had seen Virgil, and Sam started to worry a little himself. Missing people in a small community upset the natural balance of things. It was highly unlikely that Virgil was out on a bender. Sam knew most of the juicers locally from his own liquor establishment recon, as he called it. Virgil wasn’t much of an outdoor guy and his car was gone. What the hell, nobody would grab him unless he saw something that he shouldn’t have. Time to start from the beginning and earn my keep, he thought, and steered in the direction of the old mill next to Ward’s. Sam turned up the road, stopped the squad next to the larger shed, and slid out of the car. He automatically pulled a side-by-side 12 gauge out of a holster attached to the back of his seat. He remembered all of the times he’d wished he could have carried a good old blunderbuss on some of those calls in Detroit. This one was a mean bastard and sounded like a cannon when it went off. Screw that keep-your-gunholstered bull, nobody to worry about hitting here except possibly a bad guy, a rabbit, or a squirrel, all which were perpetually in season in Sam’s book. Since he had narrowly escaped death when he’d been shot in Detroit he really didn’t feel the need to yell “freeze” anymore. You know, war is hell. If the bad guys see a cop car and shoot anyway, their intention is quite clear.
    Sam walked over to the shed and pushed the door open with the barrel of his shotgun. He walked in and noticed a lingering chemical smell and a pile of lye and solvent bottles. He went out a side door and over to a burn barrel. The barrel had seen plenty of use and the majority of its contents looked like gummy ash, wet with the recent rain. He stirred the contents around with a stick and saw a couple of cold tablet boxes that had survived. As he continued to walk around the area he found a lump of melted plasticpill cards, what looked like hundreds of them. The men that had been there recently might as well have left a sign announcing the presence of their former lab.
    “So a cook comes to Patience,” he muttered aloud. He must have overlooked the ‘bad god damn idea’ portion of the chamber of commerce literature. One lab usually meant more. It was time for a little scouting mission.

 
    S am drove the squad over to his parent’s farm and pulled onto the gravel drive way and followed it up to the modest farm house he’d grown up in. It was nothing fancy but was