Free Ranchero by Rick Gavin Page A

responsibility and bother of a key. K-Lo had gone cheap on his back metal door, so if you knew just where to pry it, there was play enough to ease the bolt entirely from the keeper.
    The thieves K-Lo was plagued with of late didn’t bother with the back. They usually drove up on the sidewalk and rammed the front doors in.
    I figured K-Lo would be drunk and out on the sales floor somewhere. I had a reasonable fear that K-Lo might have gotten his shotgun loaded before he went about the business of loading himself. That wouldn’t have taken long because K-Lo couldn’t hold his liquor. He drank almost every night. Always Armagnac and Coke in a Solo cup on ice, and he’d get stewed straightaway and all at once.
    I thought maybe he was playing the radio at first, but it turned out he was singing, and he was doing a fairly remarkable imitation of der Bingle’s “Swinging on a Star.”
    I was just about stunned, to be honest, because K-Lo didn’t fraternize. We got to see him fight with his wife, but that was incidental. K-Lo didn’t ever confide in us, wasn’t the sort to tell us a thing. He was just the guy who gave us scraps of paper and sent us out into the Delta, railed at us with devastating surgical skill whenever we made him unhappy, paid us once every two weeks without fail, and stayed behind when we went home.
    I only knew for certain that K-Lo loved a dollar and refused to eat Chinese. I hadn’t really imagined the man could sing.
    My job was to take his shotgun before K-Lo noticed me. He was parked out on a settee, the one he couldn’t sell or lease because it was uglier even than the worst sort of Delta trailer trash could stand for. It had skirting and tufts and buttons, and the fabric was hideous plaid, all married in a way to make for universal homeliness.
    I came up slowly, silently, picked my way through the store, and the closer I drew to K-Lo, the better his Bing Crosby got. He had the croon and the burble down cold, and his timing was damn good, too, for a hotheaded Lebanese American living on a bayou in Leland.
    “You could be better than you are.”
    He’d left his shotgun leaning on the sofa back, stock wedged behind a cushion and barrel to the ceiling.
    I grabbed the barrel and drew the thing to me.
    “You could be swinging on a … SHIT!”
    K-Lo saw me, leapt to his feet, and went scrabbling for his gun, but he wasn’t even looking where he’d left it, just scratching around any old where as he blistered me with abuse.
    “Calm down,” I said. “It’s just me.”
    K-Lo studied me for a moment and then recalibrated so he could lace me for a solid minute with a personalized tirade. Ronnie the tattooed felon might have wept, but I’d already had a character-building day.
    K-Lo dropped down hard on the ugly settee, and I circled around and sat beside him. Neither one of us said anything for about a half a minute until I broke the ice with, “Mean Bing.”
    K-Lo nodded. “He had pipes.”
    “How’s Dale?”
    K-Lo shrugged. “Some stitches. He’ll be okay.”
    “And Patty?”
    K-Lo shook his head. “Pissed,” was all he told me.
    K-Lo took a draw on his Armangac and Coke. “Found my TV yet?”
    I shook my head. “But we’re on it.”
    Just then a ghetto-fabulous Mazda pulled into the shopping plaza. The aftermarket grille alone was worth more than an engine rebuild, and I could have spent two weeks in Cancún on the price of the free-spinning wheels. The driver turned off his headlights, and that coupe cruised through the lot.
    The shopping plaza was empty. Half the storefronts were vacant due to ongoing Delta retail strife, and the ones that were still occupied had long since closed for the night. That Mazda rolled into a corner, deep in shadow, and everybody got out. Three at least. Maybe four. Over from Greenville, I figured, where the lowlives there had probably run out of places to rob.
    K-Lo hadn’t been hit in nearly three months. That was almost an unprecedented