Free Ranchero by Rick Gavin Page B

stretch.
    “Come on,” I told him. I led K-Lo back toward his office as I checked the shotgun load. K-Lo had slammed in six rounds of rubber buckshot—good for driving off bears or anarchists. I ejected one to look it over. RIOT READY , the casing read.
    “When did you get these?”
    “Week or so ago. I’d just as soon make them sorry as dead.”
    “Hmm,” I said in just the way that Desmond would have said it. Riot Ready rubber buckshot felt to me at the moment like a means of high-velocity therapy.
    I left K-Lo in his office and went out the back door. I circled around to the retail side of the place. There were three big, strapping black kids and one wiry older guy whose job apparently was to wonder why nobody was doing what he’d asked them to do. They had a wonder bar and a hacksaw. A come-along, a pair of bolt cutters.
    K-Lo had long since sprung for a titanium plate on the door gap, so there wasn’t anything to pry or saw, nothing to draw or cut. Those boys might as well have brought a sugar spoon.
    The trouble was with the wiry guy. He loved his Mazda too much. The tried-and-true way into K-Lo’s was to just drive through the front glass. Then you grabbed what you could, rolled your car out, and headed back to Greenville. Nobody ever got away with more than about a thousand dollars of goods, but they kept just making the same Godawful mess.
    Me and Desmond had once tried to convince K-Lo to leave a TV on the sidewalk. A kind of thug offering to help to keep his plate glass in tact. K-Lo hadn’t done it. He thought it wasn’t manly. K-Lo was big on manliness. He was Mexican that way.
    If I waited around for a crime scene, I feared I’d be there half the night since those fellows didn’t have among them the tools or apparently the smarts they needed to get in. For my part, I had Riot Ready loads and some frustration to work off, so I decided I wouldn’t wait for an actual crime. I decided this would be about me.
    “Fellows,” I said, and before any of them could draw out whatever thug-life pistols they were packing, I aimed that shotgun barrel just over their heads and squeezed off a load. Once they’d lit out for their Mazda coupe, I leveled that Beretta and fired again. I didn’t want to blind them after all.
    I was taking a lesson from Desmond. Rubber buckshot was just my way of scuffing those fellows up. From the fuss they raised, I could tell I was making capable work out of it.
    I kept firing until they’d all piled in the car and left the lot. I could hear those rubber pellets zipping and bouncing all over the place.
    It was purely exhilarating, and by the time they were out of range I was probably hearing about half as well as Dale. So I didn’t know Angie was racing up until she’d pulled into the lot.
    She’d heard the shots from over by the KFC and had driven right toward trouble instead of sitting or driving the other way. I knew if I owned an Acura and had a career, I’d be deaf to a lot of things. In particular gunfire at a deserted shopping plaza.
    I screamed at her I was fine. We walked together around to the back door, where K-Lo met us with a ball-peen hammer. Aside from his shotgun, it was all he had to ward off burglars with.
    I tried to introduce him to Angela Marie, but K-Lo was far too agitated for even marginal civil discourse, which left us to stand there in the stockroom and watch K-Lo be upset.
    “They won’t be back,” I told him.
    “More where they came from,” K-Lo said.
    He then retired to the sales floor to plop down on the homely plaid settee. We followed him. Angie insisted. This was her first exposure to K-Lo. I didn’t see him sad and drunk too often. I was accustomed to irate.
    He looked up at us. He was nearly in tears. “They took my cat,” he said.
    “His cat?” Angie asked me.
    “Bobcat,” I told her.
    “He had a bobcat?”
    “Stuffed.”
    K-Lo was weeping by now in a near-hysterical Middle Eastern sort of way.
    “Somebody broke in three