Free Do Unto Others by Jeff Abbott Page A

please stay out of all this. Let the police do their job.”
    “Their job seems to be trying to find enough evidence to arrest me, according to Billy Ray Bummel.”
    “They won’t arrest you. I promise. I—” Bob Don never got to finish. I heard the nasal sounds of the bee-hived receptionist and I recognized two other voices before the door flew open.
    Junebug Moncrief and Billy Ray Bummel.
    They hadn’t bothered with the niceties of knocking.Billy Ray looked at me like he’d caught me with my hands around a tender young throat.
    “I told ’em you were busy talking to Mr. Poteet,” the receptionist yelled from behind Mirabeau’s Law and Order.
    “It’s okay, Bernadette,” Bob Don eyed Junebug and Billy Ray critically. “Y’all come in.”
    Since they were already in, they stayed put. A glaring Bernadette shut the door behind her.
    “Afternoon, Mr. Goertz,” Junebug smiled. Billy Ray nodded and continued to scrutinize me as if I were a urine specimen.
    “Gentlemen,” Bob Don wheedled in his closing-the-deal voice, “usually visitors wait to be announced. Y’all trying to make ever’ body here think y’all gonna arrest me?” He chuckled good-naturedly at the end.
    “We just wanted to ask you some questions, Bob Don,” Junebug said. “How you doing, Jordy?”
    I stood, setting my drink on Bob Don’s desk. “I’m fine, thank you.” I didn’t feel it.
    “You mind telling us what you’re doing here?” Billy Ray asked. “Not making a toast to Miz Harcher’s memory, I hope.”
    Before I could answer, Bob Don leapt into the fray. “Jordy here and I were just talking about him gettin’ a new truck.”
    “You must be a mighty cool customer, findin’ a dead body then going car shoppin’,” Billy Ray observed. He didn’t bother to hide the vitriol in his voice.
    “Billy Ray,” Junebug cautioned. He looked at me, then the drinks. “Didn’t know you were interested in buying a truck, Jordy.”
    “I’m offering him a good trade-in on that car of his, but he reckons I’m trying to rip him off,” Bob Don laughed, as jovial as a host politely trying to remove unwantedguests. His verbal awkwardness was gone; the hallmark glibness that’d earned him that big car lot was back.
    “Since Junebug and Billy Ray obviously want to talk to you, Bob Don, I’ll be leaving.” I shook his hand. “I’ll consider your offer. Thanks.”
    “Give me a call and we’ll discuss it further.” His blue eyes bored into mine and there was steel in his handshake. I thought for a moment that he was reluctant to release my hand, but he did.
    Junebug and Billy Ray said nothing further to me as I walked out and shut the door. I went past the still fuming Bernadette, who was muttering about the poor manners of civil servants. I emerged into the heat of the afternoon.
    Bob Don Goertz, unaccountably, was acting like my ally. But even though he had been forthcoming, he hadn’t seemed comfortable. Did I make him nervous? I’d half-expected him to point a finger at me and tell the officers that I was prying into Beta Harcher’s death. But he hadn’t. And I thought I knew why.
    I’d asked if Beta was the type to dig up dirt on people; his immediate response was
She’s not blackmailing me.
It seemed an odd answer for a smooth talker like Bob Don. Not a “Yeah, she was the type to do it” or “No, she was a good Christian woman who’d never commit extortion.” He just said
he
wasn’t being victimized. I wondered if that was a slip of the tongue, if Bob Don had been so jumpy that he’d logically leapfrogged ahead a couple of questions. Was he being blackmailed by Beta, or did he know of someone else who was? I was getting ahead of myself, I thought. But I’d definitely take him up on his offer of further discussion. He hadn’t said where he was last night. I felt that honest Bob Don wasn’t being entirely so.
    It didn’t make me want to buy a car from him.

    The smell of marijuana hung faint in the air as I