The Texan Read Free

felt his throat tighten with emotion. He kept his eyes lowered, so Clay wouldn’t see how devastated he was by his brother’s news. He wasn’t sure he could handle the funeral on his own. He wanted his brother beside him in case he needed a strong shoulder to lean on.
    “I don’t think I’ll be missed,” Clay said. “Every police officer in Texas is liable to show up here in Bitter Creek tomorrow to pay their respects to Hank.”
    None of them is my brother
, Owen thought.
I can’t turn to one of them, if I start to fall apart
. “Isn’t there any way you can rearrange your plans?”
    “’Fraid not. I’ve got some business in Midland tomorrow with Paul Ridgeway.”
    Owen took a sip of beer while he contemplated Clay’s revelation. Paul Ridgeway was the FBI’s special-agent-in-charge of coordinating all the law enforcement agencies investigating the theft of the VX mines. He had also
almost
been Clay’s father-in-law.
    Clay had been engaged to Paul’s only child Cindy until she’d been murdered a year ago, two weeks before their wedding. Paul had tracked down his daughter’s murderer, who’d turned out to be a vagrant, and shot him when he resisted arrest. But he’d had a difficult time dealing with his daughter’s death, and Clay had spent a lot of time with him over the past year, keeping him company on hunting trips and attending football games. Offering comfort.
    The same comfort Owen needed now. The same comfort Owen had offered his brother at Cindy’s funeral. He’d been there when Clay fell to pieces the morning Cindy was buried. He’d hoped to have Clay’s support when he buried his best friend tomorrow.
    Then he remembered Luke Creed’s accusations. Owen knew Clay hadn’t stolen the mines. That was absurd. But maybe Clay knew something about their theft. After all, it was soldiers in Clay’s National Guard unit, a heavy mechanized engineer battalion that specialized in laying mines during combat, who’d discovered the mislabeled crates of nerve gas mines.
    “Does your business with Paul have anything to do with those missing VX mines?” Owen asked pointedly.
    “My business with Paul is absolutely personal,” Clay said with a grin that acknowledged the contradiction in terms.
    “Which means you’re not going to tell me.”
    “Nope.”
    “You’re a secretive sonofabitch,” Owen said.
    “Yep. At least to the secretive part.”
    Owen dutifully laughed. “I wish you could be there,” he said.
    “I’m sorry, Owe. I can’t.”
    Owen concentrated on tearing the label off his beer. His nose stung, and his throat ached. The grief he felt was terrible. But he wasn’t going to cry. He wasn’t.
    It had been so long since he’d cried, he wasn’t sure he could. And he had an awful, frightening feeling that if he let even one drop fall, he might not be able to stop the humiliating flow of tears. It had happened once before.
    When he was nine, he’d gone hunting with his father and shot his first white-tailed buck. He hadn’t killed the deer, and it was thrashing in the underbrush and shrieking in agony—something he hadn’t known a deer could do.
    His father had refused to kill the buck for him, saying it was up to him to end the animal’s suffering. Tears had spurted from his eyes as he held the knife to the deer’s throat, unable to cause the pain that would end its pain forever. He’d seen the disappointment in his father’s eyes.
    Worse was yet to come. His father had agreed to kill the buck for him the moment he stopped crying. Owen had tried to stanch his tears, but every time the deer shrieked, his throat clenched and more tears fell. Until at last he’d found himself on his knees with the knife in his hand slitting the deer’s throat himself to end its torment.
    Once the deer was dead, his tears had stopped abruptly. Nothing that had happened to him since—no joy or pain or sorrow—had wrung a tear from him. But he’d never lost someone so close to him before, and