Page 58 of The Cowboy’s Reckoning

The bartender shook his head. “He never brings her here.”

“Heard he’s doing all right, though. Better than Gremlin.” Jordan drained the last of his beer.

The barkeep laughed. “His face is prettier, but yeah. Whatever his last job was, it must have been a good one because he’s flush. Boy needs to learn to keep his temper, though.”

“That’s why I never hired him.” Jordan pulled out his wallet.

“Why didn’t you ask where we could find this Gremlin person?” Lil asked as they hit sunlight. She squinted and pulled her sunglasses down from the top of her head. “And why is he called Gremlin?”

“His name is Grimaldi. He got nicknamed in grade school and it stuck.”

“Didn’t find out much, did we?”

“We found out that Gremlin is full of shit, Joe is flush, and that no one in the Wolf Den has met his girlfriend.”

*

“Chased any cows lately?” Sara Crabbe, the woman behind the counter at the courthouse assessor’s office, stop number two of Lil and Jordan’s fact-finding mission, cracked up at her own joke. “That night was one for the books.”

“Perhaps you’d like to meet the man responsible,” Lil said, taking hold of Jordan’s arm.

Sara’s eyes widened. “No. I’d heard rumor that it was Burke Thurley who released the cows.”

“You heard correctly,” Jordan replied. “My brother and I were merely”—he glanced down at Lil—“bystanders.”

She nudged him and he grinned.

“We’re here for two reasons,” Lil explained. “We want to look at older plats, and I wanted to give you my business card.” She pulled one out of the upper pocket of her jeans jacket. “Aubrey told me that you might be interested in my services in the future.”

The shadow that crossed the woman’s face was barely noticeable. Unfortunately, Lil did.

“You heard?”

“I’m really sorry for what happened. Have you had any other issues?”

Lil shook her head. “To be safe, I moved my operations to Jordan’s ranch for the time being.”

Sara’s face cleared. “The Tree Fork, right? Wade Matthews’s place.”

“That’s the one.”

“Jim Reed subdivided the adjacent property recently.” She smiled at Jordan. “I recorded that map when I was in land services.”

Lil shot Jordan a sideways look. He was still waiting to hear on his mortgage that would allow him to buy that property, and even though it seemed like a sure thing, she knew he was still concerned about the off chance of being turned down.

“Can you tell us how to access archived property maps?” he asked Sara. “We’re trying to trace down an owner.”

“All you need is an address and you can do that online.”

“Except that there really was no address at the time. I’m wondering who owned the Willow Creek Property in the 1990s and before.”

Sara ran a hand over her face. “I might be able to just tell you that. Give me a minute.”

She disappeared through an archway that connected to the office next door. When she came back, she said, “That would be R. F. Weston. Robert Frank. A nonresident owner. According to what we have on file, he sold the ranch to Mr. Jordan in the mid-nineties and then put the rest of the land into a conservancy. He passed away a few years ago. JoBeth managed the title change to the heir.”

“So the conservancy now belongs to …”

“R. F. Weston, an LLC based in Nevada.”