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Valentine watched the Goat Shack through his Memphis river patrol binoculars. Except for the horse tails swishing under a barn's awning and ATVs parked around the outbuildings, he'd suspect the place was deserted.
The Goat Shack certainly looked dilapidated-even abandoned. Glassless windows, the front door laid out across the wide porch, a few holes in the roof. The road-facing side had fresh cypress boards nailed on horizontally to cover a pickup-truck-sized hole. A dock, divided into an aluminum half by the shore and a wooden extension out onto the lake, ended in a boathouse. Pilings for other docks, perhaps swept away in some flood, dotted the whole riverside behind the house.
Goats rested in the shade of the porch. Valentine watched a tired-looking billy plunge his head into a water trough fed by a downspout and drink.
Valentine suspected it had once been a bar and restaurant for pleasure craft on the river.
A few feet behind, Duvalier lay flat on her back, her feet up on her pack. Ahn-Kha sat cross-legged with his back to the chestnut tree shading Valentine.
The smell of goats reminded Valentine of his first day as a Wolf.
"It just doesn't feel right," Valentine said. "It's like the place is waiting for us."
"We could try going north on our own," Ahn-Kha said. "I don't think this country is muchly inhabited."
"No, we need a guide," Valentine said. "Oh, screw it. Ahn-Kha, cover us from out here with your gun, would you?"
While he changed into the cleaner cut-down black clothes he'd worn in Memphis, Ahn-Kha unstrapped the leather belts around the blanket rolls containing his gun. Duvalier picked up her pack and slung her pump-action shotgun, then handed Valentine his U-gun.
They wandered off the small hummock the chestnut shaded and walked the broken-up road, more potholes than grade.
"What if this Hoffman Price isn't here?" Duvalier asked.
"We find someone else."
"Reaper teeth won't do us much good."
"I have some gold left."
"Just enough to be robbed of and left for dead."
Valentine put his arm on her shoulder. "As if you'd let that happen."
She shrugged him off.
The nanny goats lying on the porch watched them walk past a pair of motorcycles and up onto the porch. A mutt watched them from the shade beneath a truck up on blocks. Duvalier wrung out her neckerchief in the water trough and wiped the sweat from her deeply freckled face and neck.
Valentine heard the clatter of a generator.
"Ready when you are, Val."
"Hello the house," Valentine called. "May we come in?" The brilliant sunshine made every crack in the repaired section of wall a black stripe. There were bullet holes in the door frame and around the windows.
"You a warrant-man?" a crackly woman's voice called back.
"No," Valentine said.
"Then you're not welcome here. Be off."
"We're looking for a warrant-man, actually." Valentine heard movement inside, chairs being pushed back from tables, perhaps.
"Who?"
"Hoffman Price."
"Then come in, friend," the voice said.
