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Hunter looked at her hands on the coffee mug. So much was riding on this. “You any good?”
“Can I move? I’m better when I move.” He grinned at her. She frowned at him. Truman said, “You know, Robert Redford as The Sundance Kid, showing the mine boss, ol’ Strother Martin, he can shoot?”
Hunter nodded her head slowly at him like, Okayyy, your point being…
“Kincaid, I’m hyperactive, always have been. I can’t sit still, anything like that. I sleep about two hours at a time, and then I have to get up, move around. It’s the same on a case. I have to move while I work. But yeah, I’m good.”
“I don’t know...I might be better off hiring an attorney on my own.”
Truman clasped his hands together and tapped his lip with the forefingers. “You could. I wouldn’t blame you, with my addiction and all. But I am good. And I’m clean. I figure I need to win this case as bad as you do, to prove myself to everybody, and to myself.”
“This is huge for me, Truman. Everything’s riding on it. I need the best I can get.”
“I won’t let you down. Let me represent you. We’ll kick old Ronnie’s ass completely out of that courtroom.” Truman’s pale blue eyes were almost electric with intensity.
“He doesn’t like to be called that.”
Truman grinned, “Yeah, I know.”
Hunter took a deep breath and blew it out, “All right.”
Truman beat out a tipity-tipity bop-bop on the counter. “Let’s get busy then, because I forgot to tell you what they found yesterday at the base of Santa Elena.”
Hunter felt her scalp prickle, “What?”
“Some rafters found Julian Garcia’s black billfold in a crack between two boulders, right below the place where you shot him and said his pistol fell off th
e cliff.”
“It was a pistol, not a damn billfold.”
“I understand, I read your report.”
“They hunted down there for five days and never found a pistol, and damn sure never found a billfold, either. How come now?”
“What I heard, the river is down, and the billfold would have been about a foot under water when the shooting occurred.”
“Is anybody looking for the pistol now, since the water’s lower?”
“Nope. They used metal detectors on the initial search and the grid was photographed to show where they were working. They worked out to a depth of five feet in the river. Covered the area completely.”
Hunter looked at the ceiling and shook her head slowly, “Ohh, I’m screwed.”
“Nope. I’m your lawyer now. We are not going to lose. Trust me.”
“Truman, if there’s no gun...”
“You saw a pistol. I know it. You’ve been around guns your whole life...won what, thirty something shooting events in your career? I know you saw him with a pistol, and you saw it go over the edge of the cliff. I don’t know where it is, but I intend to prove you shot in self-defense, not to cancel El Lobo’s credit cards.”
“I hope you’re as good as you think you are.”
He winked at her and opened his briefcase on the counter, “Can I move? I’m better when I move.”
CHAPTER 3
Joe started his day shift as Hunter was ending her first midnight. He sat down across from her at the large, grey metal table in the center of the Border Patrol squad room. Joe said, “You scratch those eyes, you’re gonna bleed to death.”
“Thank you so much,” Hunter said, setting the coffee mug down beside her hat.
