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He neared a group of men and was taken aback when he recognized two of them. They were Lynch’s men, and they’d brought a team with them. What was Lynch doing?
Nash raised an arm to catch the men’s attention and walked over to them. Immediately the workers turned to meet him, their movements defensive. The shorter of Lynch’s men, Crawley, seemed to relax when he saw him. “Oh good, it’s you.”
Why were they acting like this was normal procedure? No one had told him about this. “What are you doing out here?” Nash asked.
The taller man, Stein, grumbled. “Just making sure that West isn’t cheating us. We’re seeing for ourselves if we’ve got oil out here. We’re not paying top dollar for this place if West isn’t planning on going through with our deal.”
“Oil?”
“Yeah, oil,” Crawley said flatly. “These are seismic survey thumper trucks. They’ll tell us if we have oil here.” The vibrations each time the trucks lowered their sensors to the ground was like nothing Nash felt before.
“Does Millie know you’re out here?”
Crawley made a noise of disgust. “You think we’re operating a charity here? Lynch isn’t about to support no widow and her grandson if he can’t get something out of it.”
So no, Millie didn’t know. Suddenly, making millions of dollars for his cut made more sense. Lynch was trying to cheat Millie—West was, too, if Nash was being honest about what was happening here. His stomach clenched. “Did you find the oil?”
Crawley and Stein clammed up again. “You’ll have to talk to Lynch about that…”
So in other words, “Yes.”
Crawley waved in the direction of Millie’s ranch house. “We need you to wrap things up here and get us your final offer by Sunday. Lynch is real eager to close this deal with Trout.”
Over his dead body.
Nash gritted his teeth and picked up his phone to call Lynch. It went directly to voicemail. Nash didn’t even bother to leave a message. He got into his pickup to drown out the sound of their heavy machinery and tried West next.
His brother sounded testy the moment that he picked it up. “This better be you telling me that you have a contract for me to sign.”
West had given him until Sunday, but that wasn’t the point. “I can’t get ahold of Lynch,” Nash told his brother.
“Yeah, he’s still dealing with a family emergency, right now,” West said in clipped tones.
“Family emergency?” Nash had a feeling there was more going on than that, and as usual, West was playing the PR guy and covering for Trout’s interests. “I always know when you’re doing cleanup. C’mon, I’m your brother. Tell me the truth.”
West sighed. “You know that I can’t do that.”
“This is an emergency here—a real one, and by the way, I think Lynch found oil on this land, and he’s lying to Millie about it.”
“Oil?”
“Stop pretending that you don’t know anything about what this land is really worth. Lynch’s thugs are crawling all over the place doing seismic measurements behind Millie’s back. She might be interested to know that her land will bring in way more cash than she thought. She deserves to know. Our family’s name depends on it.”
“Our family’s name?” West sneered. With misgiving, Nash recognized that combative tone. “We don’t even know if her land will really produce oil,” West said. “Not unless weactuallydrill. Seismic measurements give us only a hint of what we’ll find, so as far as I can see,we’rethe ones taking the chance here. Millie’s husband never wanted his land drilled. That’s on them for not checking it out. They had their opportunities to put some real work into assessing their land.”
He wouldn’t let West twist this. “If we don’t disclose that there’s a chance for oil,” Nash said, “then we’re buying the land under false pretenses. I’m supposed to be fair.”
“We don’t knowanything.”
“Lynch wouldn’t want this land if it didn’t have oil.”
“You sure about that? It’s good land, Nash. There is plenty we can do with it if we didn’t find oil. You’re making a lot of assumptions here that you have no call making. Did Lynch’s men even tellyouthat they found something?”
“No… but it’s pretty obvious. They’re bringing in their machinery behind Millie’s back? And then pushing me to close the deal? They found something. You can’t tell me they haven’t.”
West sighed again, and Nash stiffened, getting ready for his brother to lecture him on assumptions. “I can’t answer for Lynch,” West allowed. “He’s an idiot for being there. In fact, they can get us all in trouble, so thanks for the head’s up. I’ll contact Lynch to call his dogs home, but as for you, you’ve got your job to do. You don’t actually know what they found on that land, do you? Do you?”
“No,” Nash admitted.
