Total pages in book: 131
Estimated words: 131387 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 526(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 131387 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 526(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
But I knew.
My one-night stand just turned into my dog trainer.
And maybe my protector.
“Fuck,” I whispered.
And as ever all my life, I had no choice but to get on with it.
Therefore, I headed to the feedstore.
EIGHT
I Want It All
Hutch
Hutch not only took the time to read Mabel’s application, since the unreasonable woman wanted to adopt Moxie as well as Tonks, he also took the time to introduce them and see if that was going to be a fiasco.
It wasn’t.
There was a lot of sniffing and eye contact, but the biggest problem Mabel was going to have was Tonks wanting to play, and Moxie not.
Fortunately, cats could get to high ground and dogs could learn.
He returned them to their cages, said goodbye to the staff and set about doing the next thing on his agenda.
This meant, out on the road, he kept a lookout, checked his mirrors and noted, not unusually, CR 10 was deserted.
So he slowed at the spot he’d scoped out earlier, pulled his truck off the asphalt and into the trees until it couldn’t be seen from the road.
He’d been trained to cover any possible eventuality, so after he got out his gear, he pulled the camo net from his truck bed and covered the vehicle with it.
Only then did he tug on the camo fleece and the army drab knit cap to cover his hair. He loaded up with his gear and started his hike.
From where he parked, it was quite a way, all of it uphill, to the stony bluff that gave the area in Fret County the name of Stony Bluff.
He hiked behind the chalky stone until he knew he was where he needed to be.
Only then did he partially climb the bluff, then scope his next position.
There was a rise in the rock about ten meters away.
Crouched, he hustled to it until he was behind it. Once in place, he dropped to his belly and used the balls of his feet and his elbows to position behind the rocky rise.
He got his long-range binoculars out, popped the lens caps, put them to his eyes, did some adjusting and settled into the mental space of reconnaissance, ticking mental notes.
At the southwest end of The Lion and The Lamb compound, precisely, just inside the entry to it, a very long car port housed eight trucks, not all dual cab, but most of them were.
There was a tarred log perimeter fence surrounding the whole encampment. Hutch’s estimation: a good eight feet tall, spike tops. The only break was at the drive that would lead out to the road, and at the road there was a gate that had two signs Hutch had seen countless times over the years.
No Trespassing.
And…
Private Property Keep Out.
Even so, he saw locked egresses cut into their log fortress, and one of them led toward Mabel’s place.
They’d cleared a good deal of the original owner Mr. Flannery’s land to get their open space and that fence, and the old man, who had spent eighty years of his life on that land, doing it since birth, caring for it, protecting it, had to be rolling in his grave because of it.
A massive supply of firewood was stacked along the south perimeter.
But with that amount of fence built from logs, that firewood didn’t come from Flannery’s land, which somehow Lars Enstrom got deeded to him in Flannery’s will, even if the man wasn’t blood and Flannery’s real kin pitched a series of legal fits about it.
Unless they made more on their jam and bread than Hutch suspected, they had to be poaching lumber.
It was slim for Harry to get a lock on, but it wasn’t nothing.
Hutch kept cataloging.
Fifteen houses, all the same, looked prefab and portable, no obvious order, seemingly scattered around the center of the space, but all of them surrounded what looked to be a church, if the steeple was any indication.
At a guess, Hutch would say the houses were, at most, twelve hundred square feet. Walkways spiderwebbed between them, the church and the outbuildings.
Northwest end of the space, a massive pole barn. Huge.
He’d seen some of the men on CR 10 riding ATVs. Since they weren’t covered and kept outside, that was likely where they kept them.
Between the pole barn and the big cattle barn on the northeast side of the property, a large pigsty and a heavily protected, also large, chicken coop. He counted at least twenty chickens outside the coop, roaming and pecking.
At the back of the property, fallowed fields, though there were some squash vines and sunflowers still yielding, along with some chicken-wire-covered rows of what looked to be late-planted carrots, kale, beets and spinach.
Electrical lines ran to all the structures, including the truck port and the chicken coop.
That said, all the houses had a thin wisp of smoke coming from stoves or fireplaces.