“Well, just before you got there, when he was trying
to borrow one from me, he said she was down for half
a million.”
“Interesting. We had lunch last week and she was
worried about the mortgage on her B-and-B. A half-
million sure makes a nice consolation prize.”
“Also makes a motive for murder.”
“No way!” Portland protested. But she mulled it over
as I pulled out to pass a slow-moving pickup. “Dwight
got her in his range finder?”
“Probably. Along with Mrs. Harris and everybody on
the farm, I should think. Not that he tells me every-
thing.”
“Yeah, right,” she jeered. “I don’t suppose he’s said
anything about Karen Braswell’s place getting shot
up?”
244
HARD ROW
“Nope. But I haven’t really talked to him since this
morning and that only happened last night, right?”
“Well, when you do, would you please stress that this
guy’s gone over the edge? Bo promised to tell his peo-
ple to be on the lookout in her neighborhood and so
did Lonnie Revell, for what that’s worth.”
Lonnie Revell is Dobbs’s chief of police. Nice guy but
not the brightest star in the town’s constellation.
I repeated what Dwight had said about hurricanes
and the need to head for high ground when you know
one’s on the way.
“Moving in with her mother’s not really high ground,
but with a little luck, he’ll do something to get himself
arrested again before he finds out that’s where she is. I
just hope you’ll give him a couple of years next time.”
“Hey, no
“What’s
if there
who could possibly be unaware of the situation unless
it’s Harrison Hobart and isn’t that old dinosaur ever
going to turn seventy-two?”
Seventy-two’s the mandatory retirement age and
it looked like he was going to hang on till the end.
Hobart’s a throwback to an earlier age when men were
men and their women kept silent. Not only in church
but everywhere else if he’d had his way. He had tried to
keep female attorneys from wearing slacks in his court-
room, and whenever I had to argue a case before him,
he never failed to lecture me that skirts were the only
attire proper for the courtroom.
“If that’s true,” I had said sweetly, gesturing to our
district attorney who sat at the prosecution’s table and
