An Arm and a Leg by Olive Balla Read Free Book Online

without feeling the need to hurl his beans. Maybe his innards were trying to tell him something his head hadn’t quite figured out.
    Bellamy picked up after the second ring. “Ah, Larry. You have good news, yes?”
    “Mel and me rifled through O’Neil’s place. We didn’t find anything there, so we went on over to the sister’s house. She’s got the place locked up tighter’n a drum. Besides an alarm, there’s deadbolts on the front and back doors. We figured you wouldn’t want us to risk breaking in and being seen.”
    “What about Tim’s car? Were you able to manage a look at that?”
    “We didn’t see anything inside O’Neil’s car.” Larry added a silent screw you at the sarcasm in his boss’s voice. “We were about to pop the trunk when some old blister came out of the house next door and yelled what were we doing, so we took off. We could go back later tonight when everyone’s in bed.”
    “We’ll chat about that later. We received an interesting call this morning from our songbird. It seems O’Neil is dead.”
    Larry’s stomach lurched at the thought that Bellamy knew he’d withheld important information. He gulped then cleared his throat. “That’s good, right? At least now he can’t make trouble.”
    “That’s all you have to say for yourself? What other details did you leave out of your report?”
    “I didn’t know O’Neil was dead, I figured he was just hurt. But him being dead takes care of our problem, right?”
    “That remains to be seen. The Colfax County Sheriff has issued an all-points bulletin for two men in a green pickup, along with a press release asking for any witnesses. It seems another man was shot as well, a hunter whose timing and choice of hunting grounds turned out to be a terminal mistake.”
    Larry swallowed hard, the sound embarrassingly audible. “What’ll me and Mel do?”
    “We will give you instructions, and you will follow them to the letter. Mel has hidden the pickup at the farm. We’ll get it repainted when things have died down a bit. You take the old Camaro we keep in the barn. Drive it into town, get it serviced and fill it up. Mel will drive it.”
    “Yessir.”
    “Is that ancient Mercedes you stole from your ex-boss still running?”
    “Yeah, it runs good. I mostly just drive it around town.”
    “Are your tags up to date?”
    “Yessir, I’ve been real careful about that ever since you fixed the title and all.”
    “Excellent. We wouldn’t want you to attract the attention of the local gendarme.”
    “The what?”
    “The law.” Bellamy snorted into the phone. Like the airbrakes on an eighteen wheeler, the puff of air blasted into Larry’s ear. “How have you managed to survive this long with such a miniscule brain?”
    What kind of messed up pleasure did Bellamy get out of making fun of Larry’s lack of education? Just because he’d dropped out of school didn’t mean he didn’t know stuff. He wanted to remind his boss that several of the ideas used to streamline the operations at Bellamy’s chicken farm had been his. And that the farm’s website design had been all Larry’s doing. He wanted to yell that into his boss’s ear, but thought better of it. Far be it from him to deprive Bellamy of one of his favorite pastimes. Besides, he made it a practice never to buck anyone who could handle sharp instruments the way the old man did.
    And then, of course, there was Bellamy’s collection .
    One of the first things the boss had done after hiring Larry and Mel was to take them to his basement and show them his pride and joy. He’d laughed and said there were people who’d give an arm and a leg to own the things he’d spent the past twenty years accumulating.
    A feeling washed over Larry—a feeling his ma used to say meant a goose was walking over his grave. He clamped his jaws together so tight his neck started to ache.
    “You will watch the sister,” Bellamy was saying. “She is not to see you or suspect she is being