Page 42 of Lawbreaker

Cole frowned. “Hell of a shot, Tony,” he noted as he kissed his daughter’s hair. “Sweetheart, you okay?”

She pulled back reluctantly and hugged her dad. “I’m okay. I hate rattlesnakes.”

“We all hate them,” Cole said. “You didn’t see it?”

She shook her head. “They blend. If it hadn’t been for Tony...”

Tony was reloading his .38. He made a face. “Sorry. I should have told you that I always carry. Old habit.”

Cole swept back his overshirt, displaying a .45 Ruger Vaquero double action pistol in a tooled leather holster. “We all carry around here. Never know if there will be a snake or a rabid animal that has to be put down, or even one of our animals that’s injured too badly to save.” He cocked his head as Tony finished reloading and put the two wasted shells in his pocket and the pistol in the pancake holster behind his back. “You don’t carry an automatic?” he added.

Tony shook his head. “I had an auto fail on me at the worst possible time,” he replied. “If it hadn’t been for Ben—” he indicated the bodyguard who was just joining them “—we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“Well, I’m not giving up my Glock,” Ben announced.

“I don’t remember asking you to,” Tony chuckled.

“What happened?” Ben asked, wincing when he saw the tears on Odalie’s face.

“Snake,” Tony replied. “No big deal. And nobody’s blaming you, capisce?”

Which led to a spate of Italian that neither Cole nor Odalie could understand and that sounded like a family scene from aDue Southepisode.

Cole started laughing.

“What?” Tony asked, diverted.

“You two. You sound like a scene I remember from a show calledDue South. There was this Italian family...”

Tony started laughing. So did Ben.

“Oh, God, that show,” Tony chuckled. “It’s just like that,” he told them. “Just like that, when we all get together. Connie, Odalie met her at my house on Long Island, and the others, the cousins, we get together on the holidays and it’s one argument after another.” He shook his head. “I guess it’s just how Italian families are.”

“We should take him to see Great-Aunt Ophelia at Christmas,” Cole told Odalie.

She laughed with him. “It’s a riot. She and her sister, Gracie, had four children between them, and the kids had kids. So now that makes sixteen grandchildren, about thirty great-grandchildren, five great-great-grandchildren...”

“Six,” Cole interrupted. “You forgot Margie’s new baby.”

“Sorry, six great-great-grandchildren. So Ophelia and Gracie are rich beyond the dreams of avarice and they’re very old and all the kids and other descendants think they should get part of the estate. Then Gracie and Ophelia get into it and talk about changing their wills.” She shook her head. “Pure theater.”

“Almost makes me wish I’d been a foundling,” Cole sighed.

“Liar.” Odalie smiled at him.

He just shrugged.

Ben was standing over the snake. “You shoot him from there?” he asked Tony.

Tony nodded.

“Not bad,” Ben mused.

“Not bad at all,” Cole agreed. “You shoot straight.”

Tony just nodded again. It meant his life if he didn’t, and it had, a time or two.

“They stop doing this eventually?” Ben asked, with a mock shiver.