Fated to My Mate's Uncle novel · Chapter 11 of 32

Chapter 11: The Lab

Nobody in the cook shack said anything for a long moment.

Then the kid in the yellow shirt said, "Twenty grand? That's insulting. I'd want fifty."

Patsy hit him with the spatula.

Fraser sat up on the couch and rubbed his face.

"Well," he said. "He's never liked me."

"He just told the whole pack you attacked an eight-year-old," I said.

"I heard."

"You talked to him about dinosaurs."

"I got the dinosaur wrong, too."

I wanted to scream. Instead I got up and went out to the porch, because if I stayed inside I'd break something of Patsy's.

The gray-bearded wolf followed me out.

"He'll be all right," he said. "Nobody on that side will come over here for twenty grand. Not with us."

"And if they catch him in town?"

"Then he'd better not go to town."

"I'm going to town."

He looked at me.

"Today," I said. "I'm taking the cap and the comb to a lab."

He thought about it, chewing his mustache.

"Take Patsy. Nobody shoots at Patsy."

That night was the July supper.

We stood on our bank at dusk, the whole crew.

We watched the smoke go up from the fire pit in front of the pack hall.

A thin gray column, straight up in the still air.

Over there, the elders were reading the old verdict out loud and burning the evidence of it.

Patsy's mud-soaked barn jacket, going up in front of four hundred wolves.

The real one was hanging in Fraser's cabin, sealed in a garbage bag inside a cooler.

"That's my jacket," Patsy said, with deep satisfaction. "Had it twenty years. Hated it the whole time."

The crew laughed.

I didn't.

I was watching the smoke and thinking about a man who goes down to the ford every July with a bottle, and cries.

The next morning, Patsy drove me to Hamilton in her truck with the windows down and country radio up loud.

"You know what you're doing?" she asked.

"No."

"Good. People who know what they're doing never find anything out."

The lab was in a strip mall between a vacuum repair shop and a dentist.

It did paternity tests for people who didn't want their names in the paper.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Fated to My Mate's Uncle from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.