IMPROBABLE
Fortunes
a genuine archer book
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Archer/Rare Bird
601 West 26th Street · Suite 325 · New York · NY 10001
archerlit.com
Copyright © 2016 by Jeffrey Price
Set in Minion
ePub ISBN: 978-1-941729-12-0
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Names: Price, Jeffrey.
Title: Improbable fortunes: a novel / Jeffrey Price.
Description: First Hardcover edition | Los Angeles [California] ; New York [New York] : Archer/Rare Bird Books, 2016.
Identifiers: ISBN 978-1-941729-08-3.
Subjects: LCSH: Cowboys—Fiction | Mining—Fiction | Colorado—Fiction | BISAC: LITERARY/Fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3616.R5261 2016 | DDC 813.6—dc23.
For Jennie
Contents
Adopted by the Dominguez Family
Learning the Ropes at the Boyles’
Ground Zero: The Puster Auction
Eighteen Licks and One for Good Luck
PROLOGUE
By morning, several theories would circulate Vanadium as to why their town had been destroyed. Vanadium’s First Church of Thessalonians would put forth the notion that the Almighty had finally gotten around to clearing off His cluttered desk only to discover a stack of neglected outrages, perpetrated in these environs, so great as to demand His immediate retribution. Some of the standouts were the Spanish Conquistadors’ introduction of Vanadium’s first native inhabitants to slavery, small pox, and syphilis; the Mormons’ massacre of the Utes; the range wars of the 1870s; the many murders over water, women, and the receipt for the uranium mined—not two miles from Vanadium’s Main Street, that was expedited to Japan via the Enola Gay. The pagans in town believed their misfortune was caused by the Curse of the Utes—a hex put upon this land by shamans and trotted out whenever anything went wrong. But in the cold light of day, when everyone had settled down, they would come to the consensus that what had befallen them was simply because Marvin Mallomar, one of the richest men in the United States, had moved there from New York City and formed an unlikely friendship with a dim-witted local cowboy by the name of Buster McCaffrey.
It had been raining for seven days straight, and on this auspicious night, most of Vanadium’s regulars would decide to “drink in” rather than venture into the wet. It was now 1:30. The neon light of the High Grade Bar switched off. The Busy Bees, the area’s anarchistic motorcycle gang and Lame Horse County’s largest manufacturers of methamphetamine, saddled up their Harleys and pulled out of the parking lot. Although business this evening was slow, the Busy Bees were up 9.5 percent for the second quarter. Their success was no accident, for Cookie Dominguez, the gang’s leader, had modeled his sales and distribution system on an organization he much admired, that being the Mary Kay Cosmetics Company.
Here they came now, grim-faced and rain-slickered, throttling down Main Street heading back to their secure compound twenty miles to the west, giving the town one last defiant crankpin exhaust blast as they passed the town’s proudly misspelled welcome sign suggesting that everyone: “Quit Your Damn Bellyachin’ Your in Vanadium.” As the Geiger Motel sign, with its neon Geiger counter needle that twitched