Down Among the Dead Men (Entangled Ignite) Read Online Free PDF

glass, she said, “You’re a single dad?”
    “Max told you that, I guess.”
    “Sort of. Who’s looking after Ginny tonight?”
    “My mother.”
    “Your parents live in the town as well, then?”
    “Only my mother. She lives with Ginny and me. She makes sure Ginny has a proper home life, including all the things a little girl likes and a father has no clue about.”
    “And Max helps out?”
    “Yes. It’s hard work looking after a toddler. Rose has to have a day to herself each week, and Max is our first-choice babysitter.”
    Caitlyn nodded. “Max seems like a good kid.”
    “Seems like?”
    “Oh, I mean, she is. I don’t know her very well. This is my first visit out here.”
    “She had to grow up early. Once her mother died she had to basically raise herself, because Wally was as useful as—” He stopped abruptly.
    “A chocolate teapot?”
    “That’s a polite way of putting it. Sorry, I forgot for a minute there about him being your father.”
    She waved her fork at him. “Please, don’t censor yourself because of that. It’s not like he and I are close.”
    “Right. So, what do you want to know for your book? Ask away.”
    He had an infectious smile and bright, intelligent eyes. She could almost forget they’d only just met. He felt like a friend. “Great. Let’s see. Perhaps you could tell me what you know about ratting?”
    He frowned.
    “Or do you call it nightshifting? I think they’re one and the same, aren’t they?”
    “What kind of book are you writing?”
    “It’s fiction. A fictitious account of…well, you know, it’s a novel.” She’d have to refine her description before she used it again.
    “But it’s about ratting?”
    “Well, some of it might be. I haven’t written it yet, I’m doing my research first.”
    “Research,” he repeated, his voice skeptical. “I gather you haven’t done much of it yet or you’d know that most people don’t talk about ratting openly. And I’d advise you to be careful who you talk to about this book. People around here consider ratters the lowest of the low.”
    She leaned further across the table, lowering her voice. “But you’ll talk to me about it?”
    He took a long drink while she waited for an answer. “Ratting,” he said as he placed his glass on the table, “is the practice of going into another person’s mine without permission and extracting the opal.”
    “Stealing it. Right, I understand that much, but what I don’t understand is, why bother? I mean, why not mine their own? It’s not hard to register a claim to mine a plot of land, is it?”
    “It’s not hard, but there are conditions involved. A minimum number of hours to be worked and so on. But it’s not that so much as the difficulty of working the claim, with no guarantee of striking lucky. Ratting eliminates all the hard work, or most of it. They go into a shaft where they know there’s already been an opal strike. A miner might have spent weeks, months even, carefully gouging out a drive—a horizontal tunnel—then, when he finally finds opal, these guys come in overnight and steal it.”
    She drew in a sharp breath. “That would piss anyone off.”
    “Too right.”
    “Do you think any rat people have been killed for doing it?”
    “Rat people?” He chuckled, sipped his beer, and looked at her over the top of the glass. “It’s highly likely,” he said, putting the glass down. “I wouldn’t say the opal fields are a lawless place exactly, but the miners aren’t angels. When they’ve slogged away to find the opal, they can hardly be expected to be happy about people stealing their strike, can they?”
    “No. Of course not.”
    “What’s more, ratters often leave the mine in an unsafe condition. Honest miners have died as a result of ratters doing their stuff.”
    “Because they’re in a hurry to get the opal out?”
    He nodded. “Partly. They have no reason to be concerned about the safety of future work, so they’ll take too much