When the Women Come Out to Dance - by Elmore Leonard (2002) William Morrow

- Sparks - Joseph Canavan is an insurance investigator.  He’s interviewing Robin, a former rock star whose husband recently passed away and whose house has now burned down as part of local wildfire.  He needs to tell the insurance company if the fire was accidental or providential.  The interview gets relaxed, then intense.  She even offers him money, $100,000 so the 2.5 million claim will go through.  Fraud committers usually offer him half.  He has no proof she set her house on fire, so he’s prepared to let it go.  On his way out, she asks if he can’t stay a while.  If he didn’t stay, he could always come back.

-Hanging Out at the Buena Vista - Natalie and Vincent live in a retirement community.  He’s eighty, she’s eighty-two.  He offers to take her to a Jerry Vale concert.  Then he asks her if she wants to get out, go for a ride.  She counters with an offer for him to move in with her.  He asks, would we sleep together?  She says, Well, not the first night.

- Chickasaw Charlie Hoke - Charlie lives with Vernice, but he doesn’t have a job, so Vernice wants him to move out at the end of the week.  Charlie has a prospect and he’s basing it on the fact that he pitched in the major leagues and even has a world series ring.  He only pitched one inning and gave-up the winning run in the game, but he was there.  A local casino is about to open and he thinks he can get picked-up as a celebrity host.  When he interviews, the owner challenges Charlie to pitch the ball to him, tells Charlie that if he can strike him out, he has the job.  Charlie gets him to 0-2, but then he hits the guy with a ball.  The guy refuses to take the base and insists on one more pitch.  This one he rips to right field.  When he tells Vernice about it, and that he was hired, she’s shocked, Even though you knocked him down? She says.  Charlie says, Honey, it’s part of the game.

- When the Women Come Out to Dance - Lourdes becomes Mrs. Mahmood’s personal maid.  Mrs. Mahmood, a redhead, is a former stripper who wishes her husband would die.  They talk and Lourdes reveals she was a mail-order bride who came to Florida from Columbia.  Her husband is dead.  He was covered in a block of cement.  When the police broke the block open they noticed his hands were tied behind his back.  Mrs. Mahmood asks if Lourdes’ friends from Columbia could help her.  There will be a cost, of course, thirty thousand.  The next day, two policemen come to the house and tell Mrs. Mahmood that her husband was killed in a car-jacking.  That night she goes out and does not return until late the next day.  She discovers Lourdes dancing by the pool in one of her swimsuits and two guys sitting there watching.  When Mrs. Mahmood asks what is going on, Lourdes says We having a party for you Ginger, The Columbian guys come to see you dance.

- Fire in the Hole - this is the story the Justified series is based upon.  The story is effectively the first season of the series.  Deputy Marshall Raylan Givens tells a fugitive in Miami that he has 24 hours to leave town.  When that time is up, he confronts the criminal, who draws on him.  Only Raylan is faster.  He finds himself transferred back to the Kentucky town where he grew up.  The local criminal master-mind is a man Raylan dug coal with in the mines.

This was the basis for the television series, Justified.

- Karen Makes Out - Karen Sisco finds herself romantically involved with a man.  Only he turns out to be a bank robber.

- Hurrah for Captain Early - Bo Catlett, a black veteran of the Spanish-American War, comes to town to wait for Captain Bren Early.  Town folk can’t believe a black man would appear in a suit and tie and just walk into hotels or bars and expect to get service.  When the bartender tells some of the locals, that Catlett was in the war and in the battle for San Juan hill, they don’t believe him.  One, especially is offended and tries to call out Catlett to a duel in the street.  Catlett allows how as he is the one being called out, according to the rules for dueling, he gets to pick the weapons.  This confuses the drunk man and when he looks back at Catlett, there is a saber pointed at his throat.  The duel fizzles.  Captain Early arrives and embraces Catlett, then sees the saber and looks closely, realizing it is his own, the one he dropped on the way up the hill when turned around to rally his troops, he was shot in the butt.  Catlett had picked it up and waved it as he and the rest of his men from the tenth colored regiment went up the hill shooting and yelling and singing.  Catlett asks Early why they were fighting the dons.  Early asks, You didn’t know why you went to war?  Catlett says I guess I knew, I just wasn’t sure.

- The Tonto Woman - Rueben Vega, a cattle thief, hears of a woman, marked by the Indians who had captured her, tattoos on her face.  He stops by her place to water his horse.  Then comes back another day to do the same.  She is the wife of a powerful rancher who will not allow her to move back into his house.  Instead she is kept in a shack on the edge of his property.  He finds out that Vega has been visiting her and sends four men to teach him a lesson and drive him off.  Instead, Vega defeats them all.  He brings a wagon and a dress for the Tonto Woman and takes her to town to a hotel restaurant.  There the husband confronts them.  Vega points out that every woman is unique and beautiful in their own way and shames the man.  By the time he leaves, the woman’s self-worth has risen to a point where she will no longer allow herself to be repressed.  Vega leaves with a good conscience to take some of her husband’s cattle.

- Tenkiller - Ben Webster, aka Tenkiller, a former champion bull rider, decides to go home to Okmulgee, Oklahoma, after his girlfriend dies falling off a ladder at their home.  He’d been living in Southern California working as a stunt man in movies.  Once he gets back home, Lydell, the man who had been taking care of his place has dementia and someone took advantage of him.  Those men think they’ve found a way to steal the property.  Ben has local contacts who have become police and they manage to run the men off the property.  When Ben and his new love are confronted by the last of the hijackers, the new love tells him to go away.  Ben asks the woman why she was able to run the hijacker off with simply the threat of killing him, she pulls her Sig Sauer out of her purse and says That man is really stupid isn’t he?  Ben responds with …Nine out of ten criminals have the brain of a chicken.