Montana Creeds: Logan

by Linda Lael Miller

  Floyd replied that the state police had taken all the pictures that they needed, and he’d held Brett all night, but had to let him go that morning, since he couldn’t charge him without some kind of proof.

  Logan said he understood.

  Then he got in the truck, drove over to Briana’s and gathered up the pictures and the ruined album. Took them back to his place and piled them, as neatly as he could, next to his computer.

  After that, he made a sandwich, ate it, took the dogs out, brought them in again.

  Sat down at his desk and booted up the photo-doctoring program.

  He’d used it a lot, while he was building his company, to make brochures and design a Web site, and navigating it was second nature. He began mending pictures as best he could, scanning them in, smoothing out tears and wrinkles.

  Perhaps because Briana was an only child, Wild Man had taken a lot of pictures of his daughter. Working with those images was like watching her grow up—she’d been cute as a very little girl, then an awkward tomboy, always on a horse. As a teenager, she’d been drop-dead gorgeous, and garnered herself a couple of rodeo queen titles.

  There were scores of snapshots of Alec and Josh, as babies, as toddlers, as small boys. Their clothes were shabby in those pictures, and the backgrounds showed a succession of trailers and old houses, but they’d looked happy. Secure.

  Kids were resilient. Alec and Josh were proof of that—and so were he and Dylan and Tyler.

  Logan began to hope that, by scanning in the Creed pictures he’d found in the attic, and giving disks to Tyler and Dylan, he might open the way back to being brothers. Real brothers.

  He worked until his eyes felt as though they’d cross, then took a break to check on the progress with the barn. It was going well.

  Briana drove in, when he was just thinking it might be time to rustle up supper, with the boys in the backseat.

  He was ridiculously glad to see her, and it had nothing to do with the cosmic sex they’d had the night before, or the prospect of more.

  “Hey,” he said.

  Alec and Josh clamored out of the truck. “We had to go to day care,” Josh complained.

  “Like babies,” Alec added.

  Then they hurried off to greet the dogs. So much for the Day-Care Trauma.

  Logan ran his hands down the thighs of his jeans, suddenly awkward now that he and Briana were alone.

  “Did you mean what you said this morning?” she asked, very quietly. Her expression was solemn, and she seemed to be holding her breath. “About getting married?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I think I did.”

  “When can we get the license?”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  LOGAN SADDLED the pinto gelding, still unnamed, for Briana. Put a bridle on Traveler, the gray. Alec and Josh, happy because they’d had corn dogs for supper, watched from their perches on the corral fence.

  “Out of practice?” Logan asked, as Briana hesitated beside the pinto.

  She raised her chin a notch. “I haven’t forgotten how to ride a horse,” she said. Then, to prove it, she stuck a foot in the stirrup and hauled herself up into the saddle. The late-in-the-day sunshine rimmed her like the aura of some stray saint. “I don’t like leaving the boys here alone, that’s all.”

  “We’ll stay close by,” Logan assured her. He knew she was worried about running into that bear again—it was enough of a possibility that he’d cleaned and loaded one of Jake’s old hunting rifles and attached the tooled leather scabbard to her saddle, since he didn’t have one.

  “We’re okay, Mom,” Alec called.

  Logan mounted the gray, Indian-style, gripping the mane in one hand and making a swinging leap.

  “Pretty fancy horsemanship,” Briana said. She’d been skittery as water droplets on a hot griddle, since agreeing to his proposal when she got home from town, and the pinto picked up on that, fidgeting a little beneath her.

  “Jim Huntinghorse taught me that move,” he answered, riding in close to grip the pinto’s bridle strap for a moment, so it would settle down. “When we were seven.”

  She smiled, but looked pointedly at his hand, where he was holding on to the bridle. “I’m not a greenhorn, Logan. Let go.”

  He let go. Smiled. “Ready?”

  She nodded.

  He leaned to open the corral gate, waited as she rode through ahead of him. Josh came around the fence to close it behind them.

  “Stay close to the house,” Briana called over one shoulder.

  Logan gave her a look. “They’re okay,” he told her.

  She smiled. “Race you,” she said. “Across the field, through the orchard to the graveyard and back again.”

  “You’re on,” Logan said, and bent low over the gray’s neck, urging the animal into a run with light taps of his boot heels. He shot ahead of Briana, but she was soon streaking along beside him, poetry on horseback, as fiercely beautiful as he could bear for her to be.

  Logan was so busy watching Briana, in fact, that he was almost thrown over Traveler’s head when the horse came to a fallen log and paused for a split second before making a clean jump.

  Through the orchard they raced—the horses would have caught the scent of a bear if there had been one around—but neither animal hesitated. They seemed to revel in speed and freedom, the pinto and the gray.

  As they cleared the orchard, though, and the graveyard was in sight, a shot sounded, somewhere up ahead.

  Logan immediately reined in his own horse and grabbed for Briana’s reins, too. Deftly, he bent sideways to wrench the rifle free of its scabbard.

  “Probably just a poacher,” he said. “Go back to the house, Briana.”

  “Let’s both go back to the house,” Briana replied.

  Another shot boomed through the still afternoon, a muffled, reverberating ka-boom, soon followed by a second blast, then a third.

  Logan rode forward, the rifle resting crosswise in front of him.

  That was when he saw Brett Turlow, through the trees edging the cemetery, standing astride Jake’s grave and pointing a shotgun at the ground.

  The damn fool was trying to shoot a corpse.

  Logan imagined the top of the coffin splintering, Jake’s dust-and-bones body buckling under a spray of buckshot. He knew the lead wouldn’t penetrate six feet of hard Montana dirt, but that didn’t stop the gruesome pictures from forming in his mind.

  “Call the sheriff,” he said evenly, handing his cell phone to Briana because he knew she’d left her own at home, charging on the kitchen counter. “And get the hell out of here before he sees you.”

  It was too late for that, though.

  Brett looked up, hesitated and then stormed toward them, still holding the shotgun.

  “Go,” Logan rasped. “I’ll be okay. Just go, and get hold of Sheriff Book as soon as you’re out of range.”

  Her eyes gleamed with tears. “Logan—”

  Brett was closer now. He cocked the shotgun.

  “Put it down, Brett,” Logan said, feeling relieved when Briana finally turned the pinto and rode back through the orchard. “Put it down.”

  Brett ignored him. As he drew nearer, Logan could see that his face was ravaged—by drink, by rage and despair, and God knew what else. “I never killed your old man!” he wailed. “But I wish to Christ I had, because at least I wouldn’t have spent all these years payin’ for somethin’ I didn’t do!”

  “You’re drunk, Brett,” Logan said easily, though his finger was hooked around the trigger of his rifle and he’d taken the safety off. “Lay down the shotgun, and we’ll talk.”

  Brett stopped, took wavering aim. He was pretty unsteady, so any shot he fired would probably clear both Logan and the gray, but probably wasn’t good enough. And Logan couldn’t take even a moment to look back to see if Briana had ridden beyond the range of that shotgun. He sensed her, back there in the orchard, felt her presence, a strange, harried energy, in the skin of his back and the pit of his stomach.
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  His hand tensed on the rifle. He didn’t want to shoot Brett Turlow, or anybody else. But he’d do it if he had to—and he suspected Turlow was trying to provoke him into killing him. Guilt-free suicide—he’d seen the phenomenon in Iraq, on the American side as well as the enemy’s.

  It was a game he didn’t intend to play.

  Brett pulled the trigger, and Logan swung his rifle wide just in time to keep from putting the poor bastard out of his misery by sheer reflex. Turlow’s gun had jammed, or he’d forgotten to reload after firing the last round into Jake’s grave.

  Logan was off the horse in an instant, tossing his rifle aside in the process, and grappled with Turlow to get the shotgun away from him.

  The struggle was brief, but Turlow was stronger than he looked, and he put up a fight.

  Finally, Logan managed to rip the shotgun out of Turlow’s grasp and fling it away, into the grass. He sat astraddle of the other man’s belly, knees pressing hard into the underside of his upper arms.

  Turlow gave a keening shriek, a trapped-animal sound that chilled Logan, deep down.

  “Easy,” he said gruffly. “I’m not going to hurt you, Brett.”

  Briana rode up then—Logan had been right in guessing she hadn’t gone back to the ranch house, and he was both annoyed and proud. “The sheriff’s on his way with a couple of deputies,” she said calmly, swinging down from the saddle and then collecting the fallen rifle and shotgun, carrying them out of reach and leaning them against the trunk of a tree.

  “Did you break into my house, Brett?” she asked quietly, when she came back.

  Turlow struggled, spat at her feet, and Logan pressed his knees in a little harder.

  “Answer the lady,” he growled.

  “I didn’t mean nothin’ by it,” Turlow protested. “I just wanted to hold that little nightgown in my hands. I put it on the bed so I could imagine you lying there, wearing it, and wanting me.”

  Bile scalded the back of Logan’s throat, left a bitter taste on his tongue. “Sheriff Book said your car never left Skivvie’s parking lot that night.”

  Turlow gave a soblike laugh. “I used our next-door neighbor’s Blazer,” he said. “Always leaves her keys in the ignition. She never even missed it.”

  Logan willed himself not to lose control. “The spray paint was a nice touch,” he said.

  “I don’t know nothin’ about no spray paint!” Turlow gasped out. “Let up on my arms a little, will you? You’re gonna break ‘em.”

  Logan and Briana exchanged glances.

  Logan let up, but only slightly.

  “You didn’t come to my place a second time?” she asked Turlow.

  He shook his head. Tears glistened in the craggy lines at the sides of his eyes. “Floyd picked me up and harassed me about it, ‘cause that’s what he does best, but I was helping Freida put up campaign posters that night, and my sister will vouch that it’s true!”

  “What the hell were you doing, plunking away at Jake’s grave with a shotgun?” Logan demanded, still breathing hard from the struggle. He was out of shape—too much soft living in Vegas. Chopping wood and digging post holes would fix that. “You ever heard the word ricochet? You’re damn lucky none of that buckshot struck a rock and doubled back on you.”

  “The bastard’s been haunting me since the day he died!” Brett cried, and the hoarse conviction in his voice was painful to hear. “I can’t stand it anymore!” He flung his head back and screamed, “Do you hear me, Jake? I can’t stand it anymore!”

  Logan shifted, got to his feet, looking pityingly down at Brett Turlow.

  Briana moved to stand beside him, touch his arm. “I’m going back to the house to watch for the sheriff and make sure the boys are all right—they must have heard the shots, and they’re probably scared to death.”

  Logan nodded. “Go,” he said, his gaze still fixed on Turlow. The poor, crazy son of a bitch needed medical attention, not a stretch in the county jail.

  After Briana had gone, Turlow struggled up onto one elbow. His billed cap lay beside him on the ground. “You believe in ghosts, Creed?” he asked, in an eerie, disjointed tone.

  “Not the kind you’re seeing,” Logan answered. “And don’t make any sudden moves. I’m still more inclined to choke the life out of you than leave you be.”

  Far off in the distance, a siren droned, an almost weary sound in the humid summer air, thickening into twilight.

  Logan crouched a few feet from where Turlow sat, interlaced his fingers. He’d seen Jim Huntinghorse sit like that for hours. Logan’s thighs cramped, and he had to stand up again.

  A crafty expression crossed Turlow’s face. “I know things,” he said.

  “Hard to believe,” Logan replied, wishing the sheriff would hurry up. If Brett Turlow hadn’t spray-painted Briana’s bedroom bloodred, and Logan’s deepest instincts said he hadn’t, that meant the real vandal was still out there someplace. He didn’t like having Briana and the boys out of his sight, knowing that.

  And it would be dark soon.

  “I know, for instance,” Turlow went on, “that the high-and-mighty Sheriff Book sweated up some sheets with my sister.”

  “Not exactly news,” Logan said. The Courier certainly hadn’t run the scandal; it wasn’t that kind of newspaper. He’d heard the gossip around the time of Jake’s funeral—hadn’t given a rat’s ass then, didn’t give one now.

  With every passing moment, the anxious tension inside him mounted.

  Briana.

  She’d taken his cell phone, so he couldn’t call the house, make sure she and Alec and Josh were safe.

  The siren sliced the stillness; Turlow covered both ears with his hands and rocked back and forth.

  A few moments later, Sheriff Book came through the orchard on foot, at a lumbering trot, one hand on his holster to keep it from bouncing against his leg.

  “I’ll be goddammed, Brett,” he sputtered, slowing to a walk and jerking his cuffs off his utility belt, “you’re a regular one-man James gang, aren’t you?” He turned to Logan. “You better get on back to the house. Briana’s got Deputy Jenkins by the shirtfront—says somebody snatched her kids—”

  Logan swore and raced for his horse, grazing a dozen yards away, and sprang onto its back.

  While Floyd arrested Turlow, he and the gray cut through the brush as though they’d been catapulted.

  Reaching the corral, Logan jumped off the gelding and landed running. He vaulted over the fence and hurried toward Briana, who was struggling with Deputy Jenkins—Stillwater Springs’ version of Barney Fife—next to the squad car.

  Logan pulled the deputy away, flung him back so hard that he thumped against the second squad car. Red and blue lights still flashed dizzyingly along the bar bolted to the cruiser’s roof.

  Freed, Briana immediately headed for Dylan’s truck.

  Logan caught up to her in a few strides, grabbed hold of her arm.

  She kicked and fought; holding her was like trying to stuff a feral cat into a gunnysack.

  “Stop,” Logan ordered. He hadn’t shouted the word, he’d whispered it, but his throat felt as raw as if he’d yelled at the top of his lungs.

  Miraculously, Briana went still. She dragged in great gulps of air, and she was trembling. “The kids—” she finally managed “—gone…”

  “I was just trying to keep her from hurting herself,” Deputy Jenkins interjected, from somewhere nearby, sounding put-upon. “Nobody ought to drive when they’re that upset, and soon as Sheriff Book gets back—”

  “We’ll find the kids,” Logan told Briana, gripping both her shoulders and looking directly into her face. “We’ll find them.”

  Desperate hope flickered in her green eyes, and she swallowed again, nodded.

  “Now don’t you go off half-cocked, Logan,” Jenkins reasoned hastily. “Soon as Sheriff Book gets back here—”

  “We can’t wait,” Logan told him. The keys to his truck were in his front pocket; he got them out with a jingle
. “Do me a favor, Deputy, and put this pinto back in the corral.”

  Jenkins flushed, from the base of his scrawny neck to the roots of his hair. “We’ve got to follow procedure!” he protested, even as he got the pinto by the reins and led it toward the corral. “You can’t go taking the law into your own hands—”

  Briana scrambled into the truck on the passenger side.

  Logan got behind the wheel. The dogs were nowhere in sight—for the time being, anyway, they were on their own.

  “Talk to me, Briana,” Logan said, making the rear tires scream and fling up dirt on all sides as he backed into a hard turn.

  Her hair was coming loose from that tight braid; she pushed her bangs back with a swift motion of one hand. “I went inside the house,” she said, like someone hypnotized, or talking in their sleep. “Wh-when I didn’t see Alec and Josh in the yard. The—the dogs were there, but—”

  “Did you get your cell phone off the counter?” Logan marveled at how calm he sounded; everything inside him was in a churning panic. If Alec and Josh had been his own sons, blood of his blood and flesh of his flesh, he couldn’t have been more frightened than he was.

  She nodded, felt around, visibly realized she had her handbag. Fumbled through it, clasped the phone. Almost simultaneously, she raised her backside off the seat, straining against the seat belt, and pried Logan’s phone out of her hip pocket.

  He took it as they careened down the long driveway.

  NAUSEA ROILED in Briana’s stomach. Her palms were clammy with sweat, and somewhere inside her, someone was screaming in helpless hysteria.

  Logan.

  Thank God for Logan.

  At the gate, he wheeled the truck in the direction of town.

  And the cell phone rang in Briana’s hand.

  She nearly dropped the thing, trying to open it. “Hello?” she blurted. “Josh? Alec?”

  “Mom,” Josh said, barely whispering. “I’m scared.”

  The back of her throat scalded. She looked frantically at Logan, nodded once. Somehow had the presence of mind to put the phone on Speaker. “Where—where are you?” she croaked.