Big Sky Standoff

by B. J Daniels

  “Don’t give me that evidence bull,” Waters snapped. “Just because you couldn’t prove it.”

  “I’m confused. Arlen Dubois just told me you offered him a job. If you really believe he’s one of the rustlers…”

  Waters’s smile never reached his eyes. “Sometimes it’s better to have the fox living in the henhouse so you can keep an eye on him. That’s one reason I hired Pete Barclay. He also used to run with Savage.”

  That was also never proved, but she decided not to argue the point. “What about Buford Cole?”

  “He’s working at the stockyard,” Waters stated, and raised a brow as if that said everything.

  She looked at Nate. “Didn’t you used to run with those same cowboys?”

  Nate appeared surprised that she’d said anything to him. “What?”

  “I heard you were all friends, including Dillon and your brother, Halsey.”

  The older Waters’s face blanched and he looked as if he might suddenly grab his chest and keel over.

  “Now just a minute,” Nate said.

  “What the hell are you trying to do?” Waters interrupted, taking a step toward her. “Don’t you ever bring up Halsey’s name in the same breath as those others!”

  She noticed he was fine with Nate’s name being mentioned with the others. Nate had noticed it, too, and was scowling in his father’s direction.

  “I’m just saying that because this group used to be friends, there is no evidence they are now involved in rustling cattle together.” Her gaze went to Morgan Landers. She was smiling as if enjoying this.

  “The damn rustlers are closing in on my ranch. Even you should be able to see that.” Waters’s face was now flushed, his voice breaking with emotion. “I can’t protect my land or my livestock, not even if I hire a hundred men. Not when half of the range is badlands and only accessible by horseback.”

  She wanted to point out that the rustlers would have the same problem. But Waters was right. Huge sections of his land were inaccessible except by horseback, and given the size of the place, it would take several days to ride across the length of the W Bar. No amount of men could protect it completely.

  “Your ranch hasn’t been hit by the rustlers,” she pointed out. “Do you have some reason to believe it will be?”

  Waters looked flustered, something she didn’t think happened often. “They must know I’ll shoot to kill if they try to take my cattle.”

  “I wouldn’t advise that,” Jacklyn said.

  “Then what are you going to do to stop them?” he demanded.

  “I’m going to catch them, but I’ll need your help. Tell me where your cattle are, what precautions you’ve taken and what men you have available to guard the key borders.”

  Waters looked at her, then glanced toward the pickup and laughed. “You don’t really think I’m going to give you that information, do you? Why don’t I just run it in the newspaper so the rustlers know exactly when and where to steal my cattle?”

  “If this is about Mr. Savage—”

  “You can try to explain until you’re blue in the face why you got Dillon Savage out of prison, young woman, but I’m not giving you a damn thing. I’ll take care of my stock as best I can. Just know I’ll do whatever I have to, and that includes killing the sons of bitches.” He was looking toward the truck again. “I have the right to protect my property.”

  “Mr. Waters—”

  “I don’t have time for this,” he said, and thumped down the steps and past her, headed toward the barn.

  “Like we’re going to hold our breaths and wait for you to catch the rustlers,” his son muttered.

  “Shut up, Nate,” Waters snapped over his shoulder.

  “Mr. Waters,” Jacklyn said, trailing after him. “I want your permission to put some video devices on your ranch. If you’re right, the rustlers have probably been watching your operation already.”

  “No,” he said, without stopping or looking back. “I told you I was going to take care of things my own way.”

  “If your own way is illegal—”

  He swung around so fast she almost ran into him. “Listen, maybe you will catch the rustlers. But it won’t be on my ranch. I won’t be spied on.”

  “Spied on?”

  “Videos and all that paraphernalia. No. Maybe that’s the way it’s done nowadays, but I don’t want a bunch of your people on my land, and I know for a fact you can’t force them on me.”

  Jacklyn glanced back at the truck. She couldn’t see Dillon’s face through the sunlight glinting off the windshield, but she knew he hadn’t missed a thing.

  Then she followed Shade Waters into the barn, determined to do her job despite him.

  DILLON WATCHED MORGAN give him a backward glance before she followed Nate Waters into the house. She’d stared in his direction, as if she’d been expecting to see him.

  Unlike him, who hadn’t been prepared to see her again ever. As the front door closed, he sat without moving, bombarded by memories of the two of them.

  Morgan. There’d been a time when she’d made him think about buying another ranch and settling down. But even Morgan couldn’t still the quiet rage inside him. Not that Morgan had wanted him to be anything but a rustler. She liked the drama. She’d never wanted him to quit rustling.

  She was hooked on the danger, never knowing when he would sneak into town and into her bed, never knowing if her house would be raided by the sheriff’s men.

  And since Morgan had no way of knowing about Dillon’s inheritance, she’d just assumed he would never have enough money to keep her in the way she wanted to live, so she’d never even mentioned marriage. And he’d never told her different.

  He wondered idly if she was serious about Nate Waters. Or if she was only serious about his money. Morgan would like the power that came with the Waters name, as well.

  As Jacklyn disappeared into the barn with the rancher, Dillon fought the turmoil he felt inside. Seeing Morgan had brought back the past in a blinding flash. All his good intentions not to let what had happened drag him back into trouble again seemed to fly out the window. He felt the full power of the old bitterness, the resentment, the injustice that burned like hot oil inside him.

  Worse, while he’d always suspected that he’d been set up four years ago, that someone close to him had betrayed him, he hadn’t wanted to believe it.

  In prison, he’d told himself it didn’t matter. That all of that was behind him.

  But as he thought about the look Morgan had given him before going back into the house, the image now branded on his mind, he knew it did matter—would always matter. He’d been kidding himself if he thought he could forgive and forget—at least not until he found out who had betrayed him.

  And Morgan was as good as any place to start.

  JACKLYN SHOULD HAVE SAVED her breath. Shade Waters was impossible. She’d tried to talk to him, but he seemed distracted as he looked in on one of the horses. She saw him frown and touch the horse’s side, apparently surprised to find that it was damp, as if recently ridden.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked, noting that he seemed upset.

  He shook his head irritably. “I told you. I don’t have time for this. Shouldn’t you be out looking for the rustlers instead of driving me crazy?” he snapped, then sighed, looking his age for a moment. “I just got a call a few minutes before you got here. Tom Robinson’s condition is worse.”

  Her heart dropped, and instantly she felt guilty, because she’d been praying he would regain consciousness. She’d been counting on Tom being able to identify at least one of the rustlers.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, a little surprised how hard Waters was taking the news, given that he would now probably get the Robinson ranch, just as Dillon had said. Was Tom’s worsened condition really what had Waters upset?

  The rancher didn’t seem to hear her as he began to wipe down the horse. Jacklyn wondered where Pete Barclay was.

  She let herself out of
the barn, knowing she wasn’t going to get anywhere with him. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that Dillon Savage might be right. Maybe there was more going on than she’d thought.

  As she started toward her pickup, what she saw stopped her dead. The truck was empty. Dillon Savage was gone.

  Chapter Eight

  Jacklyn couldn’t believe her eyes. No. For just an instant there, she’d believed Dillon, believed she’d been wrong about him, believed he really was trying to help her catch the rustlers.

  What a fool she was!

  “Excuse me,” she said as she spotted a man trimming a hedge that ran along one side of the ranch house. “Did you happen to notice the man who was waiting in the pickup?” She pointed to her truck.

  He nodded, shoving back his hat to wipe the sweat from his forehead. “He said to tell you he’d meet you in town if he missed you.”

  She raised a brow. Town was twenty miles away. Trying not to show her panic or her fury, she asked, “And how, exactly, was he planning to get back to town? Did he say?”

  The man shrugged. “He said he needed to take a walk.”

  Take a walk? Oh, he’d taken a walk all right. She would kill him when she found him. And she would find him.

  She thanked the gardener and, hoping Shade Waters wasn’t watching, tried not to storm to the pickup. There were going to be enough people saying I told you so, starting with Waters.

  As she climbed in and started the engine, she looked down the long dirt road. Empty. Just like the truck.

  Still fighting panic and fury, she drove until she topped a hill and couldn’t see the ranch house anymore. Pulling over, she opened the tracking receiver terminal and started to push the on button, afraid of what she would find.

  She knew Dillon Savage. Better than she wanted to. He was too smart. Too charming. Too arrogant for words. But there was something about him, something wounded that had softened her heart to him four years ago, when she’d captured him.

  How could he do this? Didn’t he realize it was going to get him sent back to prison? Unless he thought he could evade her as he had for so long before.

  But the only way he could do that was to disable the monitoring device or cut the thing out. If he had, she’d be lucky if she ever saw him again.

  She wasn’t even thinking about her career or her anger as she turned on the receiver terminal, her heart in her throat. In those few seconds, she felt such a sense of dread and disappointment that she only got more angry—angry at feeling anything at all for this man.

  Until that moment, she hadn’t realized how badly she wanted to believe in his innocence.

  The steady beep from the terminal startled her. “I’ll be…” According to this, he was still on the ranch—and moving in her direction.

  Or at least his monitoring device was.

  If she drove on up the road, she should connect with him about a half mile from here.

  Why would he head for the road, when he could have gotten lost in the mountains and led her on a wild-goose chase? One that she wouldn’t have been able to hide from her boss?

  As she topped the next rise, she spotted a figure walking nonchalantly across open pasture, headed for the road. He had to have heard the pickup approaching, and yet he didn’t look up. Nor did he make any attempt to run away.

  He vaulted over the barbed wire fence as she brought the truck to a dust-boiling stop next to him.

  She was out of the vehicle, her hand on the butt of her pistol, before he reached the road.

  “Don’t you ever do that again,” she shouted at him.

  He held up both hands in surrender.

  Had he grinned, she feared she would have pulled the pistol and shot him.

  “I’m sorry. I couldn’t very well tell you where I was going under the circumstances,” he said contritely.

  “Circumstances?”

  “You were with Shade Waters, and I didn’t want him to know I was following one of his stock trucks.”

  She stared at Dillon. “Why would you follow one of the Waters’s stock trucks?” she demanded suspiciously.

  “To see what was going on.” He glanced up as if he heard someone coming. “Could we talk about this somewhere besides the middle of a county road?”

  She sighed, torn between anger and overwhelming relief. She removed her hand from her gun butt and turned back toward the pickup. She’d left the driver’s door open. As she slid behind the wheel, he climbed in the passenger side and saw the monitoring device on the seat between them.

  “Thought I’d skipped out on you, did you?” He chuckled. “So much for trust. You want me to help you catch these guys? Then you have to give me a little leeway. Keep me on too short a leash and I’m useless to you.”

  She wasn’t so sure he wasn’t useless to her, anyway. “So why did you follow the stock truck?”

  “I went for a little walk. Took your binoculars,” he said, handing them back to her. “Hope you don’t mind. I just happened to see a couple of ranch hands loading something into the back of a stock truck. They acted suspicious, you know? Looking around a lot. I made sure they didn’t see me, and when the truck stopped so one could open the gate, I hopped in the back.”

  As she got the pickup moving, she looked over at Dillon, convinced he was either lying or crazy or both. Then she caught a whiff of his clothing and wrinkled her nose. “Let me guess what was in the back. Something dead.”

  “Half-a-dozen dead calves.”

  She shot him a look, the truck swerving on the gravel road. “They were probably just taking them to the dump.”

  He shook his head. “They were headed north. Waters’s dump is to the south.”

  “He probably has a new dump since you’ve been here,” she said irritably. “Why would you get in the truck with the dead calves?”

  He lifted a brow. “Six dead calves. Doesn’t that make even you suspicious?”

  Everything made her suspicious. Especially him. “Every rancher loses a few calves—”

  “Six all dead at the same time? Not unless they’re sick with something.”

  She glanced over at him. “What do you think killed them?”

  “Lead poisoning.” He grinned at her obvious surprise. “That’s right, Jack, they each had a bullet hole right between their eyes. But that’s not the best part. They were missing a patch of hide—right where their brands should have been—and notches had been cut in their ears. You guessed it, no ear tags.”

  She slammed on the brakes, bringing the truck to another jarring stop. “What are you talking about?”

  He nodded, still grinning. “I knew Shade Waters was still up to no good.”

  Jacklyn was shaking her head. “You went looking for trouble, didn’t you? This walk you took, you just happened along on a stock truck with six possibly rustled dead calves? Where was this?”

  “A mile or so from the ranch house.”

  Her brows shot up.

  “I walk fast. I figured I’d be back before you finished with Waters. I told the gardener so you wouldn’t worry. I’m telling you the truth, Jack. I swear.”

  She glared at him and turned back to her driving, not believing anything he said. “So who were these ranch hands?”

  “I didn’t get a good look at them. When the truck started moving, I took off running, so I could jump in the back.”

  “Right. But you’re sure they work for Waters?” she asked, trying to rein in her temper.

  “They were on his land, driving one of his stock trucks,” Dillon said.

  She could hear the steel in his voice. She shot him a suspicious look. He had to realize that all she had was his word for this, and right now her trust in him was more than a little shaky.

  “And you have no idea where they were taking the calves,” she said.

  “No,” he replied through gritted teeth. “North. I would assume to bury them. Look, under other circumstances, I would have stayed with that truck till the end. But I knew you’d flip if you came out
and found me gone.” His gaze narrowed. “And you did.”

  “I could have tracked you and the truck,” she pointed out.

  “I thought of that. But I also really didn’t want every lawman in the county coming after me, ready to shoot to kill, before I got to explain that I hadn’t just taken off. Even you believed that’s what I’d done, didn’t you?”

  He was right. Even if she’d had faith that he wouldn’t run off, Stratton would have had a warrant out on Dillon Savage before the ink dried.

  “Plus I had no weapon and was a little concerned about when the truck got to its destination,” Dillon said. “I didn’t want to end up buried with those calves. For all I knew they might have been meeting more ranch hands up the road.”

  If he was telling the truth, he’d done the only thing he could do. And if so, he’d certainly made more progress than she had in the case.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You did the right thing.” She could feel his gaze on her.

  “You believe me then?”

  She glanced back at him. “Let’s say I’m considering the possibility that you’re telling the truth.”

  To her surprise, he laughed. “Jack, you’re killing me. But at least that’s progress.” He turned toward her. “Don’t you see, this proves what I’ve been saying. Waters is your man. He’s behind this rustling ring.”

  She met his gaze, knowing he was capable of making up this whole thing to even the score with his archenemy. “You can’t be objective when it comes to Waters.”

  “There’s a reason his ranch hasn’t been hit by the rustlers and you know it,” Dillon said.

  She shook her head. All she knew was that if Dillon was behind the rustling, then by not stealing from Waters, he would make him look guilty. Just as coming up with a story about a stock truck filled with bullet-ridden calves missing their brands would do.

  “You’re trying to tell me that Waters is rustling cattle from his neighbors, then killing them, cutting off the brands and ear tags and burying them? Why? He’s not even making any money, that I can see, on the deal.”