McQuaid's Justice

by Carly Bishop

  Jake kept a few horses and taught his boys to ride. They learned to lasso, practicing at first with an old sawhorse. They tore up their hands learning to repair barbed-wire fences, which was just the beginning of how tough they grew up to be.

  Jake had spared them none of the harsh realities. Cy could still remember the day, the hour, the way the air was choked with dust baked dry in the heat of the Texas sun, when Jake was obliged to fetch the rifle he carried in a gun rack mounted against the back window of his ’76 pickup and put a snake-bitten dog named Millie out of her misery.

  The mangy sheepdog who had saved all their skins more than once, had put herself between Matt and the rattler he tripped over.

  Even a number-crunching old fart like his grandfather knew all this. A man did what a man had to do, at the business end of a pencil, astride his horse, on his ranch, or behind the badge he wore.

  Especially behind the badge.

  A man did what was right and honorable and just, and mercy didn’t have hell of a lot to do with it.

  Cy stood in the biting wind beneath the cloudless blue Colorado sky, hat in hand for a few moments after the rest, his father, Susan and his brothers had all turned away. His right hip and leg ached like all billy-hell. Always would. A small fortune in titanium had reconstructed bone enough for him to function, even to ride. But he wasn’t willing to swallow ibuprofen to the tune of a couple thousand milligrams every four hours for the rest of his life, so he had learned to live with the pain.

  He lingered because he wasn’t ready to face Susan, but when he turned, certain that she would have gotten into the old tank of a Buick with his father, she stood waiting for him. Her hands were shoved deep in the pockets of her black coat, her graying blond hair framing her face under a black lace mantilla. He had no idea how the thing stayed put on her head.

  “I asked Cameron and Matt to ride back with your dad.” The crow’s-feet about her hazel-green eyes deepened with her bittersweet smile. Even as grown men, the McQuaid boys had mostly done what Susan asked them to do, even when it was pretty much the last goddamned thing they wanted to do. She linked an arm through his and they began walking back to his car. “Thanks for coming, Cy. It means a lot to your father.”

  “I’d have come regardless, Susan. You know that.”

  “Still and all.”

  “How did you get Matty here?” he asked, falling easily into Susan’s diminutive for his youngest brother, the only one of the three of them who’d left Colorado in his rearview mirror, with no intention of ever returning. Matt was a Texas Ranger now.

  “Why did you come?” she countered.

  “He’s my grandfather, Susan. It’s family. Matt cut himself loose a long time ago.”

  “Matty feels the same, Cy,” she chided. “I think he feels it more because he’s cut himself off.” She shivered. “Texas can be a very lonely place.”

  He helped Susan into his pickup. They drove back to the ranch house in a silence more uneasy than he was accustomed to feeling with Susan. She had something to say to him, doubtless to do with his father, but she had tried too many times to make a case that wouldn’t be made in his father’s behalf. Not where Cy was concerned, or either of his brothers, for that matter.

  He pulled up in front of the wide veranda and shoved the stick into neutral, leaving the engine on for some heat inside the cab. He sat a few moments waiting for her to get up her nerve to say what she had to say.

  She straightened, huddling inside her coat. “Your father’s birthday is coming up in a couple of months. His seventieth. I’m planning a spring barbecue and I want you to be here. I want you to come for a celebration.”

  He knew about Susan and birthdays. “I’ll try to make it.”

  “I know you will. You’re the oldest, Cy. I’m hoping if you come, Cam and Matty will see their way clear, too.”

  Cy felt his jaw stiffen. His leg was giving him fits. All she had to do was say, Do it for me, Cy, and he would come. She knew that. Cameron too, though Matt was another story. But it would be meaningless then, because she would know he had come for her sake, and what she wanted was for him to come to honor his father.

  What she wanted was for all Jake’s sons to forgive him, and that was as unlikely as hoarfrost in July. In the words of all too many hackneyed country-and-western songs, Jake had done Susan wrong. He had lived with Susan Powell, taking her to his bed, letting her raise his sons and cook his meals and keep his house and wash his shorts, all without marrying her. And he’d been doing it since the night that Cy and his brothers had carried Susan limp and unconscious, bedraggled and near-dead, home to their father.

  But Susan had never given up trying to reconcile the boys, now long since men, to what they considered their father’s utter lack of honor where she was concerned. Do as I say, not as I do, was the long and short of it where Jake was concerned.

  Cy didn’t want to fight with her. “I’ll talk to Cameron, but that’s all I can promise.”

  “Now?” she pressed him. “Today, while you’re all here?”

  He nodded.

  She flashed him a smile, and reached to pat his cheek. “You’re a good man, Cy. A good, decent, wonderful man.”

  He wondered if she would think so when he asked her about the woman in the photo on his dash. He debated doing it now while he had her to himself, but his father, lean, lanky and stooping in the shoulders a little bit, was pacing the veranda waiting for her to come in. Cy wanted to talk to Cam about it first anyway.

  He got out and went around to help Susan out. Jake bowlegged his way down the stairs and took her back up again and inside. Cy followed and started looking for Cameron among all the locals, ranchers and their wives and kids milling around with paper plates piled up with food. He got waylaid by the preacher and his daughter.

  “Good to see you, Cy,” the Reverend Bleigh said, offering his hand to shake.

  “You too, Reverend.”

  “Sorry about the circumstances.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You remember my daughter Marcee?”

  “You remember, Cy.” She laughed. Plain as a mud fence by her own account, she considered herself the poster girl for spinsters. “Marcee, marriageable Marcee?” She gave her dad a long-suffering look. The reverend flushed and moved on.

  Cy grinned and gave Marcee a peck on the cheek. They’d known each other since ninth grade. Even gone to a couple of Sadie Hawkins dances together because Cy didn’t know how to say no to a girl.

  He had Susan to blame for that. Certainly, by his example, his father had nothing to do with it.

  “How are you, Marcee? Still busting your butt down in the trenches? Last I heard, you were running an outpatient clinic for...what? Substance abuse babies?”

  “Yeah. My funding dried up though. But I lucked into a five-year grant to evaluate hypnotherapy with cancer kids—you know, getting them to imagine their cells as hordes of little guerrillas attacking their tumors from all sides.”

  Cy grinned. Marcee as director of guerrilla warfare wasn’t a big stretch of the imagination when it came to cancer. She hated anything that hurt kids.

  “What about you?” she asked. “Still counting coup in the Bureau? I heard from your dad that you got promoted to head of the terrorist squad.”

  “Lucky me.” Cy grinned. “They had to give me a desk job, Marcee. The switchboard position was filled.”

  His joke didn’t take her smile very far. “Dear Lord, what am I thinking? Cy, I’m sorry. I’d forgotten all about your leg. Your rehab obviously did wonders.”

  “Yeah.” He gave a weary grin and shook hands with a couple of his dad’s friends making their way out. “Twenty-seven months later,” he went on. “But then, having had it nearly blown off, I’m lucky I came out with my leg at all.”

  She shook her head. “Two years, Cy? That’s awful. I should have thought to visit you. Did it drive you crazy too, being laid up like that?”

  He shrugged. “I had a roommate. This deaf kid I
fell for like a ton of bricks. I learned to sign. He quit smoking like a chimney.”

  “Show me,” Marcee demanded. “Show me what ‘smoking like a chimney’ looks like in sign language.”

  He showed her. “My version, anyway.”

  Her face lit up. “Look at you! Do you even know what a soft touch you are?” she demanded. “How wonderful. There you are in a hospital bed not knowing if you’ll ever walk again—”

  “Yeah.” He cut her short to stifle the praise. “I’m wonderful.” Just not enough. The job aside, he supposed it was a testament to time passing that he could even talk about Seth without choking up.

  “You are, you bum. Listen, Cy, I’ve really got to run. I want to get back over Vail Pass before dark. Call me sometime, if you ever need an old friend to talk to, will you do that?”

  “I will, Marcee. Thanks. Shall I walk you out?”

  “Don’t even think of it. You have a houseful of people to see.”

  But he watched her go, nevertheless, watched until her car disappeared up over the dirt road. He hadn’t thought about Seth in weeks. Now, twice in a week’s time he’d been slapped with the memory. Slapped hard. Now the dam was well and truly broken, he knew what energy he’d been putting into not thinking about the kid.

  He went looking for Cam, shaking hands on the way, making all the right noises for the folks who had come to break bread together in the wake of his grandfather’s funeral. He spotted Matt sitting on the hearth in front of the massive stone fireplace. The three of them looked enough alike, a head taller than Jake’s five-eight frame, all within an inch or two of each other, dark-haired with steeply slanted eyebrows, that most people didn’t know Matt had a different mother. Or that Susan wasn’t their mother, for that matter.

  Matt was the real loner. Susan was the only mother he remembered at all. Cy piled his plate with fried chicken and went and sat with him a while. They exchanged maybe fifty words between them, but a lot got said between the lines. And a lot went understood.

  He polished off the last of the chicken, bounced a fist off Matty’s knee and said they’d talk more later. He found a toothpick, then his middle brother, Cameron, gnawing on a sparerib in the midst of a bevy of admiring women. “Need a rescue?”

  “Do I look like I need a rescue?” The women all laughed, an old girl named Lettie who used to pass out suckers and doggie bones at the bank the loudest. Cam dropped down to his haunches and asked his littlest admirer if she would do him a personal favor and take his plate to the garbage pail. Thrilled even to be noticed, she took the paper plate and darted away, pigtails bouncing behind her. “Begging your pardon, ladies?”

  Cam led the way out the door into the kitchen. The linoleum was worn through after thirty years from the scraping of work boots. The cabinets were freshly painted a cheerful yellow, though, and Cy saw the old man had finally sprung for a new dishwasher. He backed up to lean against the countertop opposite the sink while Cameron washed his hands.

  “What’s on your mind?”

  “A couple of things.” He worked the toothpick to the corner of his mouth. “Susan hit me up on the way back from the service.”

  Drying his hands on a tea towel, Cam turned around. He wore a crisp white shirt and bolo tie, dark trousers and snakeskin boots their father would mock for “duded up.” “I wondered what that was all about. What was she hitting you up for?”

  “The old man’s birthday. She wants to have a party to celebrate.”

  “And she wants us to come.”

  “Yeah.”

  Cam clamped his mouth shut hard, which meant what he had to say wasn’t suitable for uttering in Susan’s kitchen. If he knew how much he looked like Jake when he did it, he’d have cut his tongue out before it happened again.

  And if the good folks of Chaparral County knew what a grudge their sheriff carried in his heart against his own father, they might have quietly taken him down from the pedestal they’d put him on. Folks here didn’t hold with grudges, but that’s how good Cam was.

  No one knew.

  Cam would manage to be occupied with pressing county business for Susan’s party. Everyone would say what a shame it was that he couldn’t make it, and Cam would go right along with it.

  “What did you tell her?”

  “That I’d talk to you.”

  “Fine. You’ve talked to me. What else is on your mind?”

  “Maybe Susan’s right, Cam. Maybe we ought to let it go.”

  “You know, I might just be willing to do that if the old bastard were to marry her. Even now. But he won’t.”

  “Come on, Cam. They’ve been living together so long they’re common-law anyway—”

  “Yeah, and the whole thing is getting long in the tooth too. Isn’t that the point? Since when are you inclined to forget it?” But Cameron’s lips clapped shut. “It’s the kid again, isn’t it? Seth?”

  Cy exhaled sharply. “Partly.” He had come as close as a man gets without having his own babies to knowing what it felt like to be a father. To love a kid so much that his pain was worse than your own.

  But Seth was a hard sell. He hadn’t believed for one second that when Cy got out of the hospital he’d ever be back, so Cy got rejected, spit on, sworn at and ignored out of existence so damn many times he’d almost given up and proved the kid right.

  “If the old man feels half what I felt when Seth...” He couldn’t go there after all. Anyway, Cameron knew it already. “Yeah, okay, so I know how the old man has to feel. Leave it at that.”

  Cam took a deep breath. One of the neighbor women came through the swinging kitchen door. The voices from the dining room spilled through the open door. Seeing them, she turned and scuttled back out. Cameron turned back to Cy.

  “There’s a difference, Cy. You did everything humanly possible to set things right for Seth.”

  He didn’t want to go into what he had and hadn’t done for Seth. Whatever it was, it wasn’t enough. He stuck to his point. “Jake did all right by us.”

  Cam knew that. Nobody could fault the upbringing Jake had given his sons, but on the other hand, the passing of years couldn’t heal what hurt most. All three of them had a festering burr under the saddle when it came to Jake making an honest woman out of the only mother they had ever really known. “All he ever had to do to make things right was to marry Susan.”

  Cy plucked the toothpick from his mouth and flicked it into the trash like a cigarette butt. “I want to show you something. You need a coat?”

  “Will we be long?”

  “Maybe.”

  Cameron headed for the door out through the mudroom and garage to the outdoors, snagging one of Gramps’s coats from a nail. It took a couple of minutes to get back around the house. Cam stuffed his hands in his pockets. The wind plastered his pitch-black hair to his head. Along the way he asked, “You gonna help me fill in Gramps’s hole?”

  “If my leg holds out.”

  “Wuss,” Cam jeered.

  “Up yours,” Cy returned affably. He opened the door of his pickup and reached up on the dash for the envelope. He didn’t want the wind to rip the photo out of his hands and blow it to Kansas, so he kept the cab door open for a windbreak and pulled the dossier photo up most of the way.

  Far enough, anyway, if the five-by-seven was going to strike Cam at all.

  His brother frowned; sharply slanted-down eyebrows like Cy’s own pulled together. “Quite a looker.”

  Cy rolled his eyes. “When I need your help figuring out if a woman is good-looking, I’ll let you know.”

  “Well, she is.”

  Cy gritted his teeth. “Are you going to be serious?”

  “Are you saying you aren’t?” Like, if Cy didn’t have the hots for her, there was some screw or other loose.

  “If I did you’d be about last damned one to know.” He didn’t really care what his brother knew about who he was seeing. They didn’t see each other often enough anymore for Cam to make a federal case of it. All the same, he w
asn’t carrying Amy Reeves’s picture around to brag or check out whether Cam approved.

  “All right, all right. Don’t get your shorts in a twist.” He studied the photo again, squinting. The wind had his hair standing on end now. He shook his head. “I don’t recognize her.”

  “You sure?”

  Cam nodded. “Why? Should I?”

  Cy shrugged. “When I first saw it, I thought if Susan ever had a kid, this would be her.”

  “Sorry. I don’t see it. Where’d you dig it up?”

  “The picture? I didn’t dig it up. It belongs to a case file I was handed a couple of days ago.”

  “Holy hell...you mean, I mean, was Susan...”

  “No.” He saw where Cam was headed. Susan wasn’t the target of any FBI investigation. “But something about her, the shape of her nose and mouth, the widow’s peak, made me think of Susan. I wanted to check it out with you.” He took the picture out of the envelope and put it in the breast pocket of his suit jacket. “God knows why.”

  “Because I’m smarter than you,” Cam jibed.

  “In your dreams.”

  “What else?”

  Cy let the wind slam the cab door shut and began walking back around the house. “You’ve been around Susan long enough to see a resemblance if there was one.”

  Cam shook his head. “Since when have you needed me to back up your instincts?” He wasn’t buying. Cam was smart, that was the trouble. He didn’t need writing on the wall to know any resemblance to Susan wasn’t the whole issue. “You gonna tell me what’s going on with you?”

  Cy grimaced, pulling up short at the door into the garage. “Nothing.”

  “As in, nothing yet?”

  “I haven’t even met her, Cam,” he snapped, which was pretty stupid, giving himself away.

  His brother cut him a look. “So what. Are we going to stand out here in the freezing damn wind till you get up the cojones to spit it out?”

  “This woman—she’s a possible witness to the alleged murder of her mother.”

  “Okay. So?”

  There were other salient details, like the fact that she was only five at the time of her mother’s death, so his piece of the investigation was likely to take more than a couple or three interviews with her. Or that her father was not only accused of the murder, now, twenty-some-odd years later, but was a federal appellate court judge on the short list for nomination to the Supreme Court. What Cy told Cam was a matter of his own discretion. But of all that what he said was, “She’s deaf.”