Dark Paradise

by Tami Hoag

He rode alongside Tucker, amazed that the old man could ramble on about nothing at all, as if he didn't have a clue that the world was coming unglued around him. He was amazed that there weren't visible signs—the sky ripping open like a blue silk sheet, the earth cracking and separating as the various factions warring over it tore it apart. It all looked perfectly ordinary. The grass was green. The air smelled sweet with the promise of rain. The ranch buildings in the distance looked as they had always looked, aging but neat, one or two in need of paint. In the pasture they rode through, calves bucked and chased each other. Most of the cows were lying down—another sign of the coming rain. Normal sights.

  He thought of what Chaske had said to him about owning the land, and knew that if the Raffertys ceased to exist tomorrow, the land would still be here. Ownership wasn't the important thing. Stewardship was. Tradition was. He had pared down his life to the point that tradition was just about all he had, and it could be lost in a heartbeat, in the time it took a banker to sign a note.

  His heart felt like a lead ball in his chest.

  “. . . J.D.?” Tucker leaned ahead in his saddle, stretching his back, frowning at J.D. The chaw of tobacco looked like he had a golf ball in his cheek. “You use them things on the side of your head for anything but hanging your sunglasses on?”

  J.D. shook himself out of his ponderings and scowled to cover his embarrassment. “What?”

  “I asked, had you figured out the water yet. If we're moving the herd next week, who's gonna change the water?”

  The way of ranching. In the spring and summer everything needed doing at once. During the long, cold winter there was hardly anything to do at all. It was time to start irrigating the hay ground. The system on the Stars and Bars was an old one of ditches and dams that cost nothing but required almost constant manpower as someone had to periodically move the dams to make certain all the land would be irrigated. With Will gone, they had postponed driving the herd up to the high pastures, and now the move would conflict with the irrigation. With the two jobs happening simultaneously, they were essentially short two hands on a ranch that ran with a skeleton crew as it was.

  “I'll see if I can get Lyle's boys to help move the cattle. You'll have to see to the water. I can't trust some kid to that job.” Which was true enough. The job, while boring as hell, required experience. It was also far less physi-cally taxing than driving a herd of cattle up the side of a mountain.

  Tucker digested this with a nod. He spat and kept his gaze forward, trying too hard to be nonchalant. “'Course, if Will comes back—”

  “I don't see that happening, Tuck.”

  “Well, I dunno. If that ain't my old truck parked up in the yard, then I'll be giving some poor fool my condolences for having one just like it.”

  J.D.'s gaze sharpened. The truck was unmistakable, a hulking, inelegant block of rusted metal. Someone sat on the tailgate, throwing a Frisbee for Zip. The dog blasted off the ground, did a graceful half-turn in midair, and came down with the brilliant yellow disk in his mouth.

  Normal sights. As if nothing were wrong. As if his brother weren't an alcoholic who went around picking fights with billionaire land barons. As if the rift between the two of them weren't as wide as the Royal Gorge.

  “Now, go easy on the boy, J.D.,” Tucker began.

  J.D. nudged his horse into a lope and left the old man behind.

  Zip played keep-away with the Frisbee, trotting toward Will, then ducking away when he reached for the toy. There was a certain sadistic gleam in the dog's blue eye that made Will think he knew perfectly well the pain it caused him to bend over and reach. His ribs ached as though he had been crushed between a pair of runaway trains, and when he bent over, his broken nose throbbed like a beating heart.

  Each pain was brilliantly clear and separate from the next, dulled by neither drugs nor drink. The colossal stupidity of what he'd done at Bryce's had struck full-force sometime after Mary Lee had left him and Doc Larimer had yanked his nose straight and wound twenty yards of tape around his ribs tight enough to keep his lungs from expanding. He had limped out of the emergency room to find Tucker's truck waiting for him in the parking lot. Sent down by Bryce, no doubt. He wouldn't have wanted the brute cluttering up his driveway and ruining the presentation of Mercedes and Jaguars. It was a wonder he hadn't just run it off a cliff.

  His temper still simmering, Will climbed behind the wheel with every intention of going straight to the Hell and Gone to throw a little fuel on the fire. But as he drove through town, he caught himself turning down Jackson and parking in front of that empty little sorry-looking house he had once shared with his wife.

  Ex-wife. Ex-wife. Ex-wife.

  It squatted there on the corner of a yard that was weedy in patches and bare in others, where the dog had done his business. The place looked forlorn and abandoned. Mrs. Atkinson next door came out onto her porch with her hands on her bony hips and stared at him as he made his way up the walk. He gave her a wave. She scowled at him and went back into her house.

  You've sunk pretty low when the folks in this neighborhood turn their nose up at you, Willie-boy.

  He let himself in and wandered aimlessly around the living room and kitchen, then into the bedroom he hadn't seen in weeks. The bed was made, the cheap blue chenille spread tucked neatly beneath the pillows. Sam was a good housekeeper, even though she'd never had much of a house to keep. Nor had she ever asked for one. He knew she dreamed of a nicer place, a place with shrubs and flowers in the yard and a kitchen big enough that you didn't have to go into the next room to change your mind. But she had never asked him for that. She had never asked him for fine clothes or expensive jewelry or a fancy car.

  She had never asked him for anything but that he love her.

  One thing to do and you managed to screw that up, didn't you, Willie-boy?

  He stood in front of her dresser and ran his fingertips over the collection of dime-store necklaces and drugstore cosmetics and recalled the look on her face when he said he'd never wanted a wife.

  You sorry son of a bitch, Willie-boy. Stood right there and broke her heart in front of God and all the millionaires. Way to go, slick.

  He looked up at the reflection in the old mirror that needed resilvering and saw a pretty poor excuse for a man. Excommunicated by his family. A lost cause to his friends. Just a beat-up, boozed-up cowboy who had thrown away the one good thing in his life.

  You wanted your freedom. You got it now, Willie-boy.

  But it didn't feel like freedom. It felt like exile. And he ached from the loss of those things he had never wanted. The ranch. The wife.

  He sat on the bed and cried like a baby, his head booming, his face feeling as if someone had stuck it full of thumbtacks, his cracked ribs stabbing like a rack of knives with every ragged breath. The sun set and the moon rose and he sat there, alone, listening to the distant sounds of traffic and screen doors slamming and Rascal whining at the back door. Samantha did not come home. No one came to rescue, redeem, or reconcile. Mary Lee's parting shot was like a sliver beneath his skin: grow up.

  He straightened now, ignoring Zip as he pranced by with the Frisbee in his mouth. J.D.'s big sorrel had dropped down into a jog. His brother's face was inscrutable beneath the brim of his hat, but he stepped down off the horse as he drew near the truck and Will took that as a good sign. A gesture, a courtesy. Better than a kick in the teeth.

  J.D. looked at Will's battered face and pained stance and choked back the automatic diatribe. Too many bitter words had already been spoken between them. This was no time for accusations. He was as guilty as Will, just for a different set of sins.

  “You look a little worse for wear,” he said, pulling off his hat and wiping the sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt.

  Will cocked his head and tried to grin, but it held little of the usual mischief and a lot of pain. “Got my clock cleaned by a city boy. It was a sorry sight to see.”

  “I should think so.” He sat himself dow
n on the tailgate of Tucker's old H, his reins dangling down between his knees. Sarge leaned down and rubbed his nose against a foreleg, then promptly fell into a light doze. “Looks like you'll live to fight again.”

  “I'll live,” Will said, sitting down gingerly on the other end of the tailgate. Zip came with the Frisbee and presented it with much ceremony, placing it in the dirt and looking up with contrition and hopefulness that went unrewarded. “Don't guess I'll fight that fight again. I pretty well blew it.”

  “Samantha?”

  “If she comes back to me, it'll only be to serve me with papers or to stick a knife in my chest. Can't say that I'd blame her either way.”

  J.D. made no comment. He looked up at the house where they had been boys together and tried to imagine strangers living in it. The idea cut as sharp as glass.

  “What about you and Mary Lee?” Will asked.

  He moved his big shoulders, trying to shrug off the question and his brother's scrutiny. “That's not gonna work out.”

  “Because you're a stubborn son of a bitch?”

  “Partly.”

  Will sighed and picked at a scab of rust on the tailgate. “That's a poor excuse for losing something good. I oughta know.”

  J.D. said nothing. He thought Will was hardly the man to give advice on the subject, but he wouldn't say so. He didn't kick a man while he was down. Besides, if he cared to look, there was probably too much truth in his brother's words, and it was just better to let this thing between him and Mary Lee die a natural death. In a week or two she would be back in California. Life would go on.

  “I figured I could sign over my share of the ranch to you,” Will said. “Keep it out of divorce court. I'll sell it to you outright if you want to make it permanent. We'll have to get a lawyer, I suppose. Man can't take a crap in this country without needing to have a lawyer look at it.”

  J.D. said nothing. This was what he had always wanted, wasn't it? To have the ranch to himself. He was the one who lived for it. He was the one who loved it. Sitting beside a brother he claimed he'd never wanted, that sounded pretty damn sick. He braced his hands on his knees as if to balance himself against the shifting of his world beneath him.

  “What are you gonna do? Rodeo?” He heard himself ask the question and almost looked around to see if someone else had joined the conversation. From the corner of his eye he could see Tucker, fifty yards away, climbing down off his chestnut by the end of the barn.

  “Naw. There's not much of a living in it unless you're a star. I'm not good enough to be a star,” Will said flatly and without self-pity. “It's time to quit playing around.” He looked at J.D. sideways and flashed the grin, weary and worn around the edges. “Never thought you'd hear me say that, did you?”

  He sighed and marveled at the crispness of the pain that skated along the nerve endings in his back and shoulders. “I thought I'd go up to Kalispell and get a job. Got a buddy up there gettin' rich selling powerboats to movie stars on Flathead Lake. I figure if I kiss enough celebrity ass, I could make back that sixty-five hundred I owe at Little Purgatory in no time.”

  J.D. gave him a wry look. “You don't know spit about powerboats.”

  He grinned again, flashing his dimple. “Since when have I let my general ignorance stop me from doing anything? Besides, I could sell cow pies at a bake sale and have 'em coming back for more.”

  J.D.'s smile cracked into a chuckle, and he shook his head. “Pretty sure of yourself.”

  All the guile went out of Will's face, leaving him looking naked and vulnerable and young. “No. Not at all. But it's time to grow up. It's past time.”

  They sat in silence for a moment, neither of them able to put feelings into words. J.D. felt the weight of regret on his shoulders like a pair of hands pressing down, compressing the emotions into hard knots inside him. Regrets for a brotherhood that had been tainted even before Will's birth. Regrets for the wedge their parents drove between them for their own selfish reasons. Regrets for not seeing the worth of what they might have had before it was too late. He thought of his priorities and he knew this might be the last chance he had to change one. Kalispell was a long way from the Stars and Bars.

  He looked across the way at the mountains, black and big-shouldered beneath the clouds. A red-tailed hawk held its position high in the air, as if it were pinned against the slate-gray sky. He thought of the song Mary Lee had sung while he stood in the shadows of her porch, about pride and tradition and clinging to old ways, desperation and loss and unfulfilled dreams. And he could hear the faint echo of boys' laughter, could almost see the ghosts of their boyhood running through the high grass and scarlet Indian paintbrush. Not all the memories were bad ones.

  “You've got a place here if you want,” he said quietly. “Some things would have to change, but our being brothers isn't one of them.”

  Will nodded slowly. He studied the backs of his skinned knuckles with uncommon interest. “Maybe after a while,” he said, his voice a little thick, a little rusty. “I think it's best if I leave here for a time. You know, stand on my own two feet. See who I am without you to lean on or knuckle under.”

  The silence descended again and they sat there, absorbing it and feeling the paths of their lives branching off, knowing that this moment was significant, a turning point, a crossroads, but having neither the words or the desire to call attention to it. It wasn't their way.

  “If you can wait a day or two, I'll help move the herd up,” Will offered.

  “That'd be fine,” J.D. murmured, his eyes on the beat-up Chevy pickup that had just broken through the trees and was rumbling up the drive, engine pinging, gears grinding, Orvis Slokum at the wheel.

  CHAPTER

  30

  SHE COULD hear the dogs baying in the distance. Thunder rumbled farther back, just clearing the mountains to the west and rolling over the Eden valley, a warning that was coming too late.

  Samantha thought she should have seen a sign, a clue, some foreshadowing of this, even though a more logical part of her brain knew no normal person could have imagined the kind of madness that infected Sharon Russell. She still blamed herself for being naive and stupid. But that was pointless and she had no time to waste.

  She ran through the woods, pain shooting through her with each jarring step. Her ribs and back ached from the beating she had taken the night before. Cramps knotted her shoulder muscles from the unnatural position she had been tied in, and her hands throbbed mercilessly now that the circulation had been restored. They were swollen and discolored, and fears of amputation flashed through her mind when she looked at them, but then, that was stupid, because she was probably going to die.

  None of it would matter—her hands, her ragged hair, the cut that extended in a bloody throbbing red line from her right cheekbone diagonally across her face to her jaw. It wouldn't matter what she looked like when she was dead. It wouldn't matter if the dogs fell on her and tore her to shreds. She would have ceased to exist.

  She wondered who would mourn her passing.

  The notion was stunning, impossible to grasp. She had too much life ahead of her to die now. That thought compelled her to keep her feet moving and her heart pumping and her lungs working. Instinct and adrenaline spurred her to run, and she ran with no thought to pacing herself as she hurled her body between trees and through brush. Thorny brambles ripped the bare skin of her legs, lashed them with a hundred tiny cuts, and snagged the remnant of the white silk T-shirt that hung in tatters around her neck. With no shoes, her toes caught on exposed roots, and thistles and twigs bit into the soles of her feet, but she kept running. Her head felt as if it would explode, and her lungs burned until they felt like sacks of blood in her chest, but she kept running.

  South. She didn't know where she was, but she assumed they were still on Bryce's property. If she ran east, she would only take herself deeper into the Absaroka wilderness. North would take her back to Sharon. South. Toward Rafferty land. She had no idea how far that might be. She ha
d no idea how far Sharon would allow her to run. She didn't let herself think about it. She made her mind go blank and focused only on putting one foot ahead of the other. She broke into a wide clearing and sprinted across it, thinking too late that she should stick to the cover of the trees. But what would it really matter? The dogs had her scent. Better to take the quickest route than one that afforded cover. Wasn't it?

  She could hear the hounds baying, their voices carrying on thin, wavering currents through the trees. The air was heavy and still, dense with anticipation of the storm. Sound bounced through it, traveling and echoing until she couldn't tell where it originated. Were they behind her still? Or had Sharon taken another approach, circling around to cut off her escape? She pulled up to listen and get her bearings, falling heavily against the rough trunk of a lodgepole pine.

  Darkness was creeping up from the forest floor and pressing down from above, creating a nightmarish twilight. Samantha looked around her, trying to establish a heading. She was weak with exhaustion and fear and hunger; dizziness swirled around and around her brain, making it difficult to determine direction or decipher the simplest of thoughts. The sweat chilled on her skin and she shuddered and strained against being sick, against panic that was like a ball in her throat. Tears blurred her vision and rained down her cheeks, through the dirt and the blood. She tried to wipe them away with the back of her hand and cried out at the pain in her fingers and in her cut cheek.

  You'll die out here, Samantha. Naked, beaten, shot in the head by a madwoman. Stupid kid. Stupid dreamer. The dream is over now.

  Stupid girl. Stupid, silly virgin.

  Sharon watched her quarry through a night vision scope attached to a Browning rifle. I could kill you now, little slut. But she wasn't ready to end the hunt just yet. She had given the little bitch a fifteen-minute head start before riding out after her. The hounds had caught her scent immediately. The scent of blood and fear. A perfume of which Sharon found herself growing fond. Lucy MacAdam had been her first human kill. She thought the rush might be addictive. The idea excited her.