The Love of a Lawman, The Callister Trilogy, Book 3

by Jeffrey, Anna

  The Karadimos and Rondeau places were about fifteen miles out of town. Because they were the only two dwellings at the end of Stony Creek Road, Callister County's four-man maintenance crew kept the gravel passage in only fair shape. The Blazer furrowed through mud ruts and rattled over wet potholes, making poor time and giving John's mind an opportunity to dwell on Izzy.

  In school they had been in 4-H together; both had raised steers. A couple of years older than he, she'd had a woman's body when a lot of the girls his age looked more like boys than girls. He spent his whole sophomore year at Callister High School sporting a hard-on, watching her heart-shaped butt twitch up and down the hallways in tight jeans. And dreading the day when she would graduate and take that vision away from him.

  He invited her to a rodeo once to watch him rope, but his being the only Callister High School kid ever to be a steer-roping champion at the national level hadn't impressed her. She'd had eyes only for Billy, who wasn't a champion at anything.

  John reached the weathered Rondeau gate, slowed just past the cattle guard and looked at two horses grazing on his right. Their images were blurry in the fog, but they looked like mares. Izzy had fooled with horses when they were teenagers, probably would have competed in rodeo if she'd had some support.

  A white frame house of no particular style hunkered at the end of a half mile of driveway. John couldn't guess its age, but he was sure it was older than he. Its most obvious distinctive feature was wood siding badly in need of paint. A huge barn in need of more than paint and a couple of outbuildings with attached corrals lay to the left and slightly back from the house. John ground his way uphill toward the complex.

  Near the house a lone horse grazed in a separate pasture adjacent to a small barn on his left. Had to be a stallion. With springtime being peak breeding season, poor old studs got stuck out in a pasture all by themselves until needed for what they were most good for. Some people liked stallions, but he didn't trust them. Most were unruly and unpredictable. All the horses John had owned had been geldings.

  He pulled to a stop in the tire tracks worn into the grass in front of the house. A woman zipped up in a bright blue parka stood at the front gate, obviously waiting for him. Izzy. John recognized her, even with a hood covering her hair. One arm was wrapped around a little kid who seemed to be all coat and boots.

  He scooted out of the Blazer and walked over. Unable to tell if she recognized him, he lifted his hat, offered his right hand and introduced himself.

  "Oh, yeah," she said, shaking hands and looking up at him with eyes dark as coffee. Even when they were kids, John had wondered what deep secrets those midnight eyes hid. There had always been a lot of talk about the Rondeaus. "I recall, sort of," she said. "You were in Paul's class in school. Well, that is, when Paul was in school."

  Paul Rondeau. Izzy's badass little brother. He had been in trouble from the first grade forward and not much in that regard had changed. He had already tested the law's authority once by arguing when John confiscated his truck keys and kept him from driving drunk. "That's right. I was."

  "This is my daughter, Ava."

  The kid frowned up at him from behind glasses sheened with moisture. She had dark brown eyes, freckles and rosy cheeks, and full, ruby lips—just like her mother. She also had red, swollen eyes. The dog was probably hers.

  "Ava." He touched his hat to her, but she didn't move a muscle or change her sour expression.

  "I didn't know you were the sheriff," Izzy said. "Last I heard, you were rodeoing."

  John chuckled. "I quit. Slim pickings if you don't hit the good money."

  What he didn't say was when he had reached the brink of the good money, his life had caved in and he had lost his concentration. "I'm filling out Jim Higgins' term. You probably heard, he went to jail. The county commissioners appointed me. Let's see, you left town, what, around fifteen or sixteen years ago? With Billy Bledsoe, as I remember."

  "Eighteen," she said curtly.

  John waited for more, to add to the information Dana had volunteered, but all that came was an awkward pause. "Okay," he said finally, "where's your dog?"

  She tilted her head toward a fairly new, mud-spattered GMC truck parked beside the barn.

  "Let's have a look."

  "Go in the house, Ava," she told the girl.

  A defiant little chin thrust forward.

  He dug a stick of chewing gum from his shirt pocket. "Tell you what, Ava—"

  "You can't bribe me with gum," the little girl said, not changing her expression or removing her hands from her pockets.

  "Ava, go," Izzy ordered, her tone firmer.

  The kid stomped into the house and slammed the door. John followed Izzy toward the pickup, glancing back at the door to see if the glass pane fell out. "How old is she?"

  "Ten. Please try to overlook her rudeness. She's headstrong. And mature for her age... She's upset."

  "Yeah, I guess she would be." John pondered if his ten-year-old son knew what a bribe was.

  At the truck, Izzy opened the tailgate and John saw a pretty, but very dead, little border collie on the truck bed. It had probably been shot with a .22, the varmint gun of choice. The sight hurt John's heart. He loved animals and he especially loved working dogs. Growing up on a ranch, he had always been around two or three. Anger leaped into him. "What happened?"

  "I don't know. I was in the house."

  A little flutter danced through John's stomach. Art was a grouchy old codger, but surely he had more sense than to fire a gun onto a neighbor's property. "Where was he when he got shot?"

  She pushed her hands into her coat pockets and stared at the ground, pausing a few seconds before she answered. "Over there on the hillside, just below Art's house."

  John threw a glance at the grazing herd of a hundred or so sheep. Uh-oh. It didn't take a genius to see what had happened. "Tell you what. I'll go up and have a talk with him. See if we can get to the bottom of this."

  "What good's that going to do? I want the sonofabitch arrested."

  So much for the quiet, sweet-natured girl from high school. "Ma'am, er, Izzy—"

  "No one's called me Izzy in years." Those warm brown eyes gave him a glare cold enough to freeze ice cubes. "The name I use is Isabelle."

  John hesitated a few seconds, unable to interpret the vibes coming off her in waves. One of the many things he remembered about her as a teenager was she had been a puzzle. It appeared that much hadn't changed. He ducked her piercing eyes and shook his head. "Look, just hang on here 'til I get back, okay?"

  Chapter 2

  As the county's white Blazer bounced down her rugged driveway, Isabelle watched until the mist swallowed it up and she could see it only as a filmy object.

  The county commissioners appointed me.

  Had they lost their minds? She knew rodeo cowboys. Most of them should be in the jail, not minding it. John Bradshaw couldn't be any different. Well... maybe he was a little different; he was better-looking than most.

  The discussion of when they last saw each other rekindled memories as ugly as a bad scar. Eighteen years. In all that time she had come back to Callister only once.

  She had traveled a circuitous path since leaving this town. In the glare of the bright lights she had seen, high school days had dimmed, but she recalled John asking her for a date once. She remembered that particular instance because it had infuriated Billy. Crazy, how thrilled she had been all those years ago when handsome Billy Bledsoe showed jealousy over her, the redheaded, freckled daughter of the town's worst drunk.

  As a teenager, John had been tall and skinny and baby-faced. Cute. Now, he appeared to have filled out, but it was hard to tell a man's build when he was wearing a padded down coat. What she could see was that the soft face of a boy had turned into the chiseled features, lean cheeks and square jaw of a man. He would be around thirty-two now, Paul's age. People looked so different when they grew up. Just like horses and cows. And dogs.

  Dogs. The day she had brough
t Jack home flashed behind her eyes. Ava had fallen in love with him at once and Isabelle could still see him as a bouncy puppy and hear her daughter's bubbling laughter as the two of them played in the grassy yard of their home in Texas. The memories brought a new urge to break into tears.

  Without a doubt, the feisty border collie had loved driving Art's sheep uphill and down. She caught him doing it twice last week and again as recently as yesterday. She thought he was secure in the backyard, but either he escaped or, she suspected, Ava, who didn't know the strength of the border collie's instinct to herd or the years-long bitter history of the Rondeaus and Art Karadimos, had taken him outside the fence.

  She could blame no one but herself for this latest catastrophe in their lives. She should have trained Jack. Or better yet, never brought him, or herself and Ava, to Callister.

  And she shouldn't have contacted the sheriff's office, shouldn't have brought attention to herself. The Rondeaus had never cozied up to the law. Grief and frustration had spurred the phone call and all it had accomplished was to set her up as grist for Callister's gossip mill. The wheel still turned, no doubt, as ceaselessly as it did eighteen years ago when some member of her family had often been its subject.

  She drove the pickup inside the barn so Ava would be less apt to view Jack's carcass in the bed. A blue plastic tarp used for covering hay hung over a stall door. She spread it on the pickup's tailgate, lifted the dog onto it, wrapped him and tucked the corners. She was all but sobbing by the time she finished. "Dammit, Jack, I wish you'd stayed home."

  Tonight, after Ava went to bed, she would come back to the barn and bury their beloved pet.

  She tugged her coat hood over her hair and trudged toward the house, rehearsing words to allay her daughter's grief. How could she explain away yet another loss in Ava's young life? Opening the back door with no dialogue formed, she grabbed onto her emotions and schooled her face. After having failed her child in so many ways, she had to be strong for her now.

  She removed her soaked coat and muddy boots in the mudroom, then walked into the living room. Ava, wrapped in the Navajo-patterned afghan, was hunched on the edge of the sofa staring into the fire. Isabelle drew a deep breath, took a seat beside her and rested her elbows on her knees. "Want pizza for lunch? We've got one in the freezer."

  Ava's head slowly shook.

  Isabelle put an arm around her and drew her into an embrace, placed a cheek against her hair. "We'll get a kitty. We could get two or three to keep the horses company. Kittens would be fun."

  Ava pushed away, now dry-eyed, her mouth pursed and rigid. She had always worn anger like a miniature suit of armor. "I don't want any cats," she said. "It's your fault. If you hadn't run Billy off, we wouldn't be here."

  "Ava, I didn't run—"

  An engine hummed out front, then stopped. Isabelle looked out the window and saw the sheriff on his way to the front door. "Stay here, Ava. I'll be right back."

  She rose and left her daughter, opened the door before the sheriff could knock and met him outside on the porch, out of Ava's hearing range.

  "Not much I can do," he said soberly. A drop of water fell from his hat brim onto the concrete porch.

  She pulled her loose flannel shirt tightly around her and crossed her arms against the damp chill. "That's one of life's little problems, isn't it? No one ever does anything about the Art Karadimoses of the world."

  His shoulder lifted in a shrug. "He says your dog was running his sheep."

  "Jack lived around livestock all his life." Then, as if the devil himself had jumped into her mouth, a lie spilled out. "He wouldn't chase sheep."

  The truth was, the dog had been around horses and cows. In the ten years they had lived in Texas horse country, she couldn't recall seeing a single sheep and if the dog had seen one, she didn't know it.

  John looked at her a few beats, his brow arched. Of course, he didn't believe her. "If Art bothered you," he said, "I can do something about that."

  "What, give him a lecture?"

  "Listen," John said, his tone turning sharp, like he meant business. "I never said I was an expert, but I don't have to be to see what went on here. You should've kept your dog at home. I'll tell you again—if Art threatened you personally, that I can do something about."

  "Art Karadimos better hadn't dare threaten me," she said, equally sharp. "I've got a .22 rifle in the living room and a 9 mm pistol under the edge of my bed that says so."

  "Izzy—Isabelle—"

  "Even if he did threaten me, nothing would happen." She walked to the edge of the porch and looked out at the awful weather, planting a fist on her hip. "I remember how it always was around here. He'd get a slap on the wrist, then come back here and fight with me over everything that comes along. Just like he always did with my mom and dad." A memory came back of how Art had accused Paul of theft or vandalism, no matter how unreasonable, every time the old bastard found something out of place. "And my brother," she added.

  She gazed across the pasture. The mist had turned into a steady drizzle, blurring sharp lines and erasing color from the scene. Her two mares ambled toward the shed connected to one side of the big barn. She should have put them in the barn hours ago. They weren't accustomed to the cold. She would be lucky if they didn't come down with flu or something worse.

  "Next thing I know, he'll be taking potshots at my horses. And I can tell you this much, Sheriff Bradshaw—if he does that, I'll take care of the problem myself. Those are cutting horses down there. Worth big bucks. He'd better not harass them or harm them."

  "I'm gonna pretend I didn't hear any of this, Izzy—Isabelle. You can't say stuff like that to me. I represent the law. Just cool it with the threats."

  She huffed. "Some law. The county must have been desperate when they hired you."

  "Look," John said—gently, she had to admit—"I know you're upset. I understand. I like dogs as much as any man, but it's not against the law for Art to protect his herd. Any sheep grower in Callister would do the same. A person's dog can't pester his neighbor's livestock. That's just the way it is."

  She turned her head and stared across her shoulder into his unsmiling eyes, into irises as clear and green as emeralds. What was a man doing with eyes that looked like jewels? In the face of his direct look, for some reason, she couldn't admit aloud her dog had escaped her control and done something that got him killed. "Art Karadimos used to be friends with your dad. I'll bet he still is."

  And she couldn't keep the accusing edge from her voice. Wasn't offense supposed to be the best defense? Hadn't she seen that tactic work often enough, living with Billy for seventeen years?

  "That doesn't mean anything. If I could fix this, I would." John peeked out at the weather, his brow creased. "You got anybody to help you bury him?"

  "I don't need any help."

  His hand came out and touched her forearm. "Isabelle, let me help you. I know your little girl's torn up. I'm—"

  "What, sorry? A lot of good that'll do. Her heart's broken. Jack was her friend, her companion. We've had him since he was a puppy. She gave him his name."

  He nodded and stared at the porch floor.

  "And I liked him, too," she threw in for good measure, glad to have someone to rail at and unable to let the incident drop.

  He nodded again. "I'm sorry."

  Oh, hell, he probably was sorry. Why was she being such a bitch? More conversation would be useless and as painful as punching the barn door with her fist. "Okay, yeah. Whatever." She crossed in front of him, speaking as she walked. "Listen, thanks for coming all the way out here in such crappy weather."

  She opened the door and went back into the house.

  * * *

  John stood on the porch staring at the front door she had closed in his face. Okay, fine, dammit. Just fine.

  "Women," he muttered, stepping off the porch and tramping through the wet grass toward the Blazer. He wanted to reach the end of this whole sorry experience, and soon.

  His coat
was soaked. He jerked the Blazer door open, yanked off the coat and threw it in the cab before climbing behind the wheel. Shuddering, he fired the engine and turned the heat on high, waiting for comfort before driving away.

  While he shivered and waited, he scanned the nearest pasture, wanting to take a closer look at the stallion. He was nowhere in sight.

  Backing in an arc, he saw a long horse trailer parked at the side of the barn and held his foot on the brake for a few seconds while he studied the sleek newer model. It had room for four or five head, had tack and feed storage in the front end and a bunk area. Maybe climate control, too. Art had told him Izzy came with a pickup truck and horse trailer worth more than Frenchie Rondeau's whole house and that wasn't far from wrong. The only people who owned horse trailers as fancy as that one were in the horse business big time.

  As he eased down her rough driveway, he peered over at the mares again. Their rumps were turned to the storm, so he couldn't see them clearly. That horse trailer told him they were performance horses of some kind. Maybe they really were cutting horses worth big bucks.

  Art Karadimos' words echoed in his ears. Them three horses she brought in here ain't canners. If she's like her old man, she probably stole 'em.

  John didn't believe the neighbor's spiteful remark, but he couldn't deny his curiosity as to why anybody would bring highbred horses to Callister.

  As he navigated the muddy county road, he thought about cutting horses. On his mom and dad's ranch they were simply called cow horses. Smart, quick animals able to isolate a cow or calf from a herd, then maneuver left and right to block its attempts to return. They had been around since the birth of the ranching industry. Every cattle operation with a fair-sized herd had a few trained for the task. Branding cattle and administering medical treatment would be harder without a good cow horse.

  He had been in a few rodeos where cutting was an exhibition event, but cutting-horse people weren't usually rodeo people. The cutters had their own organization, their own shows.