by JoAnn Ross
But, dammit, from the time she’d first arrived in Wyoming, she’d felt a little internal click, as if she might just possibly belong in Hazard. That the town was a place she could belong. A place she’d fit in. A place she could call home.
Although this three-bedroom house was much more than she needed, she’d actually been considering taking her landlord up on his offer of a buy/lease deal. The problem, of course, was that Faith Prescott didn’t have any credit record, which made applying for a loan impossible. And she’d been afraid that using her real name could create a paperwork trail for Sal to follow.
Perhaps he’d changed.
That’d be the day.
“Better tell Bridger to be on the lookout for four horsemen riding down the streets of Hazard,” she muttered. “Because if Sal Sasone has decided to stop trying to control his world and everyone in it, it’s a sure sign of the Apocalypse.”
It was nearly five o’clock. In the summer a pale predawn light would be shimmering on the horizon. This time of year, and thanks to the heavy cloud that had drifted across the moon, the hour was the darkest time of the morning when she pulled aside the curtain just enough to look out the bedroom window.
In the distance, she could see the glow of the lights across Silver Lake, revealing that someone was still working the crime scene. On this side of the lake, it was like trying to see into the depths of a deep, black well.
Was he out there? Watching? Waiting?
No. Lurking outside a house in the dark, especially in the cold—which everyone knew Sal hated almost as badly as liberal Democrats—-was not his style.
Or at least it hadn’t been. He’d always been much more up-front, more in-your-face. The last time she’d seen him, he’d been angry, drunk, and dangerous.
Beyond dangerous. He’d been deadly.
Eighteen months was a long time. If he’d continued his downhill slide into alcoholism, no telling how worse his paranoia and possessiveness might have gotten.
Fear skimmed its cold, bony fingers up her spine and wrapped around her heart as she retrieved a suitcase and a large red leather bag from the back of the closet.
The bag held a heavy Colt revolver that, ironically, she’d received from the very same man who’d tracked her to Wyoming.
She put the ugly gun on the mattress, within reach. After making sure her boots, parka, gloves, and keys were close by, Faith began yanking clothes from the chest, which just yesterday she’d allowed herself to have the foolishly optimistic idea of refinishing.
18
Josh had decided things couldn’t get much worse. Until he walked into the sprawling, old log house and saw his grandfather sitting at the table, steam rising from a thick mug.
“’Bout time you boys got home,” he said. “I fixed some steak and eggs. They’re in the oven.”
“I’m not hungry.” The thought of food roiled Josh’s empty stomach.
“You’re gonna want some food in your belly,” Jim Bridger said. “A body needs fuel to work.”
Josh just wanted to go to bed. And sleep until spring. Or at least until he turned eighteen and could escape this dead-end town.
Star Trek had it wrong. Wyoming was the final frontier.
“I’ll eat later.” Maybe by March he’d be able to choke something down.
“You’ll eat now.” Josh’s grandfather pushed himself out of the chair and grabbed a dish towel from the wooden counter and took a platter from the oven. “We’ve got to get going.”
“Going?” Josh looked over at his father, who was hanging his jacket on the peg by the door. “Where?”
“With the wind having stopped, this snow’s just gonna keep on falling, instead of moving east. So, we’d best make sure we’ve got lots of feed out for the stock, before the roads close down.” Jim put the plate in front of Josh. “We’ll be gone a couple a days,” he told Will.
The look the two men exchanged told Josh they’d already discussed this. Without—no surprise here—giving him any choice.
“You just want to get me out of town so I can’t talk to reporters.”
"I’m sorry.” Will poured a cup of the thick, black sludge that bore no resemblance to the Starbucks Josh was used to in L.A. “Did you want to talk to reporters?”
“Hell, no.”
“Well, then,” Jim drawled, “there you go.”
“But I don’t want to run away, either.”
That was a lie. He did want to run. As fast and as far as he could. All the way back to California. Better yet, down to Mexico.
“You’re not gonna be runnin’ anywhere,” his grandfather agreed brusquely. “You’ll be doing ranch work that needs to be done. I figure after we get the hay tossed out, we’ll ride the fence line a ways, checking for breaks. A cow fall into a gulley this time a year, we won’t find her till spring. Which’ll be too damn late.”
“I don’t know anything about fixing fences.” Josh had, however, been surprised to discover he actually had a knack for riding horses.
“’Bout time you learned. Like I always used to tell your father, boys are like dogs and horses. Ain’t worth a damn if they’re not being used.”
“I haven’t been to bed yet.”
The old man arched a silver brow. “That’s not what I heard.”
Josh shot a look at Will. “You had no right telling my private stuff.”
“Nothing’s private when you’re talking about a murder. Besides, it’s not like I wrote it up on a press release and gave it to Faith Prescott to read on the radio. Whether you like it or not, whether you’ll even admit it or not, you, your grandfather, and I are a family. And family doesn’t keep secrets.”
Josh snorted. “Like you don’t have secrets.”
“None that involve you.”
“Oh, no?” Josh welcomed the temper he felt beginning to heat up in his gut. It beat the hell out of the sick, greasy cold he’d been feeling. “What about whatever the hell happened down in Savannah? Whatever it was that had you dragging me up here to Sticksville?”
“Eat,” the older man said firmly, cutting off any further discussion. “You can sleep in the truck.”
To his son he said, “Sam called from over at the Gallagher girl’s apartment. Said he found an address book, but he couldn’t find any listing of her parents.”
“That’s because she doesn’t talk to them,” Josh volunteered grumpily. “Didn’t talk to them,” he corrected.
It was still hard to think of Erin in the past tense. How could that be? He’d been warm and mindless inside her, just a few hours ago. He wondered if he’d ever get used to the idea of her being gone. His father might know. As a cop, he undoubtedly knew a lot about people dying. But Josh was damned if he’d ask.
“Why not?” Will asked.
“Because she hated them.”
And I know just how she felt. He didn’t say the words, but they hung in the air just the same.
“They should be on her school admission records,” Will said. He started to leave the room, then turned. “That was a damn good interview you gave to Deputy Charbonneaux. Straightforward, and you stuck to the facts. He cowboyed up real good,” Will informed his father.
Jim Bridger nodded. “Doesn’t surprise me in the least. He might not have been raised up in the West—”
“California’s as far west as you can get,” Josh broke in.
“California’s the coast,” Jim corrected. “The Left Coast. I wouldn’t let it into the West with a search warrant… But, like I was saying before I was interrupted,” he continued, turning back to his son, “our boy comes from good stock.”
Our boy. Made him sound like a colt he was considering buying. Or a yearling he was planning to auction off.
Josh was still thinking about that idea twenty minutes later, as he and his grandfather drove down the mountain.
“People aren’t cattle,” he said.
“Now there’s a newsflash,” Jim said drily. “Maybe we ought to pull over so I can get out a pen
and paper and write it down.”
“I just meant that just because a guy fucks a woman and accidentally makes a kid, it doesn’t mean that kid will grow up to be anything like him.”
“The old nature-versus-nurture argument.” Jim nodded. “As a father, I like to think that I had some influence over my son. And I've got a strong enough ego to be damn proud of how he turned out. Though I’ve gotta admit, back when he was your age, trying to have any kind of conversation with him was a lot like bull riding.”
Josh didn’t want to bite. But, after a lengthy pause stretched between them, he couldn’t resist asking. “Why?”
“Because I was damn lucky if it lasted eight seconds. Shoot, that boy had a flashfire temper.”
“My father?”
“The very same. Of course, at the time, I was younger and a lot more hotheaded, too. I’m mellowed some since then. And we were both having trouble dealing with the loss of Will’s brother right on top of his mother dying of cancer.”
“I had an uncle?”
Josh had been given sketchy information about his grandmother’s death when he’d asked about a framed photograph on the wall in the den. But no mention had been made of another son.
“He died before you were born. Rolled the truck he was driving over when he was fourteen.”
“He wouldn't have been old enough to have a license.”
“Like you never drove illegally before you got your license?”
“Maybe.” Josh decided there was no need to mention running his mother’s Jag off the Coast Highway when he’d been fourteen.
Jim reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a pack of cigarettes, lipped one out of the red-and-white hard pack, and punched the lighter on the dash.
“He and your dad were coming back from the feed- store. Matt, that was his name, was about a week out from getting his permit. Like most kids in this part of the country, he’d driven off road around the ranch before, but he’d never been on the public road.
“From day one, he was always trying to keep up with his big brother, had to try to do every damn thing Will did. That day he had himself a yen to try real drivin’. It was a dry road without a lot of bends, so Will—who would’ve been sixteen at the time—let him take the wheel.”
The lighter popped out. Josh had never claimed to be the most sensitive guy on the planet, but he suspected, from the way the old man was taking his time lighting that cigarette, that the subject of his younger son's death was still painful.
“Things were going along okay for a while,” Jim said on a stream of exhaled smoke. “Then he took a curve too tight, overcorrected, and rolled the rig. Your dad got thrown clear.” He drew in on the cigarette again. “Matt wasn’t that lucky. Got himself stuck in the cab with the roof smashed down on him and the engine block clean into the front seat on top of his lap.
“Will broke his shoulder and two ribs, but he managed to hike the five miles back to town to get help for his brother. Took the rescue guys another hour with the Jaws of Life to cut Matt out. Doc said he probably died instantly.”
“Jesus.” All Josh had done was smash a fender and break an axle. “That blows.”
“Wouldn’t argue that,” Jim Bridger agreed around the burning cigarette clamped tightly between his teeth. “Your dad wouldn’t talk about it, still doesn’t that I know of, but I figure he took it pretty hard, especially comin’ on top of having lost his mother, because it was right about then he got wild. Started getting into all kinds of fool trouble.”
“Mr. Law and Order wasn’t always a Boy Scout?” That was as much a revelation as that he’d had an uncle who’d died. Especially given the fight they’d had yesterday after his father had found the roach clip he’d forgotten to take out of his jeans pocket before throwing them in the hamper.
Jim snorted. “Not by a long shot. I probably wasn’t the best father back then, what with all that had happened, and my generation didn’t believe in talkin’ stuff to death the way folks seem to these days. Plus, we’d been having a drought, which led to some real lean times with the ranch, but even if none of that had happened, it might not have made all that much of a difference.
“Like Paul Newman said in that movie, Road to Perdition, it’s a natural law. Sons are put on this earth to trouble their fathers.” He slanted Josh a look. “Seems you’re doing a bang- up job of that, son.”
“My mother got married six times.”
Even to his own ears, that sounded like a whiny-kid excuse. Though it was fact. Whitney of the half dozen last names had clawed her way up L.A.’s social ladder, discarding husbands the way she’d kick off her shoes when she walked in the door.
“I never paid any attention to her husbands, since I knew they’d be gone. But I sure as hell never thought I’d end up with a cowboy cop for a father.”
“When you were a little lad, you might not’ve thought you’d grow hair on your crotch, either,” Jim drawled. “But there you are.”
Since Josh could think of no response to that typical Jim Bridger comment, he fell silent, watching the white snow drifting down from the sky illuminated by the beam of the truck’s headlights.
By dying in that plane crash in the Andes on a flight back to the States from Rio, his mother had left her lawyer to clean up the mess, the same way the maids had been forced to pick up her Manolos.
Josh rubbed the pad of his thumb along the crease etching its way across his forehead. The same one that had been the first thing he’d noticed about his father.
For the first time since he’d been dragged to Savannah and dumped on Will Bridger, he thought about him having lost both a mother and a brother when he was about the same age Josh was now.
And wondered if, just maybe, he and his father might have more in common than their physical resemblance.
19
The sound of someone pounding on the door jolted Faith from a light sleep.
Damn. She’d drifted off. And now it looked as if Sal had finally caught up with her. Unfortunately, the landlord still hadn’t made it out to the house to put the peephole in the door.
“Faith?” the deep voice called out. “Open the damn door!”
Not Sal at all. Relief was short-lived by the idea that it was Will Bridger standing on her porch. What the hell was he doing here?
From the way he was pounding, she knew he had no plans of going away, so she opened the door.
He was standing in the spreading yellow glow of the porch light, arm upraised as if to hit the door again, his deep scowl carving those horizontal lines in his forehead. “Are you okay?”
“Of course.” Or as good as a woman could be who’d just been at a murder scene and had an armed and vengeful bounty hunter after her.
“You always answer the door holding a cannon?”
“It’s not a cannon. It’s a Colt .45.”
“Yeah, I noticed that right off. If you’re looking to run off the Fuller Brush man, that should fit the bill.”
“Given that I’m out in the woods, less than a quarter mile from a murder scene, and there’s a killer on the loose, I’ll admit to being a bit nervous.”
“So you went out and bought yourself a revolver in the middle of the night?”
“Actually, I already had it. It was a gift.”
“Yeah, why get a woman chocolates or flowers when you can buy her a weapon?”
She shrugged, refusing to get into specifics with him. “Is there a reason you were attempting to break my door down?”
“I rang the bell. Several times, as a matter of fact.”
“It doesn’t work. The landlord has promised to take care of it but hasn’t made it out here yet. But surely you’ve more important things to do than go around to people’s houses and test doorbells.”
“You’re right. I do.” He folded his arms across his chest in a way that was far more cop than the gazillionaire international businessman she’d once believed him to be. “And we’re wasting time here. Are you going to invite me in?”
>
He glanced past her into the living room, pricking some small bit of feminine pride that had her wishing she’d at least managed to get more of those damn moving boxes unpacked. “Or does KWIND pay you so much you can afford to heat the great outdoors?”
“My heat is my business.” Could she sound any more petulant? What was it about this man that always had her behaving so damn uncharacteristically? “And I’d rather you just go away.”
“Sorry. That’s not going to happen. I happen to be sheriff. And this is, after all, my hometown.”
“How can I even be sure you are a real sheriff?” Of course he was, but as stressed-out and exhausted as she was, Faith couldn’t resist the dig.
“Dammit, Faith.” He plowed a hand through his dark hair.
“And it may be your hometown, but I was here first.” She suddenly had a mental image of two toddlers, glaring at each other across a sandbox.
“Oh, hell.” She moved aside. “You may as well come on in.” She had, after all, had three years to get over him. She could handle being alone in her house with the man.
“Since you asked so nicely, I believe I will.” He stamped the snow off his boots. Glanced around the room. “You moving in? Or out?”
“I haven’t gotten around to unpacking yet,” she hedged. That much was true. There was no point in telling him she was about to leave not only this house, but Hazard. “What are you doing here?”
“Something occurred to me. About your parka.”
She glanced over at the white, hooded jacket hanging on the hook by the door. “What about it?”
“It’s the same as the one Erin Gallagher was wearing.”
“That’s not surprising. The store was having a sale and had marked the rack of these down to sixty percent off. Apparently white doesn’t sell very well here. Why?”
“What if she was mistaken for the actual target?”
