The Lawman

by Vicki Lewis Thompson

  The Lawman

  Vicki Lewis Thompson

  Dear Reader,

  The mind of a cop functions differently from those of us not in law enforcement. If I suspected that before, I know it now—thanks to excellent input from police psychologist Dr. Kevin Gilmartin. I also suspect that the mentality he described would apply just as well to Pat Garret or Wyatt Erp as it does to a modern-day officer of the law. The job description is still the same—catch the bad guys. I find that admirable…and sexy. I had a good time writing about Joe Gilardini, a twenty-year veteran of the NYPD who finds the West is still in need of taming.

  Joe could use a little taming himself, and Leigh Singleton is the woman to do it. In writing about Leigh, I allowed myself to consider the possibility of psychic powers, which have always intrigued me. The more I researched, the more I moved into Leigh’s world. Crystals hanging in my office window bathe the room in rainbows and New Age music plays on my stereo. I’ve even experimented with aromatherapy. If all this sounds like more fun than one person is supposed to have, then you’ll understand why I’ve loved doing this series. Thanks for visiting the True Love with me!

  Happy trails,

  Vicki Lewis Thompson

  For John Cheek, an officer and a gentleman

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  Epilogue

  1

  A MAN WAS ABOUT to kiss him.

  As the guy’s breath began to tickle his mustache, Joe blinked and tried to clear the fog from his brain. “If you try mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, you’re a dead man,” he mumbled, giving him the benefit of the doubt.

  “Never learned it, anyway.” The guy—Joe realized it was the business type who had been in the doomed elevator with him—sat back on his heels and loosened his tie with such apparent relief that Joe decided maybe he’d been wrong about the other guy’s intentions. But these days, you just didn’t know.

  “Here.” The businessman reached into the inside pocket of his suit coat and handed Joe a handkerchief. “You’re bleeding somewhere.”

  “No joke.” Joe could feel it dripping from his chin. He pressed the snowy-white handkerchief, no doubt monogrammed, against the gash. Visibility was poor in the crumpled elevator, which was hot and smelled of dust and fried wires. He’d never liked small spaces. “How’s the other guy?”

  “I’ll survive,” said a voice from the back wall.

  “Says his back hurts,” volunteered the businessman. “I told him not to move.”

  What a genius. “Good,” Joe said aloud. “Moving a back-injury case and severing his spinal cord would top this episode off nicely.” Still holding the bloody handkerchief to his chin, he struggled to a sitting position, wincing at the sharp pain in his left forearm. Probably broken. Great. Why couldn’t it have been his right arm, so he’d be able to get out of writing reports for a while?

  He would have landed better if something hadn’t bashed him on the chin and knocked him out. The floor had buckled on impact, and a fluorescent fixture dangled nearly to the floor, but he didn’t think that was what had clipped him. The briefcase the businessman had been carrying was now lying up against the elevator doors. Aha. “That briefcase cut the hell out of my chin,” he said, hazarding a guess. “What’s that thing made of, steel?”

  “Brass trim,” the guy replied.

  Joe snorted. “You got a cellular phone in it, at least?”

  “Yeah.”

  Joe would have bet a month’s salary on the answer to that one. Unfortunately, he’d left his own radio in the cruiser. “Then you’d better use it. This has been great fun, but I’m due back at the station in an hour.”

  “I suppose almost getting killed is a big yawner for you, isn’t it?” the businessman asked, an edge to his voice.

  Joe almost laughed. “Killed in an elevator accident? You’ve been seeing too many Keanu Reeves movies. New York elevators are safer than your grandmother’s rocking chair.”

  “Tell that to my back,” said the guy in jeans. “I can’t drive with a busted back, and if I can’t drive, I can’t pay off my rig.”

  “If you can’t drive, you’ll get an insurance settlement,” the businessman said.

  “And sit around doing nothing?” the trucker said. “No thanks.”

  Joe considered commandeering the businessman’s phone and calling in the accident himself but when the businessman picked up the phone to call, Joe figured he might as well continue. Anyway, with his luck the phone was some upscale model that required either a Ph.D. or the mind of a seven-year-old to work it. His son Kyle loved technology—he’d even shown Joe how to program his new VCR last weekend. Joe wouldn’t have bought the thing except Kyle liked to rent movies on the rare occasions he spent time with Joe. And they were always the same movies—Star Trek I through VI. The kid loved Spock.

  “They’re sending a team to get us out,” the businessman said, snapping the phone closed.

  Beam me up, Scotty, Joe thought just as the elevator rumbled and lurched to the right.

  “Damn!” the trucker yelled. “Aren’t we all the way down yet?”

  “We’re all the way down,” Joe said. “The blasted thing’s still settling, that’s all. Move all your fingers and toes, see if you still have your motor coordination.” In the silence, Joe said a little prayer for the trucker. Paralysis was a tough hand to be dealt.

  “I can move everything,” the trucker said.

  “Good. What’s your name?”

  “Lavette. Chase Lavette.”

  “T. R. McGuinnes,” said the businessman.

  “Joe Gilardini,” Joe supplied. “I wish I could say it was nice to meet you guys, but under the circumstances I wish I’d been denied the pleasure.”

  “Same here,” Lavette said.

  McGuinnes remained silent. “Either one of you ever been out West?” he asked a few minutes later.

  “Why do you want to know?” Lavette asked.

  “I don’t, really. I just think talking is better than sitting around waiting for the elevator to shift again.”

  “Guess you’re right,” Lavette said. “No, I’ve never been out West. Eastern Seaboard’s my route. Always wanted to go out there, though.”

  Joe sighed. “God, so have I. The wide-open spaces. Peace and quiet.”

  “No elevators,” Lavette added.

  Joe smiled in the darkness. The trucker had a sense of humor. “Yeah. If I didn’t have my kid living in New York, I’d turn in my badge, collect my pension and go.” But he didn’t dare leave town with Darlene’s rich lawyer hubby filing petitions to legally adopt Kyle. Joe had been on his way up to his lawyer’s office to discuss the reply to that petition. “Hell, no,” hadn’t been quite the reply his lawyer had recommended, but that was the tone Joe wanted to convey to Emerson J. Pope, alias Kyle’s stepfather.

  Joe had met the esteemed Mr. Pope once. He dressed a lot like McGuinnes and was the kind of stuffed shirt who could give Kyle video games by the truckload, send him to space camp and computer camp and quite possibly turn him into a nerd.

  “I just heard about this guest ranch in Arizona that’s up for sale,” McGuinnes said, breaking into Joe’s thoughts. “One of those working guest ranches with a small herd of cattle. I’m going out there next week to look it over.”

  Lavette leapt on it. “No kidding? Think you might buy it?”

  “If it checks out.”

  “Running a guest ranch.” Joe smoothed his mustache. “You know, that wouldn
’t be half-bad.” God, he’d love to take Kyle out to a place like that, let him ride horses and play in the sunshine like a real boy for a change. A father and son could really get to know each other on a ranch .

  “And after I’ve had some fun with it, I’ll sell it for a nice profit,” McGuinnes continued. “The city’s growing in that direction, and in a couple of years developers will be crying to get their hands on that land, all one hundred and sixty acres of it. I can’t lose.”

  “A hundred and sixty acres,” Lavette said.

  Joe liked the sound of it, himself, although he wondered why McGuinnes was telling them all this.

  “I’m looking for partners,” McGuinnes said.

  Joe laughed. That answered his question, all right. “Now I’ve heard everything. Only in New York would a guy use an accident as a chance to set up a deal.” The elevator settled with another metallic groan, jostling Joe’s bad arm. He grimaced.

  “Would you rather sit here and think about the elevator collapsing on us?” McGuinnes asked.

  “I’d rather think about your ranch,” Lavette said. “I’d go in on it in a minute if I had the cash.”

  “You might get that settlement,” McGuinnes said.

  “You know, I might.”

  Joe listened with interest. No question that McGuinnes was a born deal-maker, which was probably why he had lots of money and Joe didn’t.

  “Listen, McGuinnes,” Lavette said. “After we get out of here, let’s keep in touch. You never know.”

  “I guarantee you wouldn’t go wrong with this investment. The Sun Belt’s booming.”

  “I think you’re both nutcases,” Joe said, but underneath his sarcasm he wasn’t so sure. All his life he’d struggled with finances, but he just didn’t seem to have a talent for making money. McGuinnes obviously did. Besides that, a ranch in Arizona sounded damned appealing right now. Emerson J. Pope didn’t have a ranch in Arizona, now, did he?

  “So you’re not interested?” McGuinnes asked.

  Oh, he was smooth, Joe thought. “I didn’t say that. Hell, what else is there to be interested in down in this hole? If the ranch looks good, just call the Forty-third Precinct and leave a message for me.” He calculated his unused sick and vacation days. That would raise a chunk of money. If he took out a loan using his pension as collateral, he might be able to get in on this deal. Then again, it was taking a hell of a financial risk.

  McGuinnes stirred. “Let me get some business cards out of my briefcase.”

  “I’d just as soon not think about your briefcase, McGuinnes,” Joe said. “Let’s talk some more about the ranch. What’s the name of it, anyway? I always liked those old ranch names—the Bar X, the Rocking J. Remember `Bonanza’?”

  “I saw that on reruns,” Lavette said. “The guy I liked was Clint Eastwood. I snuck in to see High Plains Drifter at least six times when I was a kid. Back then, I would have given anything to be a cowboy.”

  “Yeah, me, too,” Joe admitted. “So what’s the place called?”

  McGuinnes didn’t answer right away. “Well, this spread is named something a little different,” he said at last.

  “Yeah?” Gilardini said. “What could be so different?”

  “The True Love Ranch.”

  * * *

  JOE SAT at a fork in the dirt road, his 1983 Chevy Cavalier groaning from an overworked air conditioner. Kyle sat perched in the passenger seat, a model of the bridge of the Enterprise on his lap. He wore new cowboy boots, jeans, a snazzy Western shirt and Spock ears. He’d worn those damned ears the entire road trip from New York. Joe was afraid some sort of fungus might be growing under them, but every time he tried to coax them off, Kyle had a fit.

  At the fork in the road a wooden sign indicated Corrals to the left and Main House to the right. Underneath each sign was burned what was apparently the True Love’s official brand, a heart with an arrow through it. Joe stared at the heart and stroked his mustache. And he’d hoped to make a man out of his son in this place.

  “What ya say we check out the corrals first, son?” he asked, figuring that would set the right tone for the visit.

  Kyle shrugged. “I guess.”

  “Before we do, how about if you take off your Spock ears and put on that cowboy hat I gave you?”

  Kyle clapped his hands over the pointy ears.

  “Come on, Kyle. Cowboys don’t have Spock ears.”

  “I’m not a cowboy.” Kyle’s blue eyes grew stormy. “I’m the second in command of the starship Enterprise.”

  “Okay, let’s pretend we just beamed down to the planet Arizona, where everybody wears cowboy hats and boots, and you’re here on a secret mission, so you have to look like the natives.”

  Kyle craned around in his seat and surveyed the unfamiliar trees, bushes and prickly cactus plants. Then he gazed up at the craggy mountains towering above them. “It looks a lot different from home, that’s for sure.”

  “That’s because it’s the planet Arizona.” Joe reached over to the back seat and picked up the black hat he’d bought for Kyle the week before, a miniature version of the one he was wearing. “Here. Just take off the ears, and—”

  “Nope.” Kyle pressed his hands against his ears and shook his head.

  Joe sighed.

  Kyle peered up at him, looking worried. “Are you mad at me, Dad?”

  “No, not really.”

  “I’ll wear the hat with the ears.” Joe handed him the hat and watched him position it carefully, so that the ears curved up against the underside of the brim.

  He glanced at his father. “How’s that?”

  It wasn’t exactly how Joe had pictured Kyle looking when the boy stepped foot on the ranch where his father was one-third owner, but it would have to do. “Fine,” he said, and turned the wheel toward the left.

  He’d never had much use for planes—total lack of control—so he’d decided to drive out to Arizona from New York. That way he could also see some of the country and give himself more time to spend with Kyle. McGuinnes hadn’t liked that. He’d wanted Joe to come out immediately to investigate the “incidents” they were having on the True Love. Joe figured McGuinnes was letting the excitement of the wild West fire his imagination. Besides, Joe was officially retired from police work, but McGuinnes had claimed that Joe needed to protect his investment. He was a persistent son-of-a-gun, Joe had to admit. McGuinnes had pursued the purchase of this ranch and the financial cooperation of his partners with a single-mindedness that impressed Joe.

  And he’d married the foreman, Freddy Singleton. Lavette had tied the knot recently, too—some gal from New York he’d accidentally gotten pregnant during a wild night in his truck cab. “You guys are taking this True Love name a little too literally, aren’t you?” Joe had commented when he’d heard about Lavette. “You got aphrodisiacs in the well water or something?”

  “Maybe. Wait’ll you see Freddy’s sister, Leigh.”

  “Hey, that’s the last thing I’m looking for when I come out there.”

  “Then you’d better stick to beer,” McGuinnes had said, laughing.

  The corrals came into view, solid fences of weathered tree branches laid on top of each other between parallel supports. Beyond the corrals was a metal-sided barn with two wings, one made of the same sheet metal and the other, looking older, built of rock. Several pickup trucks clustered around the barn and corrals, and something was obviously happening. Cowboys were hanging on the fence, and considerable dust was rising from inside.

  Joe drove partway into the clearing and parked the Chevy under the shade of a feathery-leaved tree with green bark. “Let’s go see what’s going on,” he said. He was all the way around the car before Kyle climbed reluctantly from his seat. Joe scooped him up and held him so he could see into the large corral to their right, where about twenty horses milled around or stood and dozed. Joe felt a rush of pride. Those were his horses. He was standing on his land. He took a deep whiff of dry desert air scented with horse manure. No c
ar exhaust. No rotting garbage. It had taken all of his unused sick leave, all his vacation pay and a big chunk of each monthly retirement check, but it was worth it. “Pretty good-looking animals in that corral, wouldn’t you say?”

  “They’re big.”

  “They won’t seem so big when you get used to them,” Joe said. From the far corral came shouts of encouragement from the cowboys lining the fence. He put Kyle down and took his hand. “Come on. Let’s go over there and find out what the fuss is all about.”

  As they started across the clearing, brakes screeched behind them. Joe turned quickly to make sure the vehicle was under control, and saw both doors of a dark blue pickup fly open. A blonde leapt from the driver’s side and a brunette from the passenger’s side.

  “Ry’s going to kill me for telling you about this!” shouted the blonde.

  “I would have killed you if you hadn’t!” the brunette shouted back.

  Neither paid any attention to Joe and Kyle as they raced for the far corral.

  “Daddy, who are those ladies?” Kyle asked as they followed the two women across the dirt yard.

  “I think those are the Singleton sisters,” Joe said. Even running pell-mell across the clearing, they lived up to McGuinnes’s description. Freddy, the brunette, was the taller of the two. Leigh, the head wrangler for the True Love, had the more voluptuous figure.

  Kyle pointed to Freddy as she ran toward the corral, her boots kicking up little explosions of dust. “That one is real mad.”

  “I think—”

  “Ry McGuinnes, don’t you dare!” Freddy pulled herself up on the fence and leaned forward. “Get off of there this minute!”

  Joe wondered who the hell Ry was until suddenly he remembered that T.R. had officially changed his name, saying that Ry suited him better now that he lived in the West.

  That wasn’t all that had changed about McGuinnes, Joe decided as he neared the corral. A makeshift bucking chute had been constructed on the left side of the structure. McGuinnes—a tanner, leaner McGuinnes in worn jeans, a dirt-stained Western shirt and a battered cowboy hat—crouched above the chute, ready to lower himself to the broad back of a Brahma bull.