Showdown in West Texas

by Amanda Stevens

  The victim was facing away from Cage, and he moved around to the other side, this time lifting the hair away from the man’s features.

  He was Hispanic, early twenties with a wicked-looking scar that curved around his throat. Cage had seen that scar before. He knew who this man was.

  He was the guy who’d gone out the bathroom window in San Miguel, leaving his wife behind to be slaughtered with all the others.

  It appeared that someone else was being dealt a little divine retribution, Cage thought grimly.

  “SHERIFF STEELE! YOU BETTER come take a look at this,” one of the deputies hollered. He was standing at the base of a rock outcropping that looked a bit like that winged monster Grace had told Cage about earlier.

  This time Cage didn’t wait for an invitation. He picked his way through the rugged terrain behind her.

  At first he thought the mound of loose stones was a grave. Then he saw the candles and the grim reaper figurines, and he glanced over at Grace. Her face had gone almost white.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s an altar,” she said in a clipped tone.

  “What’s it doing out here?”

  “The same thing he is.” She nodded toward the corpse. “Paying tribute to Santa Muerte. The patron saint of death.”

  Cage’s gaze narrowed as he watched her. He could tell she was upset and trying very hard not to show it to everyone in attendance. “Are you saying this is a ritual killing instead of a gangland hit?”

  “I’m saying it could be both,” Grace said. “Probably is both. The worship of Santa Muerte is a cult that’s become popular with a certain criminal element in Mexico, especially the enforcers who work for the drug cartels. It has its roots in Santeria, but the followers have come to be known as narcosatánicos.”

  She bent and picked up one of the figurines. Even under the burning sun, the empty-eyed deity looked eerie and haunting. Somehow evil.

  Grace ran her gloved finger along the curve of the scythe. “If you go across the border, you see these things all over the place, especially in Nuevo Laredo. Shops, cemeteries, graffiti on city walls. Sometimes you even see it on the drug runners’ bulletproof SUVs.”

  “That’s pretty brazen.”

  “Until now, our main concern was the danger of abduction posed to American citizens crossing over the border, but then sheriff’s deputies in Laredo started finding evidence of ritualistic ceremonies in stash houses that they raided. Gruesome stuff—blood-filled bowls, animal sacrifices, you name it.”

  She tossed the figurine back on the makeshift altar. “What we’re seeing is a culture of death,” she said. “And it’s right here in our own backyard.”

  THEY BOTH SAID VERY LITTLE on the way back to town. Grace was too preoccupied—and worried—by what they’d found at the crime scene to try and make small talk.

  Dale seemed distracted, too. His head was turned toward the window, but somehow Grace didn’t think he was watching the scenery.

  “Does this change things for you?” she finally asked.

  It took him a moment to respond. He turned, but only to stare out the windshield. “It changes things,” he said. “It changes everything, but not in the way you mean.”

  She frowned at his vagueness. “What do you mean?”

  He looked at her then, and his blue eyes seemed to burn right through her. Grace felt a quiver in the pit of her stomach. She wanted to look away, but found that she couldn’t.

  “That guy back there…”

  “Yeah? What about him?”

  “He—”

  Whatever he’d been about to tell her was cut short by the sound of a shotgun blast a split second before the back windshield in the truck disintegrated. Glass from the exploding window peppered Grace’s arm and the side of her face, and she jumped, as much from the shock as the pain.

  “Get down!” she screamed as the truck veered off the road and another blast took off the side mirror.

  Grace slid down in the seat, contorting herself to keep her head below the rear window opening while flooring the accelerator. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Dale twist in the seat to get a look out the back.

  “It’s coming from the top of the canyon,” he yelled.

  Grace headed straight for a stand of mesquite bushes. It wasn’t much cover, but it was the only thing around for miles.

  As she swung the truck around and slammed on the brakes, Dale opened the door and jumped out. The entire front seat was covered in glass, and Grace could feel the chunks slice into her skin like a cheese grater as she slid across to the passenger side and rolled out behind him.

  Keeping her head down, she made her way toward the front of the vehicle where Dale hunkered in the dirt, peering around the bumper.

  “I saw a flash,” he said. “Just to the right of that juniper tree.”

  Grace gripped her gun as she eased around him to have a look.

  “What’s the quickest way to the top?” he asked.

  “There’s a trail about a mile down the road.”

  “He’ll be long gone by then.” He took another peek around the bumper. “Cover me,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Cover me.”

  Before Grace could protest, he darted around the truck and sprinted toward the canyon.

  “Idiot,” she muttered as she watched him zigzag across the open expanse.

  Buckshot tore through the scrub brush at his feet, kicking up trails of tiny dirt clouds, and for a moment as he staggered, Grace thought he might have been hit.

  She got off several rounds before a spray of slugs pinged across the side of the truck, ripping through the metal as though it were tin foil and forcing her back behind the wheel well in shock.

  Grace’s heart was pumping so hard, she could feel the beat in her temples. But her hand was still steady, thank God. She waited a split second, then popped up over the hood and started firing. She didn’t stop until Dale reached the base of the canyon where he could take cover. Then she retreated behind the truck and slid down in the dirt, her back against the tire as she reloaded.

  She wiped sweat from her eyes and her hand came back bloody. For some reason, the story she’d told Dale earlier about Willow Springs popped into her head, and she felt an unexpected kinship with the sheriff whose ghost still wandered those deserted streets, waiting for his final showdown.

  THE BLAST OF BUCKSHOT was so close that Cage was momentarily rattled and he lost his footing as he dodged and twisted through an obstacle course of scrub brush, prickly pear and cacti. As his knee gave way, he thought for sure he was going down, but somehow he managed to stay on his feet and now the sound of gunfire behind him spurred him on. Grace was giving him some cover.

  By the time he reached the base of the canyon, he was breathing hard and swearing. And he had a wrenching pain in his leg that started at the kneecap and shot all the way up his thigh.

  What the hell had he been thinking? He couldn’t handle a climb that rugged.

  But climb he did, his feet slipping and sliding in the loose shale. The narrow canyon held the heat like a kiln, and by the time Cage reached the top, he was panting and sweating and his knee had gone almost numb, which helped him at that moment but he knew he would pay for it later.

  He didn’t bother with cover now. No shots had been fired for the past several minutes and Cage had only been halfway to the top when he heard the sound of a retreating ATV. He kept going anyway, and when he made it to the top, he gave Grace the all-clear sign before he scoured the ground for shell casings and tire tracks.

  She came up after him, and as her head popped up over the canyon rim, Cage saw the thin rivulets of blood that ran down the side of her face where she’d been pelted by the exploding glass.

  “Find anything?”

  Cage was still poking around in the dirt. “ATV tracks,” he said. “Looks like a four-wheeler.”

  She walked over to have a look, and he handed her a handkerchief. “You’re bleeding.” />
  “Thanks.” When she reached for the handkerchief, he noticed that her hand was all cut up, too.

  “Are you okay?”

  She turned her hand over and briefly examined the wounds. “Yeah, it’s just scratches. Looks a lot worse than it is.”

  “You’ll need to put something on them. You don’t want them to get infected.”

  She didn’t seem too concerned as she squatted in the dirt to examine the tire tracks. “He must have gone down the trail on the other side,” she said.

  “Does anyone live around here?”

  Grace stood and wound the handkerchief around her bleeding hand. He could see dots of blood already showing through the linen.

  “There’s a ranch about a mile and a half north of here.”

  “Who owns it?”

  She glanced at him. “Jesse Nance.”

  “Do you know if he has a four-wheeler?”

  “Everyone around here has a four-wheeler,” she said. “Ranchers use them nowadays instead of horses. But what on earth makes you think that Jesse would open fire on us like that?”

  “Ex-husbands have been known to bear grudges,” Cage said with a shrug.

  She laughed. “Not after this many years. We were only married three months.”

  “Well, somebody’s got a beef with you,” Cage said. “Unless you think that ambush was random, and I’m hard-pressed to believe that it was. Whoever was up here had a clear view of the road and the Sheriff’s Department emblem on the side of your truck. The shooter knew exactly who he was firing on.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “No maybe about it,” Cage said. “Somebody was trying to kill you.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Grace gave him a strange, searching look. “How do we know they weren’t firing at you?” she asked, before she turned and started down the canyon.

  Chapter Ten

  Grace did not think for a moment that Jesse Nance had been up on that ridge firing down on them. For one thing, he hadn’t seemed all that cut up when their marriage ended, so she highly doubted he’d been carrying a grudge all these years.

  And for another, he just wasn’t the type. He had his faults, no one knew that better than Grace. The Jesse she remembered was lazy, selfish and irresponsible, and his lack of ambition was only exceeded by his lack of scruples. But he’d had his limits and Grace just couldn’t see him being involved in anything truly dastardly.

  Still, his ranch was the only one for miles around, and the body had been found at the edge of his property. At the very least, Grace needed to find out if he’d witnessed any unusual or suspicious activity in the desert lately.

  She pulled up in front of the house and sat for a moment, just staring through the windshield. Boy, did that place take her back.

  In its time, the Nance Ranch must have been something. Grace could well imagine the lavish barbecues at roundup, the sound of music and laughter echoing across the desert, the rustle of silk skirts on a makeshift dance floor beneath the stars. But by the time she and Jesse had become friends, the Nance family fortune had dwindled and the ranch was already in a sad state of decline.

  After his father died, the upkeep had proven too much for his mother’s salary as a nurse. Jesse and his sister each had trust funds, but they couldn’t touch the money until they turned twenty-five. Once the family’s savings had been depleted, there’d been no extra cash for anything other than the most necessary repairs, and for as long as Grace could remember, the house had been nothing more than a shadow of its former glory.

  But she’d always loved coming here, and had never paid much mind to the shabbiness. She, Jesse and Colt McKinney had been inseparable all through junior high and high school. They’d spent most of their free time out here riding horses and four-wheelers and swimming in a little creek near Red Rock Canyon.

  Sometime after her sixteenth birthday, Grace and Jesse had paired off, and Colt quit coming around so much. But Grace had still spent every waking moment at the Nances, and Jesse’s mother, Aggie, had doted on her. Jesse had once told Grace that the reason his mother had taken their elopement so well was because she already loved Grace like a daughter, and thought she just might be the only thing that could save Jesse from a life of sloth and debauchery.

  Aggie Nance had died the same year Grace left town, and she still regretted not coming back for the funeral.

  “You okay?” Dale asked softly.

  “Yeah. Let’s get this over with.”

  As they climbed out of the truck, a woman who looked barely out of her teens came out on the porch. She was dressed in short shorts and cowboy boots, and the crop top she wore revealed an expanse of smooth, tanned skin. Her face was narrow, the nose perfectly shaped, her silky hair fastened in a high ponytail that swayed when she moved. Her eyes were blue, not vivid cobalt like Dale’s, but a pale aquamarine.

  As Grace approached the porch, the woman watched her with all the friendliness and warmth of a pit viper.

  Grace dipped her chin. “Morning. I’m Sheriff Steele—”

  “I know who you are.” Insolence dripped like molasses off the woman’s drawl as her gaze ran up and down Grace’s dusty clothes. “You’re a lot older than I thought you’d be.”

  Grace wished that she could say the woman was a lot younger than she’d expected, but she figured it was Jesse’s natural inclination to gravitate to someone more in keeping with his maturity level.

  Not to mention someone with those legs. They looked about a mile long between the top of her boots and the bottom of her shorts. And not so much as a ripple of cellulite anywhere that Grace could see.

  On closer inspection, Grace decided the woman was a little older than she’d first thought. She might have been all of twenty-three.

  “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,” Grace said.

  The young woman hesitated a split second, as if working it out in her head whether or not she should give Grace her name. “Sookie Truesdale.”

  “That’s an unusual name.”

  “I’m named after my grandmother.”

  “Hey, so am I. I guess that gives us a thing or two in common,” Grace said, trying to break the ice.

  “Well, we’ve both been with Jesse Nance,” Sookie said. “But I don’t reckon that gives either one of us any bragging rights.”

  “Speaking of Jesse, is he home?”

  “Nah uh.”

  “Do you know where I can find him? Or when he’ll be back?”

  “What do I look like, his secretary?” Sookie’s gaze moved past Grace to where Dale stood by the truck. “He a deputy or something? I haven’t seen him around before.”

  “He’s new.”

  Sookie gave an appreciative nod. “Well, I always said this place could use some fresh man candy. And he looks pretty munchable to me.” She tore her eyes off Dale and refocused on Grace. “There’s blood on the side of your face. What did you do, get in a fight or something?”

  “Cat scratched me,” Grace said.

  “Cat do that to your truck, too?”

  “It was a big cat.”

  Sookie smirked as she lifted a hand and smoothed back a strand of hair. For the first time, Grace noticed that the woman’s face was slightly flushed, as if she’d been exerting herself, or had just come in from the heat. “What do you want with Jesse?”

  “I just need to ask him a few questions.”

  “Is he in some kind of trouble?”

  “Not so far as I know. This is strictly routine.” Grace propped a foot on the bottom step.

  “Well, like I said, I don’t know when he’ll be back.”

  “Maybe I could ask you a question or two then,” Grace said. “Have you seen any strangers around here lately?”

  Sookie nodded toward the truck. “You mean besides Pretty over there?”

  “Yeah, besides him.”

  She lifted a shoulder.

  “Does that mean yes or no?”

  “It means I don’t rightly remember at the moment.”
>
  “Well, do you remember if Jesse was home last night?” Grace asked in a slightly goading tone.

  The blue eyes narrowed as Sookie folded her arms across her chest. “I thought you said he wasn’t in any trouble.”

  “He’s not. But there has been some trouble out by the canyon,” Grace told her. “I’d like to know if he saw anybody out there last night.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Sookie said. “I spent the night in town with a girlfriend. Sarah Beth Conroy, just in case you want to check or something.”

  “So you haven’t seen Jesse this morning?”

  “That’s what I said. Guess you and Studley Do-right made a trip out here for nothing.” She shot another glance at Dale. “There is such a thing as a telephone, you know. Look into it.”

  Grace took another step up the stairs as she fanned herself with her hand. “I’ve been out in this heat all morning. You think I could trouble you for a glass of ice water?”

  Sookie stood there—arms still folded over her chest—and stared at Grace. Then she turned without a word and marched into the house.

  She’d left the door open, so Grace took that as an invitation. She glanced back at Dale, inclined her head slightly toward the large garage that stood off to the side of the house, and then followed Sookie inside.

  Grace stood in the spacious foyer for a moment, letting her eyes adjust to the dimness. Off to the side of the front hall was a room Aggie had always called the parlor. Grace could detect a faint scent of fresh paint from that direction, and the hodgepodge of furniture crowded inside looked mostly brand new.

  Up the curving staircase and third door down the hallway was the room where Grace had lost her virginity. Not a bad memory, but one she didn’t particularly care to dwell on.

  She followed the clip-clop of Sookie’s boots down the hallway to the kitchen. There were changes here as well. Aggie’s wallpaper and Coppertone appliances—ancient even back then—had been replaced with shiny stainless steel and sleek granite.

  “Looks like Jesse is doing okay for himself,” Grace said. “What’s he up to these days?”