The Last Wilder

by Janis Reams Hudson

  Dane’s only answer was a grunt. Stan was right, it had been nice of her to help out. But that didn’t mean he had to like it.

  He looked at Donnie. “What are you still doing still here?”

  “Heck, Sheriff, you said I was supposed to…” He looked over at the woman, then quickly away.

  That’s what Dane had thought. He’d told Donnie to make sure she stayed put, so Donnie had stayed to make sure she did. Of course, she could have left at any time while Donnie was gone and Stan and Jim were downstairs.

  She wouldn’t have gotten far without her car, and on crutches. She must have realized that she was good and stuck. Dane couldn’t think of any other reason she stayed, given her eagerness to depart his company last night.

  “Thanks for staying, Donnie,” Dane said. “I appreciate it. Consider it overtime.”

  “Hey, thanks, Sheriff.”

  “Don’t mention it. You can take off now. Ace?” Dane motioned for Ace to follow him as he started toward his office, and the woman waiting there for him.

  Dane stopped before her and made a sweeping motion toward the door with his arm. “After you, Ms. Smith.”

  She batted her eyes. “Why, thank you, Sheriff.” She turned and made her way on her crutches to one of the wing chairs before his desk.

  He motioned for Ace to take the other wing chair, then went behind his desk and sat down.

  She smiled at Ace, then glanced down at the purse he carried in his hand. “Not that I think your masculinity suffers any from your carrying a purse,” she told him, nearly laughing, “but it really doesn’t go with those boots.” She held her hand out. “I’ll take it now. Thanks for bringing it.”

  Before he handed over the purse, Ace looked to Dane.

  Dane nodded, and Ace passed it over.

  “This means you brought my car to town?” she asked Dane.

  “Thank Ace. He drove it in. This is Ace Wilder, by the way. It was his land you were trespassing on last night.”

  She eyed Ace with a look that was half surprise, half mistrust. “Sheriff,” she said, “I told you, I didn’t know I was on private property.”

  Dane raised one finger. “Hold that thought.” He turned to the computer beside him and logged onto the Internet. In less than a minute he had what he was looking for.

  “Ace, I’d like you to meet Stacey C. Landers, of Cheyenne.”

  The woman before him nearly came out of her chair. Outrage radiated from every inch of her. “You opened my purse? You opened my purse and went through it? How dare—”

  Dane held up a hand to stop her. “I didn’t open your purse. First, in case you’ve forgotten, you told me before I left to call you Stacey.” Right before you kissed the hell out of me.

  “I did not,” she claimed.

  Dane arched a brow. It was entirely possible that she didn’t remember demanding that he kiss her, then taking matters into her own hands. He didn’t much care for that idea, but it was possible.

  “You did,” he told her. “But even if you hadn’t, I checked your license tag. Just now. On the computer. You saw me do it. The tag was in the trunk with your purse. I put it back on the bumper where it belongs, by the way. It’s against the law to drive without one.”

  With her lips drawn up like she’d been sucking on a green persimmon, she glared at him. Then she sighed and threw her hands in the air. “Okay, I’m Stacey Landers. You got me, copper. Now what are you going to do with me?”

  “The answer depends on how forthcoming you are.”

  “Forthcoming with what?”

  “Answers to the questions I’m about to ask you.”

  She grinned, but there was tension behind it. “You gonna grill me, copper?”

  “Last night I asked you what you were doing out there on private property. I want a straight answer.”

  She opened her mouth, but he cut her off.

  “Before you go giving me any more nonsense about looking for night-blooming cactus you should be aware that we know cattle rustlers hit the Flying Ace last night, about a half mile from where you parked your car. You’re in big trouble, lady. I suggest you start talking.”

  Chapter Four

  Stacey could do no more than gape at the sheriff for a long moment. “Rustlers?” Her voice felt as raspy as it sounded in her ears. “Those men were stealing cattle?”

  “Are you going to tell me you weren’t helping them?” the sheriff demanded.

  “Helping them?” Stacey cried. “I spent half the night hiding from them. If it hadn’t been for them being in my way, I would have been gone long before you came by.”

  “What do you mean, they were in your way?”

  “Just what I said.” Oh, she wanted to wipe that look of suspicion and disbelief off his face. She’d never been treated this way—as if she were some sort of criminal—in her life. But then, under the circumstances, she couldn’t exactly say she blamed him. The entire situation stank to high heaven, and she was right smack in the middle of it.

  She’d like to wring Gran’s neck for getting her into this, but at the same time she was thankful that it wasn’t Gran sitting here with her foot throbbing while the sheriff put the thumbscrews to her.

  “Explain,” Powell said. “What men? How were they in your way?”

  Stacey swallowed. This was a little more than she’d been prepared to deal with. Cattle rustling was serious business, as in felony. She would keep Gran’s secret for as long as she could, but if push came to shove, Stacey would spill whatever was necessary to stay clear of anything to do with cattle rustling.

  She swallowed again. “It was just before full dark,” she said, replaying the event in her mind. “I was…out walking, like I said, and I crested a ridge, and there they were.”

  “There who were? What did you see?”

  “There was a big tractor-trailer rig. A semi, you know? A cattle hauler. And there was a pickup with a horse trailer behind it. They used two horses. And they had this pipe fencing set up to funnel the cattle into the back of the big trailer.”

  “How many men?”

  “I’m not sure. There were the two on horseback and two others that I saw.”

  “If you saw them again, would you be able to identify them?”

  “Probably not the two on horseback. They had their hats pulled low and one of them wore a bandanna over his face, like an Old West bank robber.”

  “What about the other two?”

  Stacey didn’t even have to think. “I’d recognize them.”

  “You’d be able to identify them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could you describe them to a police sketch artist?”

  “Yes.”

  The sheriff leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. He studied her as if she were a bug under a microscope. He was, she assumed, trying to decide whether or not she was telling the truth.

  That was exactly what Dane was attempting to determine. If she was in cahoots with the rustlers, she could easily “identify” or “describe” the wrong men and throw Dane off the scent. And if she wasn’t in cahoots with them, what the hell had she been doing out there? That was a question she had yet to answer with anything he could believe.

  He had asked her before, several times. This time he’d go at it sideways. “What did you mean, you had to hide from them because they were in your way?”

  “Just what I said. I needed to cross the area where they were parked. I had to hide behind some rocks, until my legs went numb waiting for them to leave.”

  “Why?” Dane asked.

  She heaved a sigh, as if to say the answer should be obvious even to an imbecile. “So they wouldn’t see me.”

  “No, why did you need to cross that particular area?”

  “Because I was the chicken and it was the road.” She bared her teeth and batted her lashes. “I wanted to get to the other side.”

  “Your sarcasm is misplaced, Ms. Landers,” Dane warned her. “Cattle rustling is a felony.
”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “Were you their lookout?”

  “Of course not,” she cried.

  “Their scout, maybe? You sneaked around and found the best spot for them?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  From the corner of his eye Dane saw Ace frown and narrow his eyes. “What’s on your mind?” Dane asked.

  Ace slowly turned his head and looked at the woman. He took a long look, clear down to her feet. Then he looked at Dane with a half smile. Reaching for the cell phone on his belt, he said, “Hold that thought.”

  Ace placed a call by pressing a single button on the phone. That told Dane he was calling someone he called often. One of the family, probably.

  “It’s me,” Ace said into the phone. “How’d you make out on the trail? Uh-huh. Lost it, huh? Take a run up to the cemetery and see if you don’t pick it up. And while you’re there…yeah. Call me as soon as you know.”

  Dane didn’t need an explanation. He and Ace both eyed Stacey with new speculation.

  The Flying Ace ranch had its own private cemetery where family members and longtime employees were buried. Dane had heard the story more than once from the Wilders about the time when Ace was a boy and Stoney, their foreman, found a dead man out on the range. The man had no identification on him; the sheriff back then apparently tried for months to figure out who the man was, but never did. Meanwhile, King Wilder, Ace’s father, had the man buried with a blank headstone in the family cemetery.

  Since then, two or three times a year, someone had been sneaking up to the cemetery and leaving flowers and other items on the stranger’s grave. The Wilders had never been able to learn who was doing it, only that whoever it was hiked in from the road rather than driving past the ranch headquarters.

  Hiked in from the road, just as had one Stacey C. Landers.

  Beneath his and Ace’s steady gazes, the woman in question stared resolutely at the corner of Dane’s desk.

  “You’re awfully quiet all of a sudden,” Dane said to her.

  She glanced up, then away. “I’ve got nothing to say.”

  “Ace pegged it, didn’t he?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “What was it this time?” Dane asked. “Flowers?”

  She gave a blank, deadpan look. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m curious about something,” Dane said.

  “I’m sure you are,” she muttered.

  “Why didn’t you tell me last night that you saw men stealing cattle?”

  “How was I supposed to know they were stealing them?” she cried. “I watch the news and read books. I know ranchers haul cattle around all the time. I thought it was him.” She waved a hand toward Ace.

  “You thought it was Ace? One of the men you saw looked like him?”

  “No, none of them looked like him.” She said it as though any simpleton should know better. “I just thought somebody was moving their own cattle to someplace else.”

  “In the dark?”

  “It wasn’t quite dark yet. It never occurred to me they were rustlers. Rustlers.” She let out a short, wry chuckle. “In my experience, rustlers are bad guys in old black-and-white Westerns, not real people.”

  “Don’t I wish,” Dane said. “But if you thought these men were legitimate, why did you hide from them?”

  Again she looked at him as though she had serious doubts about his intelligence. When she spoke, she pronounced each word slowly and distinctly. “So they wouldn’t know I was there.”

  “Why didn’t you want anyone to know you were there? You already told me you had no idea you were on private property.”

  “I also told you my name was Carla Smith.”

  “Yeah.” Dane sat back again and folded his arms across his chest. “You did. Why?”

  “Because I wasn’t hurting anything and I didn’t figure it was any of your business what my name was, or what I was doing out there.”

  “What were you doing out there?”

  For someone who could fire back an answer as fast as anyone Dane had ever seen, she could clam up just as fast.

  He resisted the urge to swear, but just barely. “Since you’ve lied about everything else all night long, maybe you’re still lying. Maybe you were working with the rustlers. Have you ever been arrested? Keep in mind that I can check that out easily enough.”

  The glare she shot him might have felled a lesser man. Dane prided himself on taking it without a blink.

  “No,” she informed him, ice forming on every word. “I have never been arrested. Check all you want.”

  “What,” he asked her again, “were you doing out there last night?”

  Again she spoke slowly, clearly, pronouncing each word with care. “Looking for night-blooming cactus.”

  Dane pursed his lips. It was surely perverse of him to like a woman—a suspect—who could sit there and lie to him, but damn if he wasn’t liking her more by the minute. “Did you know that the tops of your ears turn red when you lie?”

  With cheeks flaming, she gave her head a shake until her hair covered her ears.

  Beside her, Ace chuckled. “If you two will excuse me, I think now’s a good time for me to help myself to some county coffee. Anybody else want some?”

  “Yes, please,” Stacey said.

  “Count me in,” Dane answered.

  While Ace Wilder was out of the room, Stacey listened as the sheriff placed a long-distance call and spoke to someone about getting a sketch artist to come work with her on sketches of the cattle rustlers. She heard him offer to drive her to Cheyenne so the artist wouldn’t have to travel. Stacey held her breath, hoping against hope that he would do just that. The sooner she got away from Dane Powell the better she would like it. If he took her to Cheyenne she would do her thing with the sketch artist and that would be that. Once Dane left, these disturbingly hot, itchy feelings inside her would go away.

  But apparently the idea of taking her to Cheyenne didn’t work. When the sheriff hung up the phone, he told her it would be a couple of days before anyone could come.

  “A couple of days?” she protested. “You don’t mean to keep me here that long.”

  He shrugged. “You can’t drive yet, not with that ankle. You’re more or less stuck here anyway. We’ve got a nice little motel just down the street. I’m sure they’ve got room for you. Unless, of course, you prefer a cell in the back room.”

  “You’re not locking me up.” She practically growled the words.

  “Not if I don’t have to. But even if you’re not a suspect—and that’s still iffy—you’re a material witness to a felony, and I need you to ID the rustlers. So you’ll stay here for the time being.”

  “Why couldn’t we go to Cheyenne and get it over with?” she asked, a touch of desperation creeping into her voice.

  “Because their software is being upgraded and everyone who uses it is in training.”

  “Whatever happened to the old-fashioned artists—the ones who actually draw things without the help of a computer?”

  “Oh, the state bureau’s got one of those, but he’s up in Gillette. They’ve had some man hanging around an elementary school up there, spooking the kids. He’s working with them to come up with a likeness.”

  “I guess,” Stacey said, “in the overall scheme of things, some pervert hanging around a grade school is a little more important than cattle rustlers.”

  “Something like that.”

  Conversation ran out, but that didn’t keep the sheriff from watching every breath she took, every move she made.

  Stacey stared resolutely at the front corner of his desk. She refused to look up and meet that mocking grin she knew she would find on Dane Powell’s face. Or more accurately, that mouth she swore she could still taste.

  Stacey had never been a good liar, but she thought she’d been pulling it off pretty well until he found out her real name. If only she hadn’t fallen and
hurt herself last night when he’d blinded her with his flashlight.

  If only she hadn’t let Gran talk her into coming out to Wyatt County in the first place.

  Yeah, yeah, if only.

  Okay, she was here, albeit half-crippled, and under suspicion. All she had to do was figure a way out of this mess and she could be gone. Somehow.

  Obviously she was going to have to cooperate with the sheriff. At least, as much as her word to Gran would allow.

  Of course, she’d promised Gran she wouldn’t be seen by anyone, and she’d sure blown that. Which raised a question in her mind.

  She lifted her head and looked at the sheriff. “Just out of curiosity, what made you come looking for me with your handy-dandy little flashlight last night, anyway?”

  One corner of his mouth quirked, and his eyes danced. “Police business. And I’ll have you know that’s a county-issue, heavy-duty, industrial strength Maglite.”

  “Ah.”

  “Ah?”

  Stacey smirked. “A testosterone flashlight.”

  He chuckled. “Good one, Ms. Landers.”

  “Oh, please. Aren’t we friends? You can call me Stacey.”

  “Or Carla?”

  She gave her eyelid muscles another workout and batted her eyes. “Stacey will be fine. Dane.”

  “If you’re not going to tell me what you were doing on the Flying Ace last night, you can call me Sheriff Powell.”

  “I guess that answers that,” she said fatally.

  “Answers what?”

  “We’re definitely not friends.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” His voice slid low and deep, sending shivers down her spine—shivers of heat that were somehow reflected in the blue of his eyes when he looked at her. “You seemed to like me well enough last night.”

  Moisture pooled in Stacey’s mouth until she had to swallow or drool. She chose to swallow. “I don’t…”

  “Don’t remember?” His smile spoke of intimate secrets and stole her breath. “I’m not surprised. You were pretty much out of it from that pain pill when you grabbed me.”

  “When I grabbed you?”

  “Don’t worry.” His smile widened. “I didn’t mind at all. In fact, you can feel free to grab me and kiss me again—”