Sarah shifted her boots on the gravel under her feet. “If you think she’s too busy, that’s all right.”
“Too busy?” The man shook his head so hard his jowls flapped. “Joy would welcome a social call. Let me ask her. What section are you and the kids sitting in?”
“What section?” Sarah glanced at Eric.
To the man, it probably looked like she just couldn’t recall. Eric knew she was feeling the same jolt at being caught in a lie that rattled through his own stomach. But there was more implied in the man’s comment than a question they couldn’t answer. He grasped her hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “Is Joy Hodgeson here at the rodeo?” he asked.
“She don’t miss a night. She’s up in the announcer’s booth. Acts as kind of a secretary up there, keeping track of the entrants and such.” He pointed to the announcer’s booth across the arena in the top of the Buzzard’s Roost. “One of the reasons she moved back, I think. They have a grand rodeo in Cheyenne, but it ain’t Cody.”
Sarah nodded. “Good memories. I can appreciate that. I’d love to meet her. Is there any way we can pop in to talk to her? It’ll only take a second, and I’ve always wanted to see what everything looks like from up there.”
Those narrowed eyes again. “I knew you were from around here.”
Eric sucked in a breath. He groped for a distraction. Something he could say. A question he could ask. A way to take back control of the situation. This time, he came up empty.
“You know how people say they never forget a face? That’s me. At least my wife swears it.” He looked at her as if waiting for her to fess up.
This time, Sarah gave him a relaxed smile that should have had her up for some kind of acting award. “I ran the barrels when I was a teenager. I have a lot of good memories of this place as well. I’d love to talk to Mrs. Hodgeson.”
“Can I tell her your name?”
There it was. Eric hoped she could come up with something. Because even if Mr. Never-forget-a-face didn’t recognize them from photos on TV, he might have heard their names enough over the past two days that it all would click into place.
“Mary Ann Johnston was my maiden name. I didn’t win much, so I doubt you’d remember. I sure had a good time, though.” Emotion infused her voice—too much real feeling for anyone to fake.
Eric almost did a double take.
“Mary Ann…Mary Ann…you’ve grown up a lot, young lady. And here I was thinking you looked like that Trask girl. Well, follow me, Joe and Mary Ann.” He started walking back around the track that curved the arena’s edge, motioning them to follow with a wave of his arm.
Sarah glanced at Eric, relief plain on her face.
Eric seconded that feeling. He didn’t know how she’d come up with the name, but it had worked. He’d been caught flat-footed that time, and she’d pulled it out. The feeling that someone had his back, so to speak, that if he faltered she’d step in, was a new experience, one he didn’t entirely know how to process.
Eric and Sarah followed the man up a steel staircase and onto a walkway. A day and a half had passed since Randy had been shot, but it seemed like they’d been on the run without sleep for a week. The setting sun glowed orange off the Absarokas to the west, its reflection making the Shoshone River look as if it were on fire. Below, horses, steers and bulls milled in steel-pipe pens, waiting for their turn in the arena. The announcer’s voice boomed out the name of the first bareback rider on the program, and a roar went up from the crowd.
They had one more person to talk to. One more role to play, and hopefully they’d get the answers they needed. He just prayed at least one of them was still sharp enough to get the job done.
JOY HODGESON WASN’T anything like what Sarah had imagined. Shockingly white hair cropped short and stylish and dressed in Wranglers and a form-fitting western shirt with hot pink piping, the woman looked far younger than she had to be. And her energy…the way she was flying around, organizing entry forms, and feeding them to the announcer, made Sarah feel even more tired than she already was.
After making introductions, Smithy stepped to the side of the narrow staircase outside the booth’s door. “Go on in. There’s not enough room in there for me, too. Besides, that place gives me claustrophobia and vertigo. It’s like a damn tree house without the tree.”
Eric motioned for Sarah to go first and the two of them crammed in to the little room. The place smelled of new paint and cigarettes. Smithy closed the door behind them. The announcer didn’t even turn around, his ball cap pulled down to his brows, his attention glued to the action in the arena below.
“So what brings you two up to see me?” Joy managed to beam them a friendly smile at the same time as she organized entry forms for the next event and handed them to the announcer. Down in the arena, a man dressed as a ragged clown launched into a comedy routine.
“We have something you might want to take a look at.” Eric pulled out the belt buckle and handed it to the woman.
She stared at the tarnished silver and ran a fingertip over its gold lettering.
“Smithy said it might have belonged to your husband?” Sarah prodded.
“Yep. It’s Larry’s. Where did you get it?”
Sarah glanced at Eric, but she didn’t have to look to him to know the last thing either one of them wanted to do was give Joy a truthful answer to that question. “We found it out on the BLM.”
“Careless fool.” She handed it back to Eric. “It’s nice of you to return it, don’t get me wrong. I just…I’ve put that part of my life behind me. If you give me your name and number, I’ll have him call you if he ever comes looking for it.”
“When was the last time you saw your husband?”
“Oh, I threw him out over two years ago.”
Sarah didn’t have to spend much time counting the months to know the body in the crevasse probably hadn’t been there that long. She was no forensics expert, but she’d assume the bones would be clean and the smell gone after that amount of time in the elements. And the smell had definitely not been gone. “Smithy said you moved back to Cody not long ago. That you used to live in Cheyenne.”
The woman bobbed her head as she laid out the entrants on the table in front of the announcer. The man focused on his job, still not taking the time to spare them so much as a glance.
“I love Cheyenne, don’t get me wrong. But I only moved there because of Larry’s job. Cody is my home.”
“Where does Larry work?” Eric managed to make the question sound natural, as if they were merely having a casual conversation.
She waved her hands in front of her as if erasing words from the air. “He doesn’t work there anymore. Not long after our divorce, he up and quit his job. Here he just had to stay in Cheyenne instead of moving back with me, and yet he didn’t even wait to take advantage of the incentives for early retirement.” She shook her head and clucked her tongue as if the illogic of it still bothered her.
“What did he do for a living?” Sarah asked.
“Oh, he worked for the state. In the crime lab.”
“The crime lab?” She exchanged a look with Eric. “What did he do there?”
“He looked at fingerprints. It was a good job. But sometimes I wish I’d never encouraged him to go back to school. I wish we’d stayed right here and worked my folks’ ranch.”
Sarah tilted her head. “Why is that? It seems like a pretty good job.”
“It was. Not great money, but steady, good hours and health insurance. But that was before all those shows started on TV. You know, CSI and the like.”
Now Sarah wasn’t following her at all. “What about CSI?”
“Nothing against the show, but Larry started thinking he was one of those TV stars or something. He started talking with a writer. Having lunch.” She made air quotes with her fingers around the word lunch. “Getting a bit of a swelled head, I think. That’s when I left. He didn’t even try to talk me out of it. Probably had visions of dating some television st
ar in a low-cut blouse.”
A knock sounded on the door. Joy scootched past them and opened the door a crack. A man pushed a file of entries into Joy’s hand.
Eric pulled the brim of his hat down to shield his features and Sarah turned her face to the side. She gazed over the announcer’s shoulder, pretending to be studying a skit that two clowns—or bullfighters, as they liked to be called—performed to kill time while the announcer and Joy and all the people running things behind the scenes readied the next event’s entries. Best to be safe. There was always a chance whomever was at the door was more of a news hound than either Joy or Smithy.
The door thunked closed, and Sarah let out a heavy breath of relief.
Joy wedged herself through the tight space once again. “I got the breakaway roping here next, Billy.”
“All right.” The announcer turned, hand reaching for the file. He looked up at Eric…and froze.
Sarah’s blood froze with him.
Seemingly in slow motion, he reached for the microphone. He turned on the switch and leaned his lips close. “Security. I need security. Up here in the announcer’s booth. Hurry.”
Chapter Eleven
Eric grabbed Sarah’s arm, but he didn’t need to. She was already moving, throwing open the door, racing down the steel steps. They reached the main walkway and dashed past a concession stand. Their feet thundered on the steel grating.
Two men in Stetsons rounded the corner. Shoulder to shoulder, they nearly blocked the stairs.
Sarah slammed to a stop, Eric almost running in to her from behind. She whirled around, looked up at him, the whites of her eyes bright in the arena lights.
He had to get her out of here. He had to think.
The men started up the steps in unison, a wall of cowboy they couldn’t get around. Eric spun in the other direction. A man came at them from that direction, too. Striding out from the seats of The Buzzard’s Roost. Another entered the walkway behind him.
Eric had to do something now.
He grabbed the rail and looked over the edge. A maze of steel fence shown in the dimness, ten or fifteen feet below, chutes that returned bucking horses and bulls to the holding pens. He grabbed Sarah’s arm. “Over the edge.”
She nodded, no hesitation. Grabbing the rail, she swung a leg over the edge and jumped.
Eric followed. He hit the ground behind her. The impact sent a stab of pain through his foot and a shudder through his body. But the ground was soft, stirred up by hooves and padded with manure.
“Eric!” On her feet already, Sarah was moving for the gate. He struggled to his feet and followed.
Voices clamored behind them. The tramping of feet rumbled down the stairs.
Sarah half climbed, half vaulted one pipe gate, then another. She slipped over the last of the gates designed to funnel the bucking stock and disappeared into a holding pen.
Eric followed her path. Each time he jumped a gate and landed, his foot screamed. By the third one, his foot was numb.
Fine by him.
He raced across the churned-up ground of the pen. A loud snort sounded to his right. He glanced in the direction of the sound. A huge gray bull stared back.
Damn.
“Over here. Just run for it.”
He made for the sound of Sarah’s voice. Behind him, he could hear the animal. The beat of his hooves. The snort of his breath. He braced himself for goring horns.
Sarah stood near the fence. She flapped something in her hands, something…
The bull raced straight for her.
“No.” Eric veered to the side.
“Keep running! Jump the fence!” she yelled.
Her coat. That’s what she held. She waved it like she thought she was some damn Spanish bullfighter. As the bull drew close, she tossed it. It fluttered in the air. He stabbed into it with his horns and dashed it to the ground.
Sarah jumped for the fence. Ten feet down, Eric did, too. They clambered over. When their feet hit the ground on the other side, they raced for the back gate.
Men’s voices jangled behind them. Asking questions. Yelling directions. Someone shouted he’d called police.
Eric pushed his legs to move faster. When they’d arrived, a man in a cowboy hat had been watching the gate. No one was there now. Eric could only guess that he’d responded to the call for security. That he was one of the men pursuing them now.
Eric grasped the chain looped around the gate’s latch. He yanked it open and he and Sarah slipped through. He veered to the left, racing past the trailers and motor homes.
Sarah motioned to the jumble of rigs. “We—”
“Too obvious.” No way they could stow away aboard a random trailer now. Not with men combing the grounds for them, men who would be out of the stands and smack on their trail at any moment. It was the first place they’d look. “The river.”
They ran across the flat area as fast as they could, gravel shifting and scattering under their feet like marbles. The gravel ended and the ground grew rough. When they hit the spot where it started sloping down to the river, Eric dove for the dirt, pulling Sarah with him.
Behind them, shouting came closer, rising over the sound of the river’s rushing water. Eric scooped in breath after breath, trying to satisfy his hungry lungs. The faint odor of sulfur in the water hung in the back of this throat. “We’ll follow the river bed to the highway. We have to get out of here before the police arrive.”
Cheeks pink from their escape, Sarah nodded. Her eyes glowed with determination. Her dark hair swirled around her in the wind. She looked so alive and vibrant, his chest hurt.
He had to get her out of this mess. He had to find someplace safe. He looked at the rushing water. “Ready?”
Sarah nodded. “I’m right behind you.”
He jammed the black hat low to cover as much of his hair as he could and half crawled, half stumbled down the bank to the water, keeping his body as low to the ground as he could. Rock bit into his hands, his knees. He kept moving, Sarah right behind him.
Above the roar of the water and thunder of his pulse, voices rose in the night air. Somewhere a siren screamed.
They had no time to lose.
SARAH COULDN’T REMEMBER ever being so cold.
They followed the river until it flanked the highway. Most of the way, they were able to stay on the shore. But in some spots, the bank rose almost vertically from the water. Then, they had to plunge into the frigid river. Deeper than the stream that crossed through her ranch, the Shoshone’s current tumbled and swirled around them, fast and relentless. And even though she was soaked and scared and drained of any energy she had left, she was grateful to make it to the highway alive and not in the custody of police.
They followed West Yellowstone Avenue, and turned toward downtown. They needed to find a car or a place to hide, and the other direction only promised the reservoir and a road that dead-ended at the closed gates of Yellowstone. But still, walking into civilization made Sarah nervous.
She tried not to look behind her. Tried not to focus on the red and blue lights pulsing from the rodeo grounds. There wasn’t a lot of foot traffic in this stretch of Cody, making it hard to blend in. So they stayed off the highway, moving through ditches and along parking lots.
Eric reached out a hand to help her up a steep ditch and to a more level cluster of driveways leading to restaurants and motels, busy on a Saturday night. “You’re trembling. Cold?”
She nodded. But that wasn’t the half of it. The cold, the fear, the ebbing adrenaline…her list went on. But try as she might, she couldn’t stop shaking. It wasn’t within her grasp. Not any longer. The best she could do was stumble forward and pray Eric was in better shape.
He rubbed a hand over her back as they walked. “So if you were a tourist, where would you want to stay?”
She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye.
“Come on. Price is no object.” He gave her a smile that seemed a little tired and forced, but she had to ad
mit it was better than she could have done.
She could at least put in what effort she could muster. “The Irma,” she said, suggesting the famous hotel Buffalo Bill Cody named for his daughter.
“A sucker for history, eh?”
“You bet.”
A police car sped past, lights flashing red and blue.
Sarah sucked in a breath and tried her best to keep focused straight ahead, to look like she didn’t have a care in the world, not that she remembered what that felt like anymore.
“What would you have for dinner?”
She forced her mind back to Eric’s game. “A steak, of course. Baked potato with sour cream. A salad, ranch dressing.” Her stomach growled, right on cue.
“Steak, huh? Who would have guessed? I suppose a beef rancher is required to say that.”
“Hey, it’s real food, that’s what Layton always likes to say. How about you? You’re not going to choose seafood or quiche or something, are you?”
He didn’t answer. His steps slowed.
“What is it?”
“Not sure.”
They cleared the strip mall and walked to the next drive. A small restaurant sat off on its own at the back of the parking lot, a sign in front proclaiming it had the best steaks in town. The building was cute but older, built of rough-hewn logs and sporting a green roof that made Sarah think of kids’ Lincoln Logs. But unlike the restaurants they’d passed earlier, the lot in front was vacant and no lights shone from the interior.
Eric pointed to a sign on the front door announcing the restaurant was temporarily closed for renovation. “I can’t promise a room at the Irma, but I might be able to get you that steak.”
ERIC CARRIED A BUCKET of fried chicken the workers must have had left over from lunch and plopped it on the table. He added two dinner plates and linen napkins he’d found in the waiter’s aisle.
Rocky Mountain Fugitive Page 9
