Chapter 7
There weren’t many options for a pack of kids on the run in Wynott. The town was one of those blink-and-you’ll-miss-it dots on the map, marking the point where Route 35 met State Road 267. The two roads merged into one two-lane highway bordered by a bar, a post office, and a hardware store. The other side of the street boasted a junk shop bearing a sign that promised “Antiques and Collectables,” a few Victorian homes clinging desperately to gentility, and Phoenix House, along with a couple of tumbledown garages whose gas pumps had been torn out years ago.
Both the quantity and quality of the houses petered out toward the east. The residents’ efforts at tidy lawns and flower gardens kept things festive, but the flowers were leggy and sparse, having cooked through the hot summer. Any night now, the first frost would end their suffering.
At the very edge of town were two ramshackle brick garages, followed by a sad little park with rusty swings and a teeter-totter. Beyond the park was a gas station with a mini mart. The last few structures at the edge of town had fallen down altogether, leaving only a few piles of sunbaked boards and crumbling stone foundations. It was as if the town aged, declined, and died right in front of travelers’ eyes as they headed east toward civilization.
There was no sign of a gang of boys in any direction. In fact, Wynott looked like a ghost town, deserted and baked to a crisp, presided over by a rusting water tower that bore the legend “Why Not Wynott” in faded black lettering, a remnant of the town’s more optimistic days.
When they reached the sidewalk, Sierra turned to face Joshua. Crouching down to his level, she looked him in the eye. “Where did they go, Joshua?”
His back stiffened and he folded his arms over his chest. “I promised not to tell.”
“This is one of those times it’s okay to break a promise.”
He remained mute, staring her straight in the eye with a combination of mute defiance and fear.
“Don’t make the kid break his promise,” Ridge said. “We’ll find them. It’s not like there are a lot of places for them to go.”
She ignored him. “Come on, Josh.”
Ridge kicked a stone and watched it skitter over the cracks in the sidewalk. It was obvious that Josh lived by the code of the kid—which was a whole lot like the code of the cowboy but with less ambiguity. To kids, right and wrong were black and white. The world would be a better place if grown-ups had the moral fiber of nine-year-olds.
“Josh, I need to know,” Sierra urged.
“Leave him alone.” Ridge’s tone was sharper than he’d intended. “It won’t take us more than twenty minutes to find them.”
Sierra stood, setting her hands on her hips and glaring up at him. “Do you know what can happen to a bunch of ten-year-old boys in twenty minutes?”
“Do you know how it feels to break your promise to your buddies?”
“I told you, these boys need to respect you,” she hissed. “And you need to set an example.”
“By encouraging them to break their promises?”
He answered her fiery glare with a frown then looked down at Joshua, who had fortunately been distracted by a spider in the empty window of the brick garage next door. The kid watched it with exaggerated attention, as if the bug’s progress was far more important than the two adults fighting on the sidewalk right beside him. Ridge wondered how many times Josh had heard adults fight, how many times he’d pretended not to hear.
Sierra seemed to remember Josh at the same instant, and when she turned back to Ridge, she’d changed her posture and softened her scowl. But her eyes met his in a cold challenge.
“If you’re going to work with these guys, you need to lead by example, and that means doing the right thing.”
“And keeping your promises isn’t the right thing?”
“Usually it is.”
Taking her arm, he led her slightly away from Josh, who was still watching the spider.
“Do you remember being a kid?” he hissed.
“Sure.”
“Do you remember how random adults’ decisions were? They never seemed to have anything to do with right or wrong. It was all about convenience.” He was speaking low and fast so Josh wouldn’t hear, and Sierra stepped closer. His lips almost brushed the hair curling around her ear. “You’re right. Kids need to be able to respect you. And that means you have to follow the rules too. So don’t you think we ought to keep our promises?”
She shot him a look that was half anger and half confusion. “Not—not right now,” she said.
Ridge bent down so his lips almost brushed her cheek. She took a step back, probably thinking he was sniffing her again. But he just wanted to make sure—very sure—that she heard what he was about to say. Her, not Josh.
“Do you know how many promises this kid’s seen broken in his life?” he asked. “All of them—the ones that mattered, anyway. Every single one.”
“How do you know?” she asked.
“Because otherwise he wouldn’t be here.”
***
Sierra hated to admit it, but the cowboy had a point.
Not that she was ready to admit she was wrong. But she could remember a few broken promises herself, and how much they’d hurt. A lot of broken promises, actually. When it came to her mother, it would be easier to enumerate the promises that had been kept.
“While we’re standing here arguing, the boys are probably finding a dozen ways to hurt themselves. Why can’t you just help me find the kids?”
Ridge didn’t answer; he just stood there with his jaw squared and his eyes narrowed to slits. Joshua turned away from the spider he’d been watching and looked up at Ridge then set his face carefully in that exact same mulish expression, doubling the amount of male disgust aimed at Sierra.
Flinging up her hands, she turned away. “Why don’t you go back to your ranch and rope some cows or something?”
She took a few steps away, taking a turn with Josh’s spider. She didn’t know why Ridge’s refusal to help felt like a betrayal or why her eyes were tearing up.
Oh, yes she did. Back there in the closet, she’d felt a stirring that told her coming to Wynott might not be a death sentence for her love life after all. And that had made her happy and hopeful, despite the fact that she’d been hoping Wynott would kill her love life. The little town’s empty streets were supposed to be a sanctuary, not a sentence. You couldn’t make relationship mistakes when there was nobody to have a relationship with.
But Ridge Cooper was different from any man she’d ever met.
Nothing’s going to hurt you. Not while I’m around.
She knew she could take care of herself. But if she had a man who said that kind of thing and really meant it, she’d be able to step out into the world more confidently. She’d have backup, and that would make her braver.
Turning away from the spider, which was disgusting anyway, she joined Josh and Ridge. The man had knelt down to look the boy in the eye. He’d put his dirty old hat back on, and looking down at his broad shoulders hunched over the boy, she felt a twinge of tenderness that surprised her.
“Good job being a man, Josh.” Ridge tousled the fine, blond hair. “Men keep their promises.”
Joshua turned and blessed Ridge with a radiant smile, hero worship shining in his eyes.
Tears stung behind her eyes again and she wished, for the umpteenth time, that she could shut off her emotions. Most nights she went to bed feeling wrung out like an old dishcloth. She’d been in police work for three years, social work for four, and if she didn’t toughen up, she wouldn’t make it through the fifth.
Blinking fast, she scanned the street again. Find the boys. That was priority number one.
“Hey.” Ridge nudged the side of her high-heeled boots with his toe. To her surprise, his mulish expression had softened. “Keeping promises matters to me. Especially with kids. I couldn’t let that go.”
“I get it,” she said. “Let’s just find them, or we won’t have any kids left
to make promises to.”
“If I was them, I’d go to the Mini Mart.” Ridge turned to Josh. “They got ice cream there?”
“Yep. And sodas.” The kid turned his worshipful gaze back to the cowboy. “They got beer too, if you want some.”
Sierra winced. She’d read Joshua’s file, and the cowboy was dead right about the promise breaking. The kid’s dad hung on longer than the mom, but he’d been a mean drunk who took out his heartbreak over his marriage on his own child. It made her burn inside just to think of it. With his pale skin, small frame, and big glasses, Joshua was about as helpless a victim as you could find.
“You think your buds are having ice cream or soda?” Ridge asked.
“Neither,” the kid said eagerly. “They’re down behind the junk shop, playing in the cars.” The second he said it, he clapped his hand over his mouth. Tears sprang to his eyes. “I told,” he said. “I wasn’t supposed to tell.”
“Well, I kind of tricked you, so that doesn’t count.” Ridge ruffled the boy’s hair in an easy, fatherly way. “You did your best, right?”
“Yeah.” Joshua nodded, but he looked miserable, and his Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “Just stupid.”
“You’re not stupid. I’m sneaky, that’s all.” Ridge pointed a finger at the boy’s shirt, just below his chin. “What’s that on your shirt?”
Josh looked down and the cowboy quickly brought up his finger to flick the boy’s nose. “Gotcha,” he said. “See? Sneaky. Now that you know it, I bet I won’t be able to fool you again.”
Josh grinned, the trauma of breaking his promise forgotten. “Nope, you won’t fool me again.”
“I’m going to try, though.”
“No way.” The kid shook his head so hard the glasses seemed in danger of flying off his face. “You won’t do it.”
Sierra watched the boy and man walk side by side, the boy struggling to match the man’s long stride, the glow on his face making the usually somber child look as happy as she’d ever seen him. As they reached the junk shop, she heard the sound of boyish voices rising from behind the fence that obscured the backyard.
They’d found them. The worst of the emergency was over. And Josh was smiling.
Maybe the cowboy wasn’t so bad after all.
Chapter 8
The junk shop was one of the last properties on the left as you headed east, a single-story shack with a sagging front porch. If the place had ever been painted, the Wyoming winds had sandblasted off every stroke of color, leaving the warped boards gray and parched by the sun. Old tools were nailed to the front wall: a rusted blade from a circular saw, an assortment of branding irons, and a few dented hubcaps. Standing guard over the collection was a whimsical, wide-eyed tin man welded together from car parts. In New York, they’d call him folk art. Here in Wynott, he was just another piece of redneck yard trash.
Sierra looked up into the carburetor man’s glassy eyes and shivered. “Who lives here?”
“She doesn’t like people talking about her,” Ridge said.
“It’s a woman?” Sierra tried not to buy into gender stereotypes, but there was nothing feminine about this place.
“Why not?”
Why not, indeed. She was starting to think the town had been aptly named.
“Will she mind the kids being here?”
Ridge shrugged. “I doubt it. She won’t be too happy about us coming around, though.”
A high fence bordered the backyard, and Sierra started to reach for the complicated latch—another masterpiece of redneck engineering constructed of a claw hammer and a complex assortment of scrap metal. Whoever owned the junk shop was a whiz with a welder, but Sierra didn’t have time to appreciate that kind of skill. She just wanted her boys back, preferably undamaged by the jungle of rusty metal behind the fence.
As she started to lift the latch, Ridge put his hand on top of hers.
“Wait.” He put a finger to his lips then touched his ear.
She paused and heard the murmur of voices coming from behind the fence. One rang out higher than the others.
“Lookit me!” She recognized Frankie’s voice. “I’m goin’ to Vegas, baby!”
Standing on tiptoe, she peeked over the fence and decided she’d have to check the records and make sure all the boys were up to date on their shots. There were eighteen potential puncture wounds and a dozen cases of tetanus back there, along with rusty cars, washing machines, industrial equipment, and piles of bald tires. Grass sprouted from empty engine cavities, and unidentifiable vines obscured stacks of miscellaneous machinery. Over it all ruled a monstrous Caterpillar tractor, its bright yellow paint nearly obliterated by rust, its long, crooked arm hoisting a toothed bucket from which sprouted more weeds.
The boys had piled into a defunct Chevy Bel Air like a family setting out on vacation. Frankie was at the wheel, which was appropriate since he was always the ringleader when it came to getting into trouble. As always, he was wearing his favorite hat—an ancient fedora that had probably belonged to some staid businessman in the fifties. It was darkened by age and stained with mold, and made dark-eyed, olive-skinned Frankie look like a Little Rascal playing gangster. Isaiah sat beside him in the passenger seat, while Jeffrey and Carter slouched in the back like a couple of junior mob enforcers. All they needed was cigars all around and a body in the trunk.
“How come you’d go to Vegas?” That was Isaiah, challenging everyone’s ideas as usual. He had a quick intelligence that would take him far if he ever had the opportunity to use it for something other than finding trouble. “Why don’t you go to New York or LA?”
“’Cause I could make it in Vegas,” Frankie said. “I could be a dealer.”
“A drug dealer? Man, you’re stupid,” Isaiah said.
Sierra resisted the urge to do a fist pump. Isaiah’s father was in prison for dealing drugs, and like most of the boys, he clung to a fierce love for his absent father. She’d been worried he’d follow his dad down that dead-end road, but maybe the system had succeeded in breaking the cycle for once.
“You need money to be a drug dealer, and you don’t got any money,” Isaiah continued.
Sierra’s shoulders sagged. So much for breaking the cycle.
“Not drugs,” Frankie said. “I’d deal cards. Blackjack, in a casino. Or I could be a bouncer.”
“You’re too much of a punk to be a bouncer. You’d probably be a backup dancer. For Cher,” Carter teased. He was a big boy, not fat but large, and he probably wanted the bouncer job for himself. Jeffrey, who sat beside him, never seemed to take up any space at all. The boy was so quiet Sierra was afraid he would disappear someday, just fade away. She didn’t know what kind of tragedies festered in the boy’s memory, but something had stolen his voice.
“I hate Cher,” Frankie said. “I want to do backup for somebody hot. Rihanna, maybe.”
The boys jeered as Ridge and Sierra struggled not to laugh.
“My mom likes Rihanna,” Carter protested. “We’re maybe going to go to a concert sometime when she gets out of the center.”
“Your mom’s never getting out,” Frankie scoffed. Sierra winced at the casual cruelty—although from what she’d read in Carter’s file, Frankie was probably right.
“She is too.” Carter squared his shoulders and thrust out his jaw. “She’s really committed to her recovery this time.”
Other boys knew baseball stats or rock lyrics. Sierra’s boys knew the language of therapy and addiction. Sometimes it seemed as if they’d been the caretakers and their parents the children, living in an upside-down world.
Frankie draped one hand casually over the steering wheel, like a bored commuter, and turned to Isaiah. “Where would you go?”
Sierra gripped the fence, her knuckles whitening. This was an answer she wanted to hear. She wasn’t sure what Isaiah wanted out of life, and that made it hard to motivate him. Pudding Snacks would only get her so far, and she was eager to hear what his dream destination would be.
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br /> “No place.” His dark brows arrowed downward, turning his delicate, almost elfin face into the embodiment of a bad attitude. “I’d just drive. Drive and drive and drive. Away from here.” He scrunched down in his seat and stared out the window. “Away from all of you.”
“I’d go back to Millersville.” Sierra glanced down at Josh, who was whispering his own answer to the question. He seemed to be talking to the fence posts, oblivious of Ridge and Sierra beside him. “I’d go help out my dad, ’cause there’s a lot of work to do around the place.”
Sierra felt her heart break a little. Josh’s dad had done everything possible to kill his son’s affection and maybe even the boy himself. But children needed to love their parents, and it was amazing how long they’d cling to a version of reality that let them justify that love.
“You all don’t have nowhere to go either,” Isaiah said to the boys in the car. “You’re all just talk.”
As usual, his bad attitude silenced the rest of the boys. Sierra glanced at Ridge, and he nodded. The heavy latch opened with a clang and she strode into the junkyard, followed by Ridge and Josh.
“Hey,” Carter said. “Who’s—oh, shit, guys. We’re busted.” He ducked back into the car, banging his head on the roof. “Damn it, Josh told. I knew he would. I’m going to kill that kid.”
***
Ridge had once seen a rabbit caught by a coyote. At the moment it felt the beast’s jaws clamp on its neck, the normally silent rabbit had let out a high, thin cry that pierced his heart. That was the sound Josh made now, as the boys turned and glared at him.
Ridge stifled the urge to put a protective hand on the boy’s shoulder. The gesture would put the boy solidly on the side of the adults—a move that would make his life hell as long as he stayed with this group of boys. Instead, he shot a glance at Sierra, to see if she’d seen how much promises meant to this little gang.
How to Handle a Cowboy Page 4
