Cold Case at Cardwell Ranch & Boots and Bullets

by B. J Daniels

  “Ella, I don’t know what—”

  “I found your photo albums, Mother. I know. That’s why I’m here. Right now I’m trying to lose the cold-case homicide detective who is as determined to talk to you as I am. Then I’m coming back and staying as long as it takes. You can’t run from this anymore. The truth has caught up to you.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “You can explain it all to me back at the bar or wherever it is that you stay when you’re in Hell and Gone.”

  “I had my reasons for what I did.” Her mother was crying now.

  “For keeping the place and your life there from everyone, including me? Or for killing Marvin Hanover?”

  “No, you can’t believe—”

  “I don’t know what to believe.” Ella heard the pain in her voice. She hadn’t realized how hurt she was about her mother’s secret life.

  As she glanced again in her rearview mirror, she feared that her mother wasn’t the only one who wanted to keep the past a secret. The truck from the bar was coming up fast behind the detective’s SUV.

  What she saw next made her let out a cry. By the time she got her truck stopped, her mother had disconnected.

  * * *

  Waco had seen the pickup’s driver make his move. He’d known it was only a matter of time, so he’d been ready. The front of the older-model truck slammed into the back of his SUV, but not hard enough to drive him off the road. He kept going, maintaining his speed, waiting to see what the driver would do next.

  Ahead of him, he saw Ella’s brake lights, and he swore. The last thing he needed was for her to stop now. Worse, he realized, was for her to turn around in the middle of the road and come back. But damn if that didn’t look like what she was planning.

  This time, the pickup smacked the back of his SUV with more speed and force, jarring Waco and making the vehicle shudder. The pickup’s driver was really starting to tick him off. He got the SUV under control and released his shotgun from the rack between the seats. This was going to get ugly, and the worst part was that it appeared Ella was determined to be in the middle of it. She was in the process of turning around and heading back this way. If he didn’t do something quickly...

  Hitting his brakes, he turned the wheel hard to the left. The SUV teetered for a moment, wanting to roll, just before he got it under control. The driver of the pickup hadn’t anticipated the move. Waco saw the man lay on his brakes as the patrol SUV was suddenly sitting sideways on the highway in front of him.

  Instinctively, the driver turned hard to the right, going off the road in a cloud of dirt. Waco grabbed his shotgun and jumped out. The pickup had come to rest wheel-well deep in the sagebrush and dirt thirty yards off the highway.

  As Waco started to leave the highway, the man jumped out, fired off two wild shots with a handgun in his direction and then ran off across the expanse. Waco considered going after the guy, but only for a moment as Ella came racing up in her pickup.

  * * *

  Ella got her truck stopped and jumped out. Waco Johnson stood at the edge of the road, shotgun dangling from one large hand, his Stetson cocked back as he looked at her.

  She’d known the man in the pickup was going to run Waco off the road. Maybe even kill him. When she’d seen the driver get out of his stuck pickup with a gun and start firing...

  “Are you all right?” Ella asked as she tried to still her racing heart after watching the pickup driver repeatedly crash into the back of the detective’s SUV. She’d feared that the man was going to kill Waco—even before he started shooting. That was when she’d realized he wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for her. She didn’t want his blood on her hands.

  “I’m fine. I thought you were going home?” he asked in that deep, low voice of his. It warmed her in a way that made her feel vulnerable, which was the last thing she wanted right now. Yet her heart was still hammering from what had happened. What could have happened.

  “You knew I wasn’t leaving.” She hesitated, surprised that she was about to give up the information even as she said it. “I just heard from my mother.”

  His gaze sharpened. “That so? She have anything interesting to say?”

  “Just what you would expect. She wants me to go home and pretend that I never came here.”

  Waco nodded. “I would imagine that’s about the same thing Helen wrote on our bar bill?”

  So he’d seen that, had he? “She said that if I stayed here, I would end up hurting my mother more than I could know.”

  “Your mother is wanted for questioning in a murder investigation,” he said. “What could you do that would hurt her worse?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “So she’s here.” He didn’t sound happy about that as he looked from Ella to the shotgun in his hand before heading back to his SUV. He deposited the shotgun in the rig and looked over the hood to see that she was still standing there. “I’m assuming we’re going back to Hell and Gone?”

  “What about the man who was trying to kill you?” she asked.

  “I think I recognize him from a drug case I was working in Butte. He probably thinks I’m here to take him in.” Waco shrugged. “At least he can’t shoot worth sh—Worth a damn.”

  “I suppose there’s no way I can convince you to leave?”

  He seemed to give it some thought before he shook his head. “It wouldn’t be chivalrous of me to leave you here alone, even if my reason for being here wasn’t to take your mother back for questioning.”

  “She didn’t kill Marvin Hanover.” Ella had hoped to put more conviction into her words.

  Waco shrugged. “Maybe not. But you should know that he didn’t die right away. He scratched your mother’s name into the rock wall at the bottom of the well. If his intent was to name his killer...well, then he did.”

  * * *

  Waco regretted his words as all the color drained from Ella’s face. She wanted to believe the best of her mother. He hadn’t wanted to take that away from her. “I’m sorry.”

  She quickly recovered, but he could still see fear in her green eyes. Of course, her mother would be a suspect, given that Stacy had been married to Marvin when he disappeared. But she hadn’t known about the writing on the wall, the one thing that could get Stacy convicted of murder.

  The sun hung low in the sky, painting them with a golden patina. He looked at Ella and felt something snap inside him. Damn, but the woman was beautiful. Not just beautiful. Smart, sexy—the whole package. The thought struck him like a crowbar upside his head. A man would have to be a fool not to have noticed.

  He’d noticed, but it hadn’t hit him at a primal level before. Now that it had, there was no going back, he realized.

  “What?” Ella asked, frowning at him.

  He stared at her, hoping he hadn’t said the words out loud.

  “You were saying something about the hotel?” she asked.

  Hotel. “Given all the traffic backed up with my SUV sideways in the highway, I suppose we should move our rigs, huh.”

  She gave him a blank look since there was no traffic. “Sarcasm? Really?”

  Without another word, Ella turned and walked back to her pickup. He watched her climb in behind the wheel before he climbed behind his. Starting the motor, he pulled to the side of the road and let her lead the way back into Hell and Gone. That revelation about Ella had come with an ache like nothing he’d ever felt. He wanted to protect her at the same time he wanted to ravish her.

  Waco shook his head, telling himself that he needed food. It had been a long day and this case was driving him a little crazy. Worse, just the sight of the sorry excuse for a town on the horizon filled him with worry. How was he going to keep Ella safe? Worse still, he didn’t know how to deal with this mix of feelings. Nothing good will come of this, he thought.

  Yet he had no choice but to stick to Ella
. Stacy Cardwell was here. Unfortunately, so were some dangerous people. He’d thought he’d recognized the man who’d left the bar earlier to watch them leave. Another fugitive from justice. This one from an assault case Waco had worked on.

  The sun had sunk behind some mountains in the distance by the time he parked in front of the hotel and waited for Ella to get out of her pickup.

  With nightfall coming on, both he and Ella were stuck in Hell and Gone. Just the two of them in this old hotel tonight. And that meant they were both in serious danger for a whole lot of reasons.

  Chapter 14

  Helen Mandeville heard about what had happened outside of town. She’d known there would be trouble the moment she’d seen the two sitting in the booth at the bar. The one was obviously a cop. The other... Well, she’d recognized Ella from photos Stacy had shown her over the years.

  She’d always known that Ella would show up here one day. It had just been a matter of time. She’d told Stacy, but of course Stacy hadn’t listened.

  “What would you have me do?” Stacy had cried.

  “Tell the truth.”

  “You know I can’t do that.”

  “Who are you really protecting? Stacy, did you do something back then, something that will bring the law down on us?” Helen had asked, and Stacy had assured her that there was nothing to worry about.

  Except the law was here—and Ella.

  After the two had left, she’d warned everyone at the bar to leave them be. “That one’s a cop or my name is Sweetie Pie,” one of her customers said. Everyone but Helen had laughed. “He’s looking for someone.”

  “Just stay clear of him,” Helen had told them. “He’s not interested in taking any of you in.”

  “How do you know that?” another man demanded.

  “I know. He won’t be around long.” She’d expected that to be the end of it as she’d taken last night’s money out of the cash register and returned to her house behind the bar. But she should have known some fool would go after them.

  Shaking her head, Helen hoped it wouldn’t bring more cops down on them. She turned on her police scanner. It squawked a few times, then fell silent. It was quiet enough that Helen realized she wasn’t alone. She turned to face the man standing in her doorway. “You heard?”

  “Ray Archer never had the sense God gave a hamster,” Huck said with a rueful shake of his head. He still had a thick head of blond hair, although it had started to gray at the temples. Her hair had grayed years ago. She could barely remember her natural color before that, making her aware of how many years had passed. Nor was Huck that strapping handsome young man who’d wandered in off the road too long ago to count. Not that she was the woman she’d been, either. But her pulse still quickened at just the sight of him, and he seemed genuinely fond of her.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  They all expected Helen to keep them safe, like she was the mother hen of this chicken coop. She was getting too old for this, she thought. “Nothing.” She raised her chin and straightened her back. The years had been good to her. When her ex had keeled over and left her the bar, she’d thought it was a trick or bad joke. He’d never given her anything but grief.

  But the place had turned out to be a gold mine. As the only bar for miles around, she’d had no competition. Raking in the cash for years and investing it wisely, she’d known that the day would come when she’d need it. Helen had a bad feeling that day had come.

  It wasn’t as if she hadn’t been thinking recently that it was time for a change. She’d seen too much over those years. Mostly, she was just tired of it. Well past the age of retirement, she had enough money to make the rest of her life cushy somewhere else. Maybe Arizona. Maybe Florida. Maybe some island in the middle of the ocean.

  Helen brought the subject up, saying as much to Huck, only to have him roll his eyes.

  “You’d go crazy within a week. You need the drama. Not to mention the fact that you’d miss us.”

  Helen met his gaze. “You could come with me.”

  He grinned, reminding her of the first time she’d laid eyes on him. He’d walked into the bar, all cocky and cute, and she’d felt her heart float like batter in hot grease. She realized that not much had changed. Except now he was one of her bartenders as well as her lover. “If you’re propositioning me...” He said it in that sexy way he had, especially late at night when the two of them were curled up in her big bed.

  “I’m serious, Huck.”

  He shook his head slowly. “You’re talking leaving Montana. I’m not sure I can do that. I’m not sure you can, either. There’s no place like this. You know that, don’t you? Damn, woman, when’s the last time you drove in traffic?”

  Helen nodded, seeing that if she left, she’d be going alone. She wasn’t surprised. It hurt, but she understood. Roots ran deep here. She would have a hard time pulling Huck from this place and replanting him even in Arizona, let alone Florida. Maybe he was right. Maybe neither of them would fit anywhere but here—in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of other misfits.

  “That couple who came into the bar...” He let the question hang in the air. “They’re looking for Stacy, aren’t they?” He didn’t give her a chance to answer before he let out an oath. “I figured as much. You tell the girl where to find her?”

  Helen shook her head. “You know I couldn’t do that. But she’s Stacy’s daughter, and with what happened outside of town just now...”

  “She and the cop will be hanging around for a while,” he said and met her gaze. “She’s going to find out. Maybe it would be better if you—”

  The scanner squawked again. “It would be better if Stacy Cardwell had never come here, but she did.” Helen thought of the girl who’d had a flat tire outside of town and how she’d felt sorry for her. She’d hired her to work in the bar temporarily, but then one thing had led to another.

  “What are you going to do?” Huck asked.

  “Deal with it like I always have until I leave. And then it will be yours, problems and all.”

  “I’m going to miss you,” he said softly, stepping closer to take her in his arms.

  She leaned into his still-strong body. Not as much as she was going to miss him, she thought.

  * * *

  Ella parked in front of the hotel and saw Waco do the same. It was clear that he would be doggin’ her until he found her mother. She couldn’t see any way around it at this point.

  With a sigh, she reached over to the passenger seat for her backpack and climbed out. There was no getting away from him—at least for the moment. She hoped her mother would contact her again. On the way into town, she’d tried her mom’s number. The call had gone straight to voice mail.

  But as she looked around what was left of this town, she knew Stacy was here somewhere. She’d find her, somehow. Hopefully, before Waco did. After what he’d told her about the name scratched in the old well, her mom would be going in for questioning, probably handcuffed in the back of his patrol SUV.

  Waco was already out of his SUV as she started toward the front of the hotel. He hurried to open the door for her. “After you,” he said with a slight bow, making her roll her eyes.

  The musty smell hit her first. It reminded her of antiques shops her aunt Dana had taken her to in Butte on a girls’ trip. Stacy had stayed in the car, saying she didn’t like old things. That had made Dana laugh and say under her breath, “Except for rich old men.”

  Ella thought of that now. Marvin Hanover had been one of those older men. Not so funny now, given the way that marriage had ended.

  An elderly man behind the reception desk eyed them suspiciously as they approached. Ella got the feeling he’d come from the back when he’d heard them pull in. Or maybe he’d been expecting them. As few guests as she suspected this hotel registered in a month, she couldn’t see him standing there all that time. />
  “We need a couple of rooms,” Waco said and pulled out his wallet.

  “I’ll be paying for my own,” Ella said without looking at the cop.

  The elderly man behind the counter eyed them. “We only take cash. Forty dollars a room.”

  Forty dollars, from the looks of this place, was highway robbery. But given where they were, they had little choice. Waco threw two twenties on the counter.

  The old man’s watery gaze shifted to Ella.

  “Do you have change?” she asked as she set down a fifty, glad she’d thought to bring cash.

  Grumbling, the old man pulled out a cash box, rummaged around in it for a few moments and handed her ten worn dollar bills. Then, putting the cash box back under the counter, he turned and took keys from two of the small cubbies on the wall.

  He held out two old-fashioned keys, each attached to a faded plastic orange disk. “Rooms 2 and 4 upstairs. Bathroom is down the hall. The lock’s broken, so knock before entering.” His gaze sparked for a moment as if he thought the two would be sharing more than the bathroom before the night was over.

  Ella snatched a key from the man’s hand and, with her backpack slung over her shoulder, started for the stairs. She heard Waco on the creaky steps behind her, his tread heavy and slow. She could feel his gaze warming her backside and wished she’d let him go first. Earlier, he’d looked at her...funny. She shook off the thought. The detective was too single-minded to even think about anything but finding Stacy.

  The wooden landing groaned under her footfalls, making her hope the whole place didn’t cave in before she could get out of town. She’d taken the number two key and now stopped to insert it into the lock. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Waco stop at the next door down.