Garrett

by Linda Lael Miller

  “Can we work this out later?” Garrett asked.

  “Out behind the barn, maybe?” Austin interjected.

  Then he laughed, a ragged sound, like nothing was funny, and Tate gave up a gruff chuckle with about the same degree of good humor. And the tension inside that truck cab tightened like a screw.

  “So, Garrett,” Austin said, after a few beats, his tone deceptively affable, even hearty, “I hear the senator shit-canned your career right along with his own.”

  Garrett stiffened, adjusted his sunglasses.

  Tate gave a little snort.

  “Where’d you hear that?” Garrett asked, with a mildness that probably didn’t fool either of his brothers.

  “Hell,” Austin replied, “it’s all over the Internet. The word on the Web is that you’ve had a lot of job offers already, and turned them down.”

  One of the ranch pickups was coming toward them along the private road; the driver pulled to the side to make room for Tate’s truck and the horse trailer, tooted the horn and waved as they passed.

  Tate tapped the Silverado’s horn once, in response.

  “Is that true?” he asked, glancing Garrett’s way.

  “Is what true?” Garrett countered.

  “That you’ve had job offers,” Tate said, with an exaggerated effort at patience.

  Garrett shrugged. “I’ve had a few calls,” he said. “Nothing I was interested in.”

  “You’re needed here,” Tate said carefully, downshifting as they came to a wide cattle guard set into the road. The wheels of the truck and then the trailer it was pulling bumped over the wooden grate as they crossed it.

  “You’ve gotten by just fine without me, up to now,” Garrett pointed out. Then he jutted a thumb over one shoulder to indicate Austin. “And Billy the Kid here is even more dispensable than I am.”

  “Gee,” Austin said, “thanks.”

  Tate’s shoulders strained beneath his shirt and denim jacket. “I’m serious,” he said. “It’s a lot of responsibility, running this place, especially now that Pablo Ruiz is gone. I’ve got two kids and I’m about to get married. Libby and I want to get a baby started ASAP. And what I’m getting at here is this—you two each own a third of the Silver Spur, just like I do—and you’re drawing dividends for it—but you’re not carrying your fair share of the load.”

  Garrett was surprised, though upon reflection he could see Tate’s point.

  “You hard up for money, Tate?” Austin joked, possibly as clueless as he sounded, but more likely just obnoxious. “If you are, I’ll be glad to help you out with a few bucks.”

  Tate eased the truck to a stop alongside the road, mindful of the trailer and the horses riding inside it. They were probably two miles from the place where they’d seen the dead cattle and the breached fence lines, but that was as close as they could get in a rig. It was time to unload the horses, mount up and ride in.

  Shoving his door open, Tate got out of the truck and stood waiting for Austin.

  Austin climbed out, too.

  They faced each other on that dirt road, Tate and Austin, like a pair of gunslingers about to draw.

  The air was crackling again.

  Garrett rounded the front of the truck at a sprint, but he was too late.

  Tate had grabbed Austin by the front of his shirt and slammed him hard against the door of the pickup.

  Austin bounced off it and lunged into Tate’s middle with his head down.

  Garrett dove between them and caught somebody’s fist hard under his right eye.

  He staggered, seeing stars. He was going to have a shiner, at the very least.

  “Shit!” he yelled, furious, pressing the back of his hand to his cheekbone. It came away bloody.

  “Sorry,” Austin said.

  Tate’s hoarse chuckle turned to a guffaw.

  Austin laughed, too.

  “I’m glad you two think this is funny!” Garrett yelled. So much for keeping the peace. If his eye hadn’t been swelling shut already, he’d have gone after both of them at once and settled for trouncing whichever one he got hold of first.

  “I think it’s freakin’ hilarious,” Austin said, and then hooted again.

  Garrett glared at him.

  Tate grinned, flashing those movie-cowboy teeth of his, and slapped Garrett on the shoulder just a mite too hard. “Hope there aren’t any press conferences on your schedule, Mr. President,” he said. “There isn’t enough pancake makeup on the planet to cover up the black eye you’re going to have about five minutes from now. You definitely aren’t ready for prime time.”

  “It was such a pretty face, too,” Austin observed, in a voice an octave higher than his real one.

  “Shut up,” Garrett growled. The whole right side of his head ached.

  Tate merely chuckled and shook his head.

  Several ranch trucks pulled in behind them, and Austin started back to help unload the horses.

  “When I figure out which one of you hit me,” Garrett vowed to his brothers, reaching into the truck for the rifles, “I’m going to kick his ass from here to the Panhandle and back again.”

  Austin chuckled and walked away.

  Tate grinned and followed.

  Within a couple of minutes, they were all on horseback, with loaded rifles in the scabbards affixed to their saddles, as were the men who’d come along to help.

  While the state of Garrett’s face drew a few glances, nobody was stupid enough to make a comment.

  They rode uphill, single file, nine men in all, putting Garrett in mind of an old-time posse heading out to round up outlaws.

  Normally, he would have smiled at the picture that took shape in his brain, but between the punch he’d taken, Tate’s complaint about running the ranch without help and the dead cattle waiting up ahead, Garrett wasn’t feeling especially cheerful.

  It took half an hour or so to reach the first dead cow; shot through the neck, the animal had bled out on the ground. Flies swarmed, blue-black and buzzing.

  There were five more cattle just ahead, killed the same way.

  Tate was the first to dismount. He crouched beside one of the carcasses, seemingly heedless of the flies, and touched the critter’s blood-crusted side with his right hand. Something about the motion—gentleness, maybe—tightened Garrett’s throat.

  “What kind of sick son of a bitch shoots an animal and leaves it to rot?” Austin ranted, taking in the scene.

  Garrett shook his head, having no other response to offer at the moment, and swung down from the saddle. The ranch hands rode on, looking at the other slaughtered cattle and keeping their thoughts to themselves, as cowboys usually do.

  He looked around, but the ground was hard and dry, and if there had been any tracks—a man’s, a horse’s or those of an off-road vehicle of some kind—the wind had already brushed them away.

  Garrett leaned down to pick up a spent shell, showed it to Tate and Austin, then dropped it into his jacket pocket.

  Tate rose from the crouch next to the cow. Austin remained on his horse, silhouetted against a dry, blue sky.

  Austin adjusted his hat, surveyed the far distance and then looked down at his brothers with eyes the same color as the sky behind him. “Now what?” he asked.

  Tate walked back to his horse, stuck a foot into the stirrup and remounted. “We do the next logical thing,” he answered wearily.

  “Which is?” Garrett asked, returning to the saddle himself. The skin around his eye throbbed, and he wondered what Julie would think when she saw he’d been hurt.

  Maybe, he thought, mildly cheered up, he was in line for a little feminine sympathy.

  Yes, sir, he could do with some of that.

  “It wouldn’t be right to leave these animals to be picked apart by buzzards and coyotes,” Tate answered grimly. “We’ll burn the carcasses and then ride the fence lines, see if we can pick up some kind of trail.”

  Once again, Austin fiddled with his hat, as he always did when something stuck in h
is craw and there was no other way to react. “Cattle thieving is one thing,” he said, gazing off into the distance, “and killing for the hell of it is another. Whoever did this is carrying a mean grudge.”

  Garrett nodded in grim agreement. Now and then, especially when times were hard, somebody killed and butchered a McKettrick cow, but it was generally to feed his family.

  That was understandable, at least.

  This was wanton slaughter.

  He felt a lot of things, sitting there in the saddle, with the stench of shed blood filling his nostrils and making his gut churn with the need to do something about it.

  It didn’t seem possible that, not so many hours ago, he’d been in bed with Julie Remington. She’d driven him outside of himself, Julie had, and as many women as he’d been with in his life, he couldn’t recall ever feeling the things she’d made him feel, even once.

  They rode on, past the other fallen cattle.

  There were signs of horses on the other side of the downed fence line, and more spent cartridges scattered on the ground.

  Bile scalded the back of Garrett’s throat. Who hated Tate—or all the McKettricks—enough to massacre living creatures for the sport of it?

  He scanned the other men, the ones who’d loaded horses of their own back at the main place, followed in trucks, come along to help if they could. As a kid, Garrett had known everybody who worked on the Silver Spur, but now that he’d been away so much, a lot of them were strangers.

  In fact, Charlie Bates was the only one he knew. A crabby old bachelor, Bates had lived on the ranch for years, and he’d always been a hard worker.

  Tate spoke to Bates, and the other man nodded and sent two riders off on some errand. They returned with gas cans and shovels fetched from the trucks down on the road.

  Tate took one of the shovels and turned up a shovelful of dirt all around one of the cattle, making it known what he wanted done.

  Once these precautions had been taken, the carcasses were doused in gas and burned.

  The smoke burned the eyes, and the smell of singed hide and charred beef-flesh damn near turned Garrett into a vegetarian on the spot. For a while, he thought, he’d stick to chicken and fish—assuming he could bring himself to eat at all.

  He ached, watching those flames.

  He helped to quell them with shovelfuls of dirt, when the time came to do that.

  Two men stayed behind to make sure there were no flare-ups; the rest rode back down to the dirt track below.

  On the way out, they’d argued, Garrett and Tate and Austin.

  On the way back, nobody said one word.

  Not one.

  At home, Austin and Bates and a few of the other men unloaded the horses from the trailer and led them to the barn. Tate backed the trailer into the equipment shed, and then unhitched it, while Garrett returned to the house with the rifles.

  This time, Esperanza wasn’t alone in the kitchen.

  Calvin was there, perched on a barstool at the long counter, with a plate of cookies and a glass of milk in front of him. At the sight of the guns, the kid looked wide-eyed.

  Garrett gave the boy a friendly nod and kept walking.

  In the study, he locked the rifles up again, along with the box of ammunition he’d shoved into his jacket pocket earlier.

  When he got back to the kitchen, Esperanza was basting the roasting chickens, and the scent of them made Garrett’s stomach rumble with hunger.

  Pausing by the stove, he lifted the lid off a pot and looked inside, pleased to see potatoes, peeled and salted and ready to boil up and mash.

  “Yes,” he muttered.

  Esperanza looked at him over one shoulder as she closed the higher of two wall ovens. She was clearly still in a peckish mood; Garrett half expected her to tell him he needn’t let his mouth get to watering over her crispy-skinned chicken, thick gravy and mashed potatoes, because he wasn’t sitting down to any meal she’d fixed.

  “Is your mom around?” Garrett asked Calvin, who was watching him with an expression akin to fascination.

  Garrett had forgotten the shiner either Tate or Austin had given him out there on the road. From the look on Calvin’s face, it was a dandy.

  And it explained some of Esperanza’s annoyance, too.

  Calvin shook his head. “She’s at the cottage, packing up our stuff. What happened to your eye?”

  “I ran into something,” Garrett hedged, his gaze snagging on Esperanza’s and then breaking away. He opened one of the refrigerators and pulled out a bottle of beer.

  “Want a cookie?” Calvin asked, pushing the plate toward him.

  “Ought to go great with beer,” Garrett grinned, taking the stool next to Calvin’s and accepting the offer by helping himself to a couple of oatmeal-raisin cookies. He munched a while before speaking again. “How come your mom is packing up all your stuff?” he asked.

  Calvin leaned in a little, squinting up at Garrett’s shiner with the sort of interest little boys usually reserved for dead bugs and dried-up snakeskins. “We have to move,” he answered. “You didn’t really run into something, did you? You got in a fight.”

  Esperanza glared at Garrett over the top of Calvin’s blond head. Her expression said he was setting a poor example for the boy.

  “It wasn’t a fight,” Garrett told Calvin. “Not exactly, anyhow. Where are you moving to?”

  Calvin’s small shoulders stooped a little then, and he ducked his head. “Don’t know,” he mumbled. “Aunt Paige didn’t tell me that.”

  Garrett frowned, confused.

  “She thought Mom was here,” Calvin explained. “Aunt Paige did, I mean. That’s why she brought me to the Silver Spur. When Mom called her on her cell phone and told her she was at the cottage instead, Aunt Paige asked Esperanza to watch me for a while, so she could go help Mom.”

  “I see,” Garrett said, though he was still pretty much in the dark.

  Calvin sighed. “I wish we could live here,” he said in a small voice, after a long time had passed. “I wish Mom and Harry and me could stay on the Silver Spur forever.”

  The earnest way the kid spoke wrenched at something deep inside Garrett.

  Maybe because he was starting to wish the same thing.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  EXCEPT FOR THE MARSHAL’S OFFICE, which was a minor tourist attraction, the fire station was the oldest public building in Blue River. The engine itself dated back to 1957, but it still ran, and so did the old-fashioned, hand-cranked siren.

  Harry howled when the alarm sounded the first long, tinny wail, and Paige and Julie, busy in Julie’s kitchen, both stopped wrapping dishes in newspaper to press their hands to their ears.

  The siren droned to silence, then wound up again.

  Harry did his beagle-best to drown it out, singing along.

  Paige rushed for the back door, that being the nearest exit, and Julie followed, after leaning down to give Harry a brief and reassuring pat on the head and instructing him, in vain, to hush up.

  By tradition, the intended warning could be anything from a lost child to a full-scale invasion by space aliens.

  The smell of smoke was sharp in the air, but Julie couldn’t tell where it was coming from until she and Paige ran around to the front yard.

  A black, roiling cloud of the stuff loomed against the afternoon sky.

  Fire, Julie thought, strangely slow-witted. Then, of course it was fire.

  She gave in to a moment of pure panic before pulling herself together to focus on her first and highest priority—Calvin.

  Her son, she reminded herself, as if by rote, was on the ranch. Paige had taken him there before returning to town to help Julie get ready for her imminent move. The smoke, to her relief, was rising in the opposite direction from the Silver Spur.

  The siren revved up once more, and Harry bayed in concert.

  Around town, other dogs had joined in, a yip here, a yelp there. The bell on the fire engine clamored in the near distance, a resonant clang i
n the heat-weighted, acrid air.

  The volunteers, rallied by the emergency siren, were on the job then, already racing down Main Street. The old truck rarely saw action, except each year on the Friday after Thanksgiving, when it carried the Lions Club Santa to the tree-lighting ceremony in the park.

  Paige, shading her eyes with one hand, assessed the growing plume.

  “What do you suppose is burning?” Julie asked. She was good at a lot of things, but reading smoke signals wasn’t among them.

  Mercifully, the siren had finally gone silent, having alerted everybody in the county that there was Some Kind of Trouble, and so had Harry and the canine chorus.

  “Probably, it’s Chudley and Minnie Wilkes’s place, or somewhere pretty near it,” Paige answered, looking worried.

  Cars and pickup trucks raced by, two streets over on the main drag.

  Paige dashed into the cottage, summoned Harry to follow, shut him inside and came out jingling her car keys at Julie. “The dog will be fine,” she said. “Let’s go!”

  Julie nodded, feeling slightly sick as she scrambled into Paige’s car on the passenger side and snapped on her seat belt. Chudley and Minnie lived in a pair of single-wide trailers, welded together, just a few miles outside of town.

  The Wilkeses’ home was surrounded by several acres of rusted-out wrecks, most of them up on blocks, but it was the mountain of old tires that worried Julie now. If all that rubber caught fire, it might literally burn for weeks, and the greasy smoke would be a respiratory hazard for just about everybody.

  Especially Calvin, with his asthma.

  Practically everybody in the county was headed for that fire, or so it seemed—more than a few were gawkers, like Paige and Julie, with no real business showing up at all—but many wanted to help put out the flames and contain the blaze before it spread. Or simply be on hand to do whatever might need doing.

  Wildfire was always a danger in dry country—it could race overland for miles, in all directions, if it got out of hand, gobbling up people, livestock and property, anything in its path.

  Up ahead, Brent Brogan and his two deputies were running what amounted to a roadblock, letting only certain vehicles through.