The business part of the ranch, however, needed to be brought up to speed. She already had started with the fence in the northwest pasture. After consulting with the local agriculture agent, she ordered new supplies, and the men were repairing the damaged fence with modern metal posts and stringing four strands of new galvanized barbed wire.
She reined the bay to a walk and then halted next to a post that jutted outward, stretching the wire attached to it. Some heifer had probably used it for a scratching post. She dismounted, dropping the bay’s reins to the ground, and untied the duffel of tools from behind the saddle. She grabbed the top of the post and planted her feet to jerk it upright, then dropped to her knees and used a cut-off shovel handle from her tool bag to tamp down tight the dirt that should hold it upright.
Sweat dripped from her chin.
The physical labor felt good. Better than sitting behind a desk and shuffling paper. Sure, there were things she’d enjoyed about being an attorney, such as the drama of courtroom arguments. Not all her clients were guilty, and some had made stupid, one-time mistakes. Helping them was personally rewarding.
But ranching felt more like honest work. Everything was black or white, good or bad. It rained or it didn’t. Calves lived or they died. Beef prices rose or they dropped. Each year was a gamble, but the rules were clear.
She couldn’t say the same about being an attorney. Between the black typed lines of the recorded laws were a lot of gray shadows. Guilt or innocence could hinge on evidence undiscovered by investigators or disallowed by a judge. It could depend on the demographics of a jury or the cleverness of an attorney’s closing arguments. A smart criminal could play the legal system and its guardians to his advantage. An innocent person could just as easily be declared guilty.
August jabbed at the dirt. Reyes had played them all. She
had stood by while he lured Christine into his sordid schemes. She’d been running around with her do-gooder cape on, patting herself on the back for taking pro-bono cases, while he courted Christine with fancy business dinners and flattered her by recommending her to influential people. She’d stuck her head in the sand while he was putting his hands all over her lover. Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. She grunted angrily with each vicious stab at the now tightly packed soil, then stood and flung the tool away. The bay skittered a few feet even though he was trained to never move when ground tied.
She stood and panted in the oppressive heat, unable to hold the memories at bay.
August worked quickly to protect Susan and then herself.
A private-detective friend she trusted recommended a computer geek, Steve, who specialized in security issues, and they went to his office to make arrangements. Then she called an old college friend, who was an FBI agent in Atlanta and married to a DEA agent. They put her in touch with Pierce Walker, who met them at the home of a retired military officer Susan trusted. Pierce nearly drooled. He’d been trying to nail Reyes for a long time.
August returned late in the day, closing the door to her office and working long after everyone else had left. When she finally gave in to fatigue and went home, Christine was in the kitchen.
“You can have the bedroom tonight,” August said as she walked past her without stopping, gathered some clean clothes from her closet, and locked herself in the guest suite for the night. Christine was gone when she woke the next morning, but she’d stayed the night. The coffee carafe was half full and still warm.
Steve, the security geek, visited the office the next day, posing as a pest-control worker after Susan made a show of complaining loudly about roaches in the break room. He confirmed the offices were bugged with cameras and listening devices. They were probably transmitting to a remote recording device, he said, because Reyes wouldn’t likely waste the manpower for live monitoring unless he had reason to suspect they were on to him.
August’s gut told her their time was short. Her rift with Christine would make Reyes cautious.
She had court most of the day but returned to the office afterward with take-out food and very watered-down whiskey. When the cleaning crew was gone and the bottle near empty, she pretended to turn out her office light, stagger to the couch, and pass out. Her phone buzzed in her pocket at one a.m. and she cautiously checked it. The text read: YOU’VE GOT ONE HOUR.
August copied the hard drives of Christine’s and Raphael Delgado’s computers as her security guy scrambled the signal the planted cameras were sending to Reyes. While they were downloading onto thumb drives, she poked around in Raphael’s desk. The idiot had all his passwords on an index card stuck in his top desk drawer. She hadn’t thought about the phone system. She typed in the password to retrieve his messages. He had eighteen archived conversations in which Christine was instructing him what to tell his father to do to manufacture or alter evidence to implicate someone other than the person he had hired her to defend for felony crimes. Raphael must have been keeping them for blackmail in case Christine ever turned against them. August didn’t know how to download the messages, so she forwarded them straight to Pierce Walker’s cell phone.
Ten minutes before her hour was up, she tucked the thumb drives into the gym bag that she kept under her desk. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d actually gone to the gym. Then she texted her friend an ALL CLEAR, splashed the remaining whiskey onto her shirt, and resumed her place on the sofa.
August set the fence mender on the bottom strand and wrapped a short shank of new wire around the old to repair where it had stretched out of shape. Each twist of the new wire forced the old strand to tighten.
She’d stared at the ceiling with her gut churning most of the night but finally drifted into sleep. She was startled when Christine woke her with a gentle shake the next morning.
“You look like hell.” Christine’s hair and business suit were perfect, as always, but her eyes were red, as though she hadn’t slept either.
“Yeah, well, I feel like hell.” She sat up and rubbed her hands over her face.
“We need to talk.” Christine gave August’s forearm a gentle squeeze. “But you should go home and get a shower and some real sleep first.”
August looked down at Christine’s hand on her arm. The familiar gesture had always been their personal signal of affirmation and affection when they were in public. But all she could see was the new Rolex watch on Christine’s wrist. She couldn’t stop herself. “Reyes give that to you?” Christine didn’t answer, and August stood, jerking her arm away from Christine’s grasp. “I’ll be back after lunch. I’ve got a deposition scheduled at three.”
She called Pierce on the way home. He was ecstatic. The forwarded messages were enough to get warrants. He didn’t think Raphael would turn on his father, but he felt sure Christine would roll over on Reyes once she found herself in a jail cell, facing a prison sentence. He promised to have warrants by that afternoon so they could arrest the two of them and confiscate all the files and computers in the office.
There was much more to do. She showered quickly and fed Rio. She searched their home for any files Christine might have kept there—or planted there to implicate August—while her security guy scanned the house for illegal surveillance, examined their home-computer network, and copied the hard drives.
Then she drove Susan and the twins to the airport. Until the trial, they’d be living on a secure military base, under the protection of her late husband’s old army ranger commanding officer.
August moved the mender to the second strand. She swore when a rusted barb bit into her flesh and jerked her work glove off to suck at the blood seeping from her thumb. She couldn’t seem to do anything without hurting herself in the process.
She returned around one p.m., barely settling in her office when Pierce Walker burst into their reception area, followed by a handful of agents and the US Attorney. Not an assistant from his office, but the big man himself. She sat in her office while Christine fired angry questions at the attorney to buy time as she scanned the search warrants. Then she was shou
ting those questions at Raphael while he read them. An act to deflect any blame from herself? She might as well save the effort. The phone messages alone were enough to indict her. Several agents began packing up files and computers, while another agent herded the rest of the staff into the break room.
When the attorney announced that he had arrest warrants for Christine and Raphael, August finally got up and walked to the door of her office.
Christine turned to her, her face white. “August, what have you done?”
“Bitch.” Raphael sneered at August as an agent handcuffed him. “You will regret this day and wish prison had been your punishment instead of what’s coming.”
Pierce stepped forward, his phone held up as though he was recording the exchange. “Did I just hear you threaten a federal witness, Raphael Reyes Delgado?”
Christine gave her one last desperate look as she was led out in handcuffs.
August sat in her office for another thirty minutes, then grabbed her gym bag and slipped out the back door.
She was halfway home when her phone buzzed. Pierce Walker.
“Where are you?”
“On my way home. I haven’t eaten or hardly slept in the past twenty-four hours.”
“We’ll have everything set up tomorrow to stash you somewhere until we can bring this to trial. Until then, I’m putting a tail on you and an agent outside your house.”
“Are you kidding? This will take months, maybe years to come to trial. I’m not the criminal. You can’t just steal my life from me.”
“I’m not going to let my prime witness disappear like all the other witnesses in cases against Reyes’s organization. So pack a bag, and then get a good night’s sleep. We’ll be there first thing in the morning with search warrants for your house and to move you some place safer.”
“I have a dog, and I’m not leaving her behind.”
“Call a friend or family member to come get the dog. It’d be a dead giveaway to have her with you. I’ll move this along as fast as we can, and once Reyes is in jail, we might reconsider whether we need to keep you tucked away. We should have an indictment tight enough to arrest him tomorrow and hold him without bail. Your law partner was crying like a baby before we turned her over for the deputies to process her into the jail. She’ll lawyer up, but she’ll deal. I’m sure of it.”
August ended the call. As a criminal-defense attorney, she was well acquainted with the degrading process of fingerprinting, photographing, and strip-searching anyone unlucky enough to be arrested. She was furious with Christine for screwing up both their lives but felt sick at the thought of her going through that in front of jailers who knew her as an attorney.
She swung into the drive, jumped out of her car, and hurried to unlock the back door of the home they’d shared before sprinting to the bathroom to throw up.
August worked the top, final strand of wire, twisting it tighter and tighter. The wire twanged and she eased up. Another turn and it’d break, like she almost did. She’d barely finished heaving up her guts that night before another phone call landed her at the jail. Not Pierce this time. It was Christine, asking for a face-to-face. That visit had twisted August to the point of snapping, and then her phone had buzzed a third and final time as she drove away from the jail.
She steered into the parking lot of a convenience store to answer it. It’d been years since that caller contact had flashed on her screen. Maybe the universe was looking out for her. Her childhood safe haven was calling at just the right moment.
“Julio. You don’t know how glad I am to hear from you.”
The caller cleared his throat. “August? It’s BJ.”
Dread filled her. “No. Tell me Julio’s fine. I’ve been meaning to visit. I just…you know, with the practice taking up all my time. It’s not like when I was a student and had summers off.”
“He understood,” BJ said softly. “But I’ve got bad news, Grasshopper. Old Julio’s heart gave out day before yesterday. I reckon your granddaddy’s been waitin’ on him and those two are riding the big trail together now.”
Could this day get any worse?
“I got somebody here who needs to talk to you, August. Okay?”
She sighed. “Yeah, okay.”
“Ms. Reese?”
“Yes?”
“This is John Stutts. I’ve got a will here that deeds The White Paw to you lock, stock, and barrel.”
“To me? Julio didn’t have any relatives? Why didn’t he leave it to BJ? He runs the place.”
“There is a stipulation that you have to keep the ranch in operation until Mr. Billy Jack Johnson and Beauregard Davis White are deceased and no longer need the ranch as their residence.”
“Who is Beauregard Davis White?”
“BJ says that’s Pops.”
“Oh. I never knew his real name.”
“So, shall I send the paperwork for you to sign in Dallas?”
“When’s the funeral?”
He hesitated. “I’m real sorry, Ms. Reese. Julio asked to be cremated immediately and his ashes scattered at Caprock Canyon, though I know nothing about that since such scattering on federal property would be illegal.”
August laughed, in spite of everything. “He always did cut his own path.” Hadn’t Julio and Gus taught her to do the same? This call was a beacon lighting the way before her. “Don’t mail that paperwork, Mr. Stutts. I’ll see you in day or two to sign it in person.”
She closed her phone and checked her rearview mirror. The agent in a dark sedan was parked behind her. She waved to him. No suspicious vans nearby, so she doubted they were listening in on her phone calls. Things had moved too fast for that, especially since she was a witness, not a suspect. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Gus and Julio were still looking out for her. God, she loved those two old men. She drove slowly to allow the agent time to follow, calculating scenarios for giving him the slip before Pierce Walker and crew showed up in the morning.
Chapter Six
“You might as well let her go for scrap metal and put a down payment on a new car.” Tank shifted the toothpick to the other side of his mouth. “Well, not necessarily a new car. You’ll find lots of good used cars for sale around here.”
Behind his repair business stretched a graveyard of rusting auto husks mired in a tangle of unchecked weeds pushing stubbornly up through the cracks in the brick-hard soil. Despite the sun that beat down on the shadeless lot, an occasional curled fender or upturned hubcap hid in shadows and harbored pools of brackish rainwater—breeding havens for mosquitoes. Teal swatted another of the little bloodsuckers as she, Tank, BJ, and Pops stood around the raised hood of her car. She lifted the neck of her T-shirt and wiped at the spot on her neck where it’d been feeding. Couldn’t they talk about this inside?
“You can’t drop a new engine in it?” BJ asked.
“It’s not as simple as replacing the engine. That fire warped both front tires, melted the entire electrical system, every hose, the brake system, hell, even the headlights and every other plastic part they put in these things.” Tank shifted the toothpick again. “Even if it was a classic car, I doubt it’d be worth the cost to restore it.” He made a condescending sound. “And this here is a twelve-year-old Honda Civic. Scrap-metal yards are the only ones who collect these things.”
“That’s what you get for buying one of those foreign cars,” Pops said, hitching his jeans up over his modest belly.
Tank’s and BJ’s expressions indicated they clearly agreed, and that just pissed her off. That same backward, uninformed herd mentality had driven Teal to flee her small-town roots. She could point out the three hundred thousand miles on the odometer, which you’d rarely see on an American car that had the original engine. In fact, she could quote impressive statistics that she’d compiled for Lauren when the Senate was mulling over the US car-industry bailout during the Bush-triggered recession. But it’d be wasted on this audience.
“You can blame my daddy. I wanted a Ford tr
uck, but he said only boys can drive trucks to college. He wasn’t from around here.” Her mimic of their Texas drawl and jab at the local culture of pickup trucks flew right over their heads. Instead of taking offense at her sarcasm, the men nodded sympathetically. Originating from some place other than Texas was an acceptable explanation for almost any irrational behavior.
“I can get you a good price for the scrap metal pretty quick,” Tank said. “And BJ could probably get you a good deal over at Eddie’s car lot.”
The three men looked at her expectantly.
Teal instantly regretted her behavior. Sure, she’d already perspired enough to need another shower, and—damn, these mosquitoes—she was being eaten alive. But she’d been in Washington too long and was acting like a snob. She studied the men. Good fellows, all of them, and she was going to need a bit more of their time and assistance to find a train station, or—she groaned inwardly at the thought—a bus station where she could by a ticket to Caprock, New Mexico.
She smiled at Tank. “I’d appreciate it if you could arrange to sell it for me, but I’m going to hold off on buying another car.” She turned to BJ. “Is there a UPS or other store around here that packs and ships? I can catch an Amtrak or a bus, but I’ll need to ship the things that were packed in my car.”
BJ checked his wristwatch and scratched his cheek. “There’s one of those stores over by ShopMart, but we need to take Pops to his doctor’s appointment first.”
“Don’t need to go to no doctor.” Pops glared at BJ. “I told you I feel fine.”
“Do we have to go through this every time?” BJ met Pops’s stare. “I told you that you have to get checked regularly to make sure your medicine don’t need adjusting, or they won’t give you any more. Now just suck it up and let’s do what you have to do to keep that old ticker of yours going.”
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