Black Heat

by Ruby Laska

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  About the Author

  Please enjoy this excerpt of Black Flame

  BLACK HEAT

  THE BOOMTOWN BOYS

  RUBY LASKA

  Copyright © 2013 by Ruby Laska.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Black Heat / Ruby Laska. -- 1st ed.

  ISBN 978-1-940501-08-6

  CHAPTER ONE

  If only there weren't spiders.

  The afternoon light was fading fast, which was a problem because Roan hadn't brought a flashlight. But it was also a blessing, because in the shadowy corners of what had once been the dining room, it was too dark to see the webs that she was convinced were there—and the big, fat, hairy poisonous spiders just waiting to crawl up her legs, down her arms, into her shirt.

  Roan had been terrified of spiders for nearly all of her twenty-four years. Maybe only children were more prone to phobias, because they didn't have siblings to tease them mercilessly about their fears.

  Roan didn't have any brothers or sisters, but she once had a mother who never teased her, and never acted like it was silly to be afraid of a creature that was a thousand times smaller than she was. Whenever a spider found its way into their house, her mom would fetch a water glass and a piece of cardboard and gently coax the spider into the glass, then cover it with the cardboard and she and Roan would take it outside, far away from the house, and release it into the wild so it could go and find its spider family.

  "That spider deserves to live a happy life just like we do," her mom would say, and then she'd hold Roan's hand and they'd walk back to the house together, picking flowers in the summer and catching snowflakes with their tongues in the winter. At least, that was the way Roan remembered it, but memories of her mother had grown hazy after all these years.

  This had once been the prettiest house in Conway, North Dakota. It had been white, with green shutters and scalloped shingles and a white railing all around the porch. From the front of the house you could see the road that led into town and her mother's flower garden and the mailbox with the red flag that Roan was allowed to put up on days they had a letter to mail. From the side porch you could see the barn and the fields and the cattle grazing and, best of all, the bunkhouse where all the hands lived. When Roan grew up she planned to be a cowgirl herself, and she would take care of the cows who were sick, and the baby calves, and maybe even learn how to be a veterinarian in her spare time.

  Roan sighed, dragging a stick along the floorboards, tapping the wood and listening for a hollow echo. This whole idea had been stupid. She would have to come back with a flashlight and a better plan for figuring out where the secret hiding spot was. All she knew for sure was that it was somewhere on the first floor—and even that was subject to the vagaries of her childhood memories, which probably weren't all that reliable.

  Roan paused to wipe her hands on her jeans. There was a thick layer of dust everywhere, even though the county had nailed plywood over the windows after the fire. How long had it been? Four...almost five years now. Roan had moved out years before, but her father and Evil Mimi had lived in the house until his death. The fire had destroyed the home only two months after his heart attack. Everyone thought Mimi would have the place torn down and rebuilt, but instead she moved to town and left the barn and the bunkhouse to fall into ruin alongside the shell of the house that had been in the Brackens family for generations.

  Roan swore she would never return. And she never would have, if she hadn't been desperate. Besides, she wasn't there for herself: she was there for Angel.

  A sound outside made her freeze, her heart pounding in her chest. It was a footfall on the old porch. Then another one. Whoever was out there was moving slowly, which was smart, since it would be all too easy to put a foot through the rotting porch floor. Roan had broken a board herself that way.

  She looked toward the arched passage from the dining room to the hall leading to the kitchen. The fire had destroyed most of the second floor but, miraculously, the center of the first floor was mostly unscathed. There, on the cabbage rose wallpaper, were the outlines of the paintings that had once hung there—paintings Mimi had sold after Roan's father's death. There was the door to the kitchen. And there—in the direction of the footsteps—was the front door.

  Who would be out here snooping around? One of the oil men, no doubt. Half a dozen of them had moved into the bunkhouse last summer when Mimi figured out she could charge a fortune in rent, now that the oil boom had made lodging so scarce in town. Roan didn't know anything about the tenants, but she knew a fair bit about oil men, since she had waited on them at the Bluebird Cafe six days a week before she got the job at Walt's bike shop. Most of them were okay. Some weren't. They could put away a lot of food after a twelve-hour shift, and they tipped especially well on payday, and that's all Roan figured she needed to know.

  "Hey," a male voice called. "I know you're in there."

  Roan crept to the interior wall of the dining room, stepping as lightly as she could and pressing herself against the plaster. She edged cautiously toward the hallway, praying that the back door hadn't been nailed shut—and guessing that it had. She'd had to pry the nails out of the front door with the claw hammer that was in her backpack, and cut the padlock with the bolt cutters she'd borrowed from Walt’s tool chest. There was no way she'd be able to escape out the back without making a lot of noise.

  And she was a trespasser here.

  "I'm coming in," the man called. The door swung open. A heavy boot crunched on the broken glass littering the front hall. A beam of sunlight momentarily blinded Roan, and all she could make out was the figure of a man standing in the doorway of the house that she'd lived in until she was eighteen years old.

  Panic made her run. She burst away from the wall like she was coming out of the blocks at that long-ago state track championship, her lungs roaring with her breath and her fists and legs pumping hard. She bolted past the man, shoving him against the wall with her shoulder and barely breaking her stride, down the steps across the snowy yard and heading for the woods, before she registered what she'd seen in the split second before she burst out the front door:

  The man had a gun, and it had been pointed at her.

  #

  It had been a girl—and he could have killed her.

  Calvin Dixon stood paralyzed in the crumbling entry of the old farmhouse, his hands shaking. He'd returned his gun to its holster, where it damn sure wasn't at risk of going off and hurting anyone. He wouldn't even have been carrying the thing, except he'd been at the range with Zane, who had wanted Cal to come along and check his stance in advance of deer h
unting season.

  In less than a month Cal would be in uniform, carrying a department-issued Sig Sauer instead of his father's old Colt Double Eagle, on a regulation duty belt next to a pair of cuffs and a flashlight.

  But for now he was still a civilian, and drawing a gun on an unarmed girl who was doing nothing more than trespassing—in a house that didn't even belong to him—had to count as one of the stupidest moves of his life. And that was saying something, because Cal was the king of the stupid moves.

  Or had been, at any rate. Back when he was a kid. Back when he didn't know any better. But what was his excuse now?

  "Damn it," he muttered, kicking a loose board along the base of the porch. It splintered off and skittered across the dead, matted weeds. The gun was legally registered to him. He had his North Dakota concealed carry permit. And he hadn't fired; hadn't even pointed the damn thing at the girl. Who he didn't even know was a girl, or he wouldn't have reached for it in the first place.

  But with the series of break-ins around town, a girl was the last thing Cal was expecting. He listened to the police scanner whenever he was working out or doing chores, and he was now intimately familiar with the North Dakota radio codes and signals from studying for the test. So he knew that they still hadn't caught the three guys who'd been stealing copper and fixtures from abandoned buildings, and that they were armed and had shot at a neighbor who chased them.

  Cal was just lucky no one had seen him pull a gun on the intruder and reported it. If this job fell through, Cal wasn't sure what he was going to do. Get a job on the rigs, he supposed, like Chase and Zane and Jimmy. It was honest work and they were happy with it, so maybe he could learn to be happy with it, too. Hell, the money was great—and he was quickly going through his savings. It wouldn't be the end of the world.

  No: it would only be the end of his dream.

  Cal cursed again, more quietly this time, and went to retrieve the broken piece of trim. Eventually Matthew and the rest of them might get around to fixing the house up, at least so that it wasn't a safety hazard.

  While he was here, he supposed he might as well check the place out. As far as Cal knew, all the windows and doors had been sealed. Their landlady, Mimi Brackens, had assured them as much when they first moved into the bunkhouse next door.

  "Just stay away from it," she'd suggested, her mouth set in a thin line. "I know it's an eyesore, but I haven't made up my mind yet whether I'm going to renovate."

  Cal examined the door in the fading light of late afternoon. There was the problem: a few feet away, on the scratched hardwood floor of the parlor, lay the padlock that had been used to seal the front door. It had been cut clean through.

  Cal picked it up to examine it. The metal was thin enough to be cut with a bolt cutter; hardly a deterrent against anyone determined to enter. The plywood nailed over the windows offered even less protection, since it could be removed with a simple crowbar.

  Cal guessed that most would-be intruders wouldn't bother with the house because it was empty and damaged by fire. There were no furnishings to steal, and the fixtures had been damaged by smoke and flames. Sure, kids might be inclined to use the structure to get high or drink or have sex, but those kids would take one look at the vehicles parked a few hundred feet away next to the bunkhouse, and wisely conclude that there were better places to party, where they didn't invite trouble from five full-grown men and one woman trucker.

  He slipped the padlock in his pocket and walked slowly through the parlor into the living room. He'd never been inside the house before. All he knew about it was that it had been built in the 1920s by the grandfather of the last owner of the ranch, Mimi's husband, who had passed away five years ago. The Brackens family once owned hundreds of acres, but all that was left was a few dozen acres, the bunkhouse, the barn and the burned main house.

  Standing in the old dining room, Cal admired the way the tall windows let light in. The built-ins were peeling and dusty, but intact; he could imagine them stripped down and stained. It must have been a beautiful room once.

  He continued into the kitchen. The cabinets and appliances had been removed; there was an old porcelain farm sink and some dusty shelves. There was room for a table, though nothing like the long pine table they had in the bunkhouse, which had once served a dozen farmhands at a time during the harvest season.

  He continued through the rest of the rooms of the first floor, admiring the oak floors, the molding, the leaded glass windows. He paused at the bottom of the stairs, hand on the newel post. Halfway up, the walls were scorched from the fire, and the remains of the wallpaper hung in strips. It would be dangerous to try to go up the stairs; the upper hall was little more than a few timbers holding up the remains of the lathe-and-plaster walls.

  Whatever the girl had been looking for, it wasn't up those stairs.

  He shouldn't even be inside. He—and the girl—were lucky the place hadn't come down on top of them. Cal retraced his steps and pulled the door closed. Tomorrow, when it was daylight, he'd come back out and board up the door. What did they call a place like this—an "attractive nuisance," wasn't that it? Mimi could be in for a heck of a lawsuit if someone got hurt out here. And while he didn’t know the lady personally, he'd hate for her to bring unnecessary trouble on herself.

  So that was that. Cal walked slowly back to the bunkhouse, enjoying watching the smoke curl up from the chimney into the crisp autumn evening. As he opened the door, he could smell something savory, and he heard Jimmy and Zane burst into laughter at something Matthew said.

  For closed the door behind him, then stood in the unfinished front room and tried to hold the moment in time. The men in the kitchen—who were once his enemies—had become his friends. He was so close to becoming a policeman, the highest honor he could imagine. The mistake he’d made half an hour ago, when an old instinct had caused him to be reckless, could not happen again.

  So he would bury it. Cal had gotten good at burying things that were too painful to think about. It was so much easier to move forward, leaving the memories forever where they belonged—in the past.

  He fixed a smile on his face and consciously allowed the tension to drain from his body. Only then did he stride through the house and into the kitchen lit by the cheerful glow of the old wrought-iron chandelier.

  "Cal!" a chorus of voices greeted him. Jayne, who was standing at the open refrigerator, tossed him a can; he knew without looking it would be Mountain Dew, because it was his favorite and Jayne made a habit of remembering and Matthew made a habit of keeping it on hand for him.

  This was the dream, Cal corrected himself. Having a place to call home and friends to make it worthwhile. Being a cop was going to be the icing on top.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Cal was awake at two a.m., but that was nothing new. He had been an insomniac for most of his life. It was common among foster kids, who got used to waking up and forgetting where they were, as they were shuttled from one house or institution to the next.

  For a while, during high school, he'd tried things to get to sleep that only made everything worse. Drinking meant that the next day he'd be hung over. Weed made him fidgety. Sports helped—until he was kicked off the team for fighting.

  Later, after his grandmother took him in his junior year, he'd learned to wait out sleep, focusing on his breathing, or counting backward, or doing math in his head. Sometimes he read, or watched TV quietly. Most nights he drifted off and caught a few peaceful hours before dawn.

  Tonight felt different.

  Cal lay on his back with his hands clasped behind his head, his eyes fluttering open. He had forgotten to pull the thick drapes closed; the moon had risen bright and full and cast luminous shadows around the room. Maybe it was the moonlight that had woken him.

  But a moment later something caught his eye—the headlights of a passing car, perhaps, or the flash of a falling star.

  Except the bunkhouse was at the end of a rutted dirt road, one which hardly anyone but the six of the
m ever traveled.

  There—the same tiny flash, coming from the direction of the farmhouse.

  Cal slipped out of bed and went to the window. Sure enough, there was a faint glow bobbing unevenly along the side of the house as a shadowy figure crept toward the front door. It paused only for a moment before disappearing, and Cal cursed himself for leaving the door unsecured. He should have nailed up boards last night after the girl ran away, even if he'd had to run Matthew's construction light on the long extension cord when it got dark.

  He pulled on clothes even as he went over the possibilities, picking his jeans up off the floor and jamming his feet into his old Jack Purcells. His gun was locked up in the safe in the closet, and Cal didn't consider getting it, not for a moment. He wasn't about to make the same mistake twice, especially since the girl didn't look like she weighed more than a hundred twenty and there had been no sign that she was armed.

  Cal walked slowly through the house, avoiding the squeaky boards in the hallway and kitchen floors. He let himself outside, breathing in the cold air and autumn smells of smoke and turned earth and night itself. Crossing the yard, he saw frost sparkling on the dead grass, and heard the owls that nested in the barn rafters.

  Whoever she was, she'd left the front door open, and a bicycle leaning against the side of the house. An old bike, he couldn't help noticing, with heavy tires and worn paint and a cracked leather seat. Was that how she'd gotten away last night?

  Cal trod lightly on the porch floorboards, easing up the steps on the outside where they were less likely to squeak, a trick he'd learned when he was sneaking home to his grandmother's house late at night. He slipped into the house and crept slowly around the side of the parlor, listening and barely breathing.

  A sound coming from the back of the house caught his attention—a scratching followed by a muttered string of syllables he couldn't quite make out. It sounded like a curse. A moment later, however, the voice started humming and the scratching resumed.