Montana Creeds: Tyler

by Linda Lael Miller

  He sat upright, thrust the splayed fingers of one hand through his hair. Don’t screw this up? Hadn’t he already screwed it up, by getting involved with Doreen and Davie the way he had?

  What if he was plain-old, flat-out wrong about Davie?

  A man had died in the kid’s presence, and telling about it later, he’d finished with boo-hoo? The kid could be a sociopath, if not worse.

  Or simply a thirteen-year-old boy, used to making the best of situations most adults never had to deal with.

  On the plus side, Davie was good to the dog—he seemed to love Kit Carson as much as Kit loved him. Not typical sociopathic, or psycho pathic, behavior. But did it preclude the possibility that Doreen might have purposely offed poor old Marty, and that Davie might have helped her cover it up? Even helped her do it?

  Jesus.

  What in hell might he be letting Lily and Tess in for, bringing them to live under the same roof with Davie? The little girl would be vulnerable to Davie in ways Tyler couldn’t stand to think about, and couldn’t ignore, either.

  On the other hand, all he really had to go on was his imagination, which happened to be running wild at the moment. It wouldn’t be right to turn his back on Davie on the strength of midnight suppositions.

  And it had to be after midnight.

  He groped for his watch on the upended fruit crate that served as a bedside table, held it in the shaft of moonlight beaming in through the window. Seeing the golden cowboy on the face of that watch, riding a bronc and holding one arm high, certain to make the critical eight seconds, Tyler’s eyes burned. Shawna . She’d been so proud when she gave him that watch to celebrate his first championship, probably never even regretted selling her horse trailer and prize saddle to raise the money.

  He’d planned on buying her a bigger, better trailer and another fancy saddle, too, but like so many good intentions, that one had been a paved road to hell.

  Tyler blinked a couple of times. Squinted to read the dial.

  Quarter after eleven? That was all? Hell, it felt as though he’d been tossing and turning on that painfully empty bed for a whole night, and he hadn’t even turned in until ten.

  Frick, he was getting old.

  He got up, pulled on some jeans, tugged a T-shirt over his head, threw a flannel work shirt on over that. Pulled on socks and boots and descended the stairs as quietly as he could, in case Davie was having better luck in the sleep department. Grabbing up his laptop, along with his cell phone, he hushed Kit Carson, who stirred on the cot, and went outside.

  Closing the door behind him, he sat down on the porch steps and looked up at the bright Montana stars. Millions of them, close enough to touch.

  They roused a sweet loneliness in Tyler, those stars.

  It would have been his salvation to call Lily—it was two hours later in Chicago, so he’d wake her up—and her voice would be all sleepy and warm. She’d be ripe for a little phone sex….

  He shook off the fantasy. Lily was wrapping things up back there; she had a lot to do. She had a child and an ailing father to look after, a condo to clean, things to pack up.

  She needed her rest.

  So he’d wait, as agreed, until she called him.

  If it killed him.

  He would have liked to talk to Logan about all this, or Dylan, or both of them. But they had wives, kids— lives . He could have put aside his pride and leveled with either one of his brothers—and that was undeniably progress—but he wasn’t about to wake them up, or interrupt something more intimate than sleep. Most likely, they were doing some headboard-slamming with their beautiful ladies.

  That made him smile.

  Cassie? She’d listen, if he let her know he needed to talk. She’d always been a rock, a refuge. She’d steered him through a lot of things, including some dark days after Shawna’s accident. But Cassie’s magic only worked in person, not over the phone, and he couldn’t drive over to her place and knock on the door at that hour. For one thing, he’d probably get her out of bed, and for another, leaving Davie home alone, at least at night, wasn’t an option.

  The kid might be thirteen, and street-wise—he might even be a psychopath—but it was a sure bet he’d spent more than his share of nights in an empty house or apartment as it was.

  And too many things could happen. What if there was a fire? What if his appendix ruptured?

  Tyler shook his head, flipped open the lightweight, superpowered laptop, logged on.

  If he couldn’t sleep, he’d do a little detective work instead.

  First stop, his favorite search engine. His mailbox was jammed, but that could wait.

  He typed in “Doreen McCullough,” expecting to wade through a hundred different Doreen McCulloughs, if not a thousand, before he found Davie’s mom and his first lover.

  The first few were strangers, as expected, but then he hit pay dirt—if a mug shot could be called pay dirt.

  There was Doreen, face bare of makeup, wearing an orange jail outfit and holding up a sign with numbers on it.

  Feeling sick, Tyler scanned page after page of a whole other kind of dirt. Doreen hadn’t hit bottom with Roy Fifer—she’d come up in the world.

  She’d been busted for soliciting in Vegas, not once but three times. She’d tried her hand at shoplifting, and done a year for credit-card fraud.

  Where had Davie been, when she was sent up?

  In a foster home? With the truck driver Doreen had originally named as Davie’s father?

  “Okay, so she has a rap sheet,” Davie said, from just behind him.

  Tyler hadn’t heard the kid get out of bed, let alone approach, but he wasn’t really surprised. Davie probably hadn’t been able to sleep any more than he had. He’d been playing possum when Tyler passed through the kitchen a little while before.

  “Want to tell me about it?” Tyler asked quietly. Evenly.

  Davie stepped around him, wearing the ratty pair of sweatpants he slept in. Sat down on the step next to Tyler.

  “What’s to tell?” he finally said. “It’s all right there, on the Internet. Most of it, anyway.”

  Tyler wondered if Jim Huntinghorse had already reviewed all this stuff and, if so, why he hadn’t mentioned it during his visit earlier in the evening. “Where did you stay, Davie, when Doreen was doing her time for credit-card theft?”

  Davie was a long time answering. He didn’t look at Tyler or at the computer screen, but straight out into a darkness that must have seemed dense enough to swallow him whole and then digest him right into oblivion.

  “With my grandmother,” he finally admitted. “Scroll a little farther—she’s on there.”

  Instead, Tyler closed the laptop, set it aside on the newly repaired porch. Kit Carson squeezed between him and Davie and trotted out into the high grass to lift a leg against the right rear tire of the new Chevy. It gleamed in the thin light of a waning moon, that pickup, a thing of beauty. The kind of rig he should have bought in the first place. “I’d rather hear it from you,” he said.

  Davie sighed. “Gramma plays bingo all the time, so she wasn’t much interested in me—I just got in her way, mostly.” The boy gave Tyler a sidelong look and did the Creed grin again, flawlessly. “Not what you were expecting, huh? You thought I was going to say I was taken in by wolves while Mom was in the slamm
er, or maybe a band of outlaw bikers—”

  While Mom was in the slammer.

  How many kids had to cope with something like that?

  “I thought you were probably in a foster home,” Tyler said.

  “That would have been better. Mom is the greatest disappointment of my Gramma’s life—not counting me, of course. She had two other kids before I came along and, not being married at the time, or particularly flush, gave them both up for adoption.” Davie paused, shrugged in a way that made Tyler’s heart crawl right up into the back of his throat and pound there. “For whatever reason—my best guess would be that I was a financial ace in the hole, if there was any chance I was yours—she kept me. Came and picked me up as soon as she got out of jail—and was I ever glad to see her.”

  “I’m going to have to call her, Davie. Your grandmother, I mean.”

  “Good luck dumping me on her, ” Davie said, with heartbreaking bravado. “Like I said, I’m not Gramma’s favorite person.”

  Somewhere out in the gloom, Kit Carson began to bark.

  Thinking of coyotes, or the bears that sometimes roamed the ranch in search of a meal, Tyler gave a shrill whistle to call the dog back.

  After that, things happened so fast that he never got a chance to tell Davie he hadn’t intended to foist him off on anybody.

  Lights swung through the trees, coming up the driveway, and the roar of a big engine driven too fast in too low a gear made the air vibrate.

  Tyler got to his feet. “What the hell?”

  “Kit!” Davie yelled, in an instant panic. “Kit!”

  Kit was only a shadow, darting along the edge of the tree line between the cabin and the lake, and he’d evidently dropped out of obedience school, because he stayed clear.

  The roar got louder, and the ground began to shake.

  “Get out of here!” Tyler yelled, fairly pushing Davie off the porch. “Run!”

  “Run where?” Davie shouted back.

  The headlights were high off the ground, and coming straight at them now, jostling and jumping like the eyeballs of some gigantic monster sprung up out of the earth and bent on destruction.

  Tyler grabbed Davie by the back of the neck and flung him to one side, dived after him. They both hit the ground face-first, scrambled back to their feet.

  There was a crash, loud enough to rattle the stars overhead, and Tyler looked back to see the big rig pushing his new truck in front of it like a cow-catcher on a freight train. The semi’s engine was screaming now, rising toward a shrill crescendo.

  “Shit!” Tyler hollered furiously. “I just bought that truck!”

  Now Davie was the one taking the lead. He had Tyler by the arm and was trying to drag him out of the crazy, swaying beams of those headlights.

  “If he sees us,” Davie shouted, pulling for all he was worth, “we’re dead meat!”

  They’d only covered about a dozen yards when the demon semi from hell rammed Tyler’s truck into the side of the cabin, and then straight through the wall.

  And not just the front wall, but the back one, too.

  Dust billowed, fit to choke everything that breathed.

  The semi motor gave one last excruciating whine of agonized protest and then died, with a series of metallic clunks. The hand-hewn timbers of the cabin roof groaned and finally gave way with an uncanny grace, smashing down on top of the big truck. On top of Tyler’s pickup.

  “Christ,” he murmured, not sure if he was praying or cursing.

  “It was just like in that Stephen King movie,” Davie piped up. “The one with the crazy car that went around crushing people against walls—”

  “Davie,” Tyler said quietly, plucking his cell phone from his pocket. “Shut up.”

  Logan got there first, tearing up the driveway in his truck. He’d heard the crash all the way over at his place, he yelled up to Tyler, who was already on the roof, tossing down boards.

  Big brother had hit the ground running—hadn’t even shut off his pickup or closed the door behind him. But the scene brought him to a standstill. He shook it off, climbed up to join Tyler. “Holy shit, ” he said, looking around.

  It said something about Logan, and the kind of brother he was, Tyler figured, that he got right in and started flinging away shingles, without even asking what they were digging for.

  Davie, meanwhile, was trying to round up a very freaked-out Kit Carson, shouting his name, whistling.

  Finally, the boy called out exuberantly, “Kit’s all right! I caught him!”

  Tyler kept pawing at the debris of the cabin roof, hurling chunks of wood aside. He was pretty sure who he’d find behind the wheel of that buried semi, once he and Logan finally got down to it, but not so sure what condition Roy Fifer would be in by then.

  In the distance, sirens tore slashes in the otherwise silent country night.

  Jim and his crew were on their way, in response to Tyler’s 911 call, and since Logan had called Dylan soon before he left his place, brother number two was probably right behind them. If not ahead by a lap or two.

  “Do you want to tell me what happened here?” Logan asked, a little breathless from the exertion of trying to move a house with his bare hands.

  “I think that’s kind of obvious, don’t you?” Tyler countered, and he started to laugh. It started as a low, rumbling chuckle and gathered force until it was a roar. Sweat running down his face, covered in dirt, his house a wreck and his new truck a goner after one day in his possession, he didn’t know what else to do but laugh.

  The sirens grew louder.

  Briana pulled in, driving her BMW and wearing jeans under her nightgown, Alec and Josh in tow.

  “I think I heard something,” Logan said, after noting his wife’s arrival and giving a slight shake of his head. “From down there—”

  Tyler stopped laughing to listen.

  Sure enough, there was a voice rising from the depths of all that wreckage, like a faint curl of smoke, unintelligible but definitely human in origin.

  They dug a little farther, and the words came clear.

  “Somebody—help me—”

  Logan and Tyler dug harder.

  “What’s going on here?” Briana called up, from the yard.

  Logan chuckled and even in the darkness, Tyler saw the look of tender amusement move in his brother’s eyes. “Briana,” he called back, “get that flashlight out of my truck and throw it up here. Then go home! And take Davie and the dog with you.”

  “But I want to know—” Briana’s protest was cut off by the arrival of all three of Stillwater Springs’ squad cars and an ambulance. The din was deafening.

  Dylan was there, too—he took the flashlight from Briana’s hands and scrambled up onto the pile. Handed the light to Logan and started moving timber.

  “What happened? ” Briana insisted, when some of the noise had subsided.

  Jim and two of his deputies were on the roof now, while the EMTs prepared for whatever the night might bring. Within a few minutes, the roof of the semi was in sight—the beam of the flashlight bounced off it.

  “Davie will tell you all about it,” Logan shouted down to his wife, in belated reply, “on the way home!”

  Briana finally gave up and left, taking the three boys and Kit Carson with her.

  “S
he’ll be waiting up with hot coffee and a lot of questions when we get to the other house,” Logan said, pausing to drag an arm across his forehead and wipe some of the sweat away.

  “I’d rather have whiskey,” Dylan put in.

  “There won’t be any shortage of questions,” Jim huffed. “I’ve got about a thousand of them.”

  They’d created an opening, but the timbers weren’t stable and now that they’d done enough digging to get down to the truck, Jim ordered everybody off the roof.

  The deputies left, but Logan, Dylan and Tyler stayed put, along with Jim.

  Tyler started for the hole. This was his house and his truck, after all. He’d be the one to climb down there and see if the crazy man was alive.

  Dylan stopped him by taking hold of his left arm. “I’m the bull-rider in this crew,” he said. The rodeo reference wasn’t lost on the other three men—bull-riders tended to be leaner, shorter and more agile than their counterparts in the other events, though of course there were always exceptions. Dylan was by no means a small man, but Logan, Tyler and Jim were all taller, heavier and broader through the shoulders.

  And that hole was going to be a tight fit.

  “Be careful,” Logan said, with a sigh.

  Dylan nodded, glanced Tyler’s way.

  Reluctantly, Tyler nodded back.

  Nimble, like he’d always been, Dylan made his way down some ten feet, easing himself from beam to beam, going still when the timbers groaned and shimmied.

  “Everybody down,” Jim ordered, for the second time, when the quake subsided.

  “Not a chance,” Logan said flatly.

  “That’s our brother down there,” Tyler added.

  “Did it ever occur to either of you knot-heads,” Jim bit out, crescents of sweat staining the underarms of his once-spiffy uniform shirt, dust dulling his badge, “that you might be putting Dylan in more danger, standing up here arguing with me?” He paused, swallowed hard. “I am the sheriff of this county, you know. I expect my orders to be obeyed.”