by Vicki Tharp
“About time,” I muttered as I sank against the rock at my back. “You stop along the way to get your nails done?”
Boomer chuckled in my head. Giddy almost. Either he was having too much fun or the cold had gotten to him. Probably a bit of both.
“Get your ass up,” Boomer ordered his captive. His voice rang in my head and more quietly through my uncovered ear. Not much later Boomer said to me, “We’re coming in.”
“Meet me over by Hank and Dale.”
I headed in that direction, still in a half crouch, still running from cover to cover because I couldn’t shake the fact that there hadn’t been any sign of Link since the men had posted watch.
I was twenty yards from Hank and about thirty from Boomer when I sensed movement to my left. I heard a throat clear.
The same throat I’d heard clear time after time, shot after shot when Link was practicing on the firing range. My hand brushed back the edge of my coat and in one fluid motion, I palmed the Beretta’s grip, slid the gun from the holster, spun, crouched, and aimed where the sound had emanated. I slid my finger inside the trigger guard.
It was Link.
He’d popped up from behind a rock no more than ten feet away. He had the barrel of his rifle aimed right at me. My momentum carried me forward, but I kept Link in front of my sights.
I took up the slack in the trigger, my finger on that infinitesimal borderline between shoot and don’t shoot, kill and don’t kill—a one-way ticket to death. Link’s barrel didn’t follow my motion.
He wasn’t aiming at me.
A muscle in my forearm twitched.
I fired.
He fired.
Someone else fired. Birdshot pinged my coat and stung the back of my knee, but most of the load went high and wide.
A voice screamed out. Anger. Pain. Surprise.
I hit the ground, rolled, and aimed my gun in the opposite direction ready to fire again.
“You bastard,” a woman hissed at Link. She held her shotgun with one hand, the barrel pointed at Link’s stomach. She swiped at the bloody crease on her cheek where Link’s bullet had grazed her.
“Put the gun down, Doris,” Link ordered.
“All this,” Doris said, waving the end of her shotgun in an all-encompassing gesture, “this is your fault.”
I had to hand it to Link. He remained non-confrontational, and as calmly and unemotionally as he could manage he said, “Put the gun down before you kill someone.”
Even with the dim light of early dawn, I could tell her face screwed up into an expression that was equal parts disgust and hate. Maybe it was the way the moonlight glinted off the whites of her eyes, but I also caught a hint of madness.
“Shoot him. Shoot all of them,” the brother Boomer had apprehended shouted. The man was on his knees with his hands zip-tied behind his back. Boomer gave him a boot in the back and he landed face first in the mud not too far from me with a splish and a grunt. He spat the muck out of his mouth and rolled to his side, but with his hands behind his back, he couldn’t get up.
Doris’s rifle swung in Boomer’s direction.
“You don’t want to hurt him,” Link said.
She swung the barrel of the shotgun back to Link. He still had his rifle in his hands, but the stock wasn’t to his shoulder. He wasn’t prepared to use it.
“You don’t know what I want,” Doris vomited the words. All gooey hate with chunks of malice thrown in, stinking with her vitriol. “You never cared what I wanted. It was all about this stupid ranch. Doing for it. Doing for them. Always.”
“This is where I grew up. We decided against our own place. We agreed to stay here.”
“No.” The shotgun dangled in her hand as she used the other one to jab a finger at him. “I stayed because you refused to go. There’s a difference.”
“This is my home. Dale and Lottie and Jenna, they’re like family to me.”
“Not like family. They are your family.”
“Doris.” Link’s voice was low and guttural like the warning growl of a guard dog, all potential threat, and leashed fury.
I had my pistol trained on her, but I was still on my side on the ground where I’d landed. My hands vibrated from fatigue and the cold.
Dale stepped forward into my peripheral vision and said to Link, “What is she talking about?”
Her laugh came out a twisted, a hair-raising combination of Cruella de Vil and the Wicked Witch of the West. “You still haven’t told them?”
“Doris! Enough!”
“Told us what?” Dale’s voice was steady but full of tension and the fear of the unknown. Of the truth. He glanced from Link to Doris and then back again.
“The ranch should have been Link’s. Ours. Mine. Not Lottie’s. Certainly not yours. That should have been us in the big house all these years, not you.”
“Link, what’s this nonsense?”
Link didn’t respond. He was behind me but his internal battle was palpable.
“Tell them,” Doris ordered.
Link cleared his throat. “Lottie’s my younger sister. I’m Donovan Sill’s bastard.”
“What… I mean how…when…” Dale couldn’t focus on one question long enough to spit any of them out.
“Found proof after going through my mother’s papers while I was trying to find her will. There’s a letter from Donovan to my mother, acknowledging that he was my father.”
“Shoot. Them.” I couldn’t see Talbot’s face, but his voice vibrated with rage. “Fucking shoot them.” I was certain this was Trevor. The other brothers seemed more like the type to follow orders, not issue them. “Now, Doris.”
Doris raised her gun, pointed it at Link’s belly, her brows narrowed, and she squinted her eyes as if she couldn’t watch what she was about to do.
“Don’t do it, Doris,” Link implored.
With a frustrated scream, she tore the end of the barrel away from Link and swung it until it pointed at me. My heart skittered sideways and my lungs refused to draw air. I still had my gun aimed at her, but as much as she was waving the shotgun around, I really didn’t think she wanted to use it. This wasn’t Iraq. She wasn’t a trained killer. She didn’t want to hurt anybody. Of course, that assumption could be the last one I made.
A pistol cocked. “Ah, ah, ah,” Hank said. I turned my head. Hank had his weapon pointed at Doris’s chest.
“Don’t even think about it.” I twisted my head around. Boomer had his Beretta out. From the trajectory of his muzzle, it pointed at Doris’s head. Of all of us here, I knew Boomer had the least qualms about firing.
“Put your guns down,” a voice commanded from somewhere behind Hank.
Boomer chuckled, his gun hand never wavering off Doris. “Not gonna happen, brother.”
“What are you doing here?” Doris demanded at the same time Dale said, “Tate, what the hell are you doing?”
Sheriff Tate ignored both of them and reissued the order to Hank. “Put it down or I’ll put one in your head.”
Hank glanced at Boomer, who told Hank with a slight shake of his head not to give up his weapon.
Boomer placed the sheriff in his sights. “Do it and Mac and I will make sure the next two bullets do the Two-Step with your heart.”
With Hank in front of the sheriff, I wasn’t completely sure Boomer had a clean shot.
I knew I didn’t.
I shifted my aim and still the only way I had a clear shot was if Tate dropped Hank as he’d threatened.
Yes, no, and no.
Jenna’s three questions echoed in my brain: “What about my mother, did you love her? Did you love all of them or any of them? Do you love Mac?” Then it hit me like a two-by-four to the head or maybe more like a freight train because the tightness in my chest was crushing. I knew I had the order of the questions wrong. He’d given me the answers becau
se it was significant. Because they meant something. Because the only yes that mattered was one that answered the question of if he loved me.
Holy crap.
Hank loves me.
I sucked in a lungful of air at the realization, my jaw dropped, and my gaze flicked to his. His eyes were already on me as if he’d decided if he were going to die today, he was going to die with me etched into his brain. Loving me. His eyes were soft. He knew that I’d finally figured it out. His lips twitched with a ghost of a smile.
My hands shook, and for a second Hank’s outline turned all wavy, but I blinked him back into focus. If Hank went down, I wouldn’t stop firing until I’d filled the sheriff with more holes than a colander.
Boomer had his gun trained on the sheriff. Hank’s and Link’s were on Doris. Doris’s shotgun pointed at my stomach. The sheriff’s muzzle pressed into the back of Hank’s head.
“Somebody give me a fucking gun and I’ll shoot them!” Trevor screamed.
“Shut the hell up or I’ll shoot you first, dipshit,” Tate’s tone was snide, as if he was one lick away from having all of his patience eaten up.
“Quite the goat rope, Mac,” Boomer said with all the emotion of someone saying, “Pass the ketchup.”
“Yeah, sorry about that,” I told him.
He shrugged it off as if every day he was a finger twitch away from death. “It happens.” Then to the sheriff, he said, “This how you gonna end your career, man? Like a bad scene from High Noon?”
For a few seconds, nobody moved or spoke. My teeth chattered and my toes had lost all feeling. Suddenly a hundred and ten degrees in the shade didn’t sound so bad after all.
“Fuck,” the sheriff finally ground out as he tossed his weapon and stepped out in front of us. Hank weaved on his feet for a second, but stuck his hand out on a boulder and stabilized himself. Tate waved his hand at Doris in a give-it-to-me gesture. “It’s over, Doris. I can’t cover for you anymore. You’ve caused enough grief.”
Four guns trained on her, blood oozed from the crease Link had put on her cheek but she didn’t seem to notice the blood or the guns. I stood and Boomer retrieved the sheriff’s pistol from a puddle.
I stepped over to Hank, and he wrapped an arm around me and planted a kiss on the side of my head.
Doris’s gun was no longer aimed at anyone, but she also hadn’t put it down. The sheriff stepped towards her as if he were going to grab the barrel and yank it out of her hands. I saw the moment that she snapped, the moment that consequences didn’t matter, the moment that Tate became her reason it had all gone bad.
She backed away a couple steps and started swinging the muzzle. Past Link, past Boomer, past Dale. A trajectory that would put Hank and me in the blast zone behind Tate. Tate grabbed at the shotgun.
Boomer fired.
She fired.
I dove to the ground, shoving Hank ahead of me.
The concussion from the blast rattled my eardrums and my nose filled with the tang of gunpowder. More pellets hit my back and legs, but the shot was high and the coat was thick and protective. Hank muttered a few curses, but I didn’t think he’d been hit worse than I had.
“I need help here,” the sheriff hollered. He was on the ground with Doris. He unzipped her jacket and jammed both hands on top of the bullet wound near her shoulder to stop the bleeding.
Boomer holstered his gun and went to help. In the distance, a faint whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop beat the air. The sound came from high in the sky. A pinprick of light grew stronger and larger and brighter as the sound intensified and whipped the air.
“Hey Boom,” I called out. “You call in air support?”
* * * *
A Blackhawk helicopter landed a hundred yards away at the edge of the boulder field, the rotor wash slinging droplets of mud and water in every direction and the search light painting us in blinding light.
Someone called out over the loudspeaker, “Weapons down. Step away and put your hands on your head.”
I dropped my pistol and took a step back. My bad shoulder twinged as I laced my fingers behind my head. Hank, Dale, and Link followed suit, dumping Tanner and Trevor on their knees to show they weren’t a threat since their hands were zip-tied behind their back. Boomer and Tate remained focused on Doris, doing their best to staunch the bleeding.
The heavy whoomp of the blades and the piercing whine of the engine wound down when the engine cut off. Eight men disgorged from the helo, dressed in full tactical gear, their M4 assault rifles strapped to their chests. They fanned out, before a couple of them moved in and secured our weapons. These weren’t Tate’s boys. These guys had to be some sort of special rapid response team from one of the bigger cities.
One of the men identified the group: “Rock Springs PD. Keep your hands on your heads.”
We didn’t move. I didn’t take offense. This was for their safety. They flew into a hot situation without any idea who the bad guys were. Still my body buzzed. I didn’t like being on the business end of a gun without a way to defend myself. They patted first Hank down and then Dale and Link. When they got to me, I said, “I have a knife in my right boot.”
An officer finished the pat down and relieved me of my knife.
“I have a pistol on my right hip,” Boomer notified one of the officers, his hands covered in blood up to his wrists, as he applied pressure to Doris’s wound. Doris moaned, delirious from the pain, but not so bad she passed out.
One of the men stripped Boomer of his Beretta while another ran in with a medical bag to attend to Doris.
“Everyone have a seat over there.” Jeffery was his name according to the patch on his Kevlar vest. He hitched his chin toward a large flat rock about chair height. By all accounts, he was the man in charge.
When Dale and Hank reached down to help Tanner and Trevor to their feet, Officer Jeffery said, “Leave them.” Then he called two of his men to escort Tanner and Trevor to the rock.
The rock was damp, the cold and moisture soaking through my jeans, but I was already so numb that my pegged-out crapometer didn’t register the blip. Hank bumped me lightly with his shoulder in a hang-in-there-this-is-almost-over kind of way. Dale was on the other side of me. Link on the other side of him. The officers deposited the Talbot brothers on the rock on Hank’s right flank.
Jeffery stood in front of us, his rifle dangling from the single point sling around his chest. “Which one of you is Dale Cunningham?”
“I’m Dale.” Dale stood, but didn’t move away from the rock. “How did you know my name?”
“Your granddaughter called the Sweetwater County Sheriff’s office. They called us. She had radio contact with one of your men. She was concerned for your safety.” He glanced around. Tate and Boomer were helping to carry Doris to the helo on a stretcher. Then he focused his attention back on us. “Rightly so, from the looks of it. What happened here?”
Dale gave him a quick rundown of the situation and what had happened.
Boomer trotted back, with Tate and one of the officers close on his heels. Somewhere along the way, Boomer had wiped most the blood from his hands. The helo’s engine grumbled and coughed to life and the massive blades slowly revved.
“You two have anything to say for yourselves?” Jeffery asked the brothers.
“It was all—” Tanner started.
“Shut the fuck up, dumb ass,” Trevor ordered, contempt twisting his features into something almost inhuman.
“But—”
“Not a fucking word.”
An officer stepped up to Jeffery and said, “We need to evac the lady to the hospital, ay-sap. We can have another helo here in thirty to take the rest of you back.”
“Leave me two men. We still have two on the ridge to pick up, apparently. The rest of you head back.”
“Yes, sir.”
The officer selected two men to
stay and jogged back to the helo. Seconds later, it lifted skyward, the blades slashing a trail across the rising sun.
Jeffery turned to Sheriff Tate, who was standing in no man’s land somewhere between him and us. “Is what Cunningham says true? You wrapped up in this mess, Sheriff?” There was something about his direct, nonjudgmental demeanor that made you want to confess all your sins.
It didn’t make any sense, but that didn’t make it any less true.
Tate’s shoulders sagged and he couldn’t look Jeffery in the eye. “Yeah.”
An emotion flitted across Jeffery’s face. If I’d known him better, I would have said it was disappointment. He nodded once. “I have to put you under arrest.”
Tate walked over to Jeffery, bloodstained hands in front of him, wrists held together, waiting for Jeffery to slap the cuffs on.
“Pat him down,” Jeffery ordered one of his men. Tate was cooperative, but Jeffery couldn’t take any chances. When the officer finished, Jeffery said, “You behave and I’ll let you keep your hands in front. Do anything stupid and all bets are off.”
“Understood,” Tate mumbled.
I almost didn’t hear him because the sound of hoofbeats nearly drowned him out. One of the horses from our picket line called out, long and high pitched. Several horses whinnied in return from somewhere around a bend.
“Hot damn,” Hank said, as he stepped away to greet an incoming Quinn, who rode at the head of the herd like the equine Pied Piper, an exhausted but exhilarated grin splitting his face. It took them several minutes to reach us. He clasped Quinn’s hand in a hearty shake. “Well done, son.”
Santos brought up the rear, the herd moseying through the boulders, snatching bites of scrub here and there. A few were limping. Others had open wounds that seeped blood, but in general, they were not too bad off. Considering.
Dale and Link brought their horses in from the picket line, leading Hank’s horse behind them. Hank put a foot in the stirrup, grunting as he hefted himself into the saddle as if stiff and sore.
Dale said, “We’ll run the herd into the canyon and post a couple guys at the entrance to keep them in until we can jerry-rig a temporary fence.”