Texas Ranger

by James Patterson

  His eyes narrow.

  “Okay,” he says.

  “Outside,” I say. “Just to talk.”

  Sara Beth stands up.

  “You two need to stay away from each other,” she says. “No good will come of you going out into the parking lot.”

  “It’s okay,” I say, putting my hands on Sara Beth’s shoulders. “I think if we were going to kill each other, we would have done it two days ago.”

  “I’m coming out to check on y’all in two minutes,” she says. “And you better be talking.”

  Cal leads the way to the door, and I follow. On my way through the bar, I catch Willow’s eye. Her guitarist is in the middle of a solo, so she mouths to me what looks like, Are you okay?

  I nod and give her a thumbs-up.

  Cal walks out into the parking lot, away from the building. Sara Beth keeps an eye on us from the door.

  “Go back and sit down,” I say. “We’ll be fine.”

  I mean it.

  But once she’s inside, I turn to Cal and his fist is already coming at my face.

  Chapter 79

  THE PUNCH CONNECTS with my cheekbone, and I stumble back against a pickup truck.

  “Who the hell do you think you are?” Cal shouts, coming at me with another fist.

  I move my head enough that this one glances off my forehead. I throw a jab into his chest. His hands instinctively move to block it, leaving his face exposed. That’s when I bring my right fist up and smash it into his mouth.

  Cal grabs me by the shirt and pushes me against the truck. His teeth are clenched and coated in a sheen of blood that looks black in the moonlight.

  I’m faintly aware of the music from the bar thrumming through the walls and into the parking lot.

  “Did you kill her?” Cal shouts.

  He has left his body exposed, so I throw a right into his rib cage, then another and another.

  He backs off, and I know I should stop, but we’ve been headed for this fight since the day of Anne’s funeral. The crowd pulled us apart then, and again when we were inside the Pale Horse. But here we are with no one else. No guns. No knives. Just us. Just our fists.

  He is cradling his ribs, hunched over.

  I draw my arm back and go for a knockout punch, but he’s quicker than I expect and maneuvers out of the way. He grabs my body and uses my momentum against me, throwing me facedown into the gravel. He’s on top of me in an instant, trying to wrap his arms around my neck. His wrestling technique puts me at a disadvantage while I’m grappling on the ground with him.

  I throw an elbow backward and connect with the same ribs I hit before—that’s not a move that would have been allowed in his wrestling tournaments. I roll and twist and get myself on top of Cal.

  I drive my fist into his face.

  Again.

  Again.

  His arms are up, trying to block my blows, but when I hit him once more, they go limp, wobbling without control.

  I bring my arm back to hit him again, but I stop myself.

  His nose is broken and gushing blood. There is a cut next to one eye, trickling blood down his cheek.

  I’ve finally done it: I’ve beaten the hell out of Cal Richards.

  It’s what I’ve wanted to do since Anne died—what I’ve wanted, in truth, since I found out she was dating him years ago.

  But now that it’s happened, I don’t feel good about it.

  I feel like throwing up.

  “Rory!” someone shrieks.

  Sara Beth runs through the parking lot and grabs me. She yanks me off of Cal with surprising strength.

  People start filing out of the bar to see the commotion. The music stops.

  Cal sits up, his back hunched, and puts a hand to his face. It comes away bloody.

  “If you wanted to kill me,” I say to Cal, “why didn’t you do it in New Jersey? You could have crushed me with your truck.”

  Cal spits a thick glob of blood.

  “When we were back in Jersey, I didn’t know you’d planted a gun in my house,” he says.

  “I didn’t plant that gun in your house,” I say.

  He looks at me, and again, his expression is either genuine or he’s the best actor on the planet.

  “Then who did?” he says.

  Chapter 80

  WILLOW COMES RUNNING out of the bar and into the crowd. When she gets to us, she wedges herself between Sara Beth and me, putting her hand on my chest in a protective stance. She looks back and forth between Cal and me and says to me, “Are you okay?”

  I don’t know how to answer.

  Yes, physically.

  But in every other way, the answer is no.

  “All right, everyone!” shouts Darren. “The fight’s over. Go back inside.”

  I didn’t see Darren in the crowd, and everyone else acts like they can’t hear him. They don’t believe the show is over.

  “Cal,” I say, my voice thick and heavy. “I came out here to talk. Not to fight. I just want to figure out who killed Anne and Patty.”

  He rises to his feet and looks at me. “I wish you’d figure it out already, and leave me alone.” His voice sounds like he’s pinching his nostrils closed.

  Part of me wants to apologize. For beating him up. For chasing him all the way to New Jersey.

  But I’m still not completely sure that he didn’t do it. I vow that if it turns out he’s innocent, I will apologize with all my heart and soul.

  “I don’t know if you did it or not,” I say, “but we’ll know soon enough. The gun in your house had fingerprints. Not on the gun. On the bullets.”

  I shouldn’t tell him this. If he’s guilty, he might make a run for it before the report comes back on the prints. But I can’t help myself. I want to see his expression when I say it.

  “Good,” he says, and as before, his expression tells me nothing.

  All is quiet for a moment, and then Darren says, “Willow, maybe if you go back to singing, we can get these people inside.”

  Willow looks at me, her eyes full of concern.

  “I’m not leaving Rory’s side,” she says to Darren without breaking eye contact with me. “Not tonight. I’ll be back tomorrow. Till then, you’ll just have to use the jukebox.”

  “I pay you to sing,” Darren says petulantly.

  She turns her head and glares at him. “And I make a lot of money for you. If I want the rest of the night off, I’m taking it.”

  That ends the conversation. Willow tugs on my arm.

  “Come on,” she says.

  We start to walk away, and faintly, I hear Sara Beth say, “Rory.”

  Her expression says everything. This is the moment I have to choose.

  Willow or Sara Beth?

  On my arm, I have a sexy country singer. The new girl in town. She’s fun, exciting, and I don’t know what the future holds for us.

  And standing before me is a beautiful teacher. My high school sweetheart. My first love. The girl whose heart I’ve already broken once. She’s told me she’s forgiven me. She’d take me back and spend the rest of her life as my supportive, loving partner.

  “I’m sorry,” I say to Sara Beth, and I turn away.

  Willow and I walk silently through the parking lot toward her Toyota.

  I know I’ve broken a good woman’s heart a second time. But my heart wants what it wants.

  Anne wanted to be with Cal more than me.

  I can’t help it if I want to be with Willow more than Sara Beth.

  Chapter 81

  WILLOW DRIVES ME to my little casita on my parents’ property.

  The moon is high in the sky now, full and bright, lighting up the ranch house and fields. Visibility is excellent, and Willow and I sit on the porch in the cool night air, talking and listening to the crickets.

  I tell her about everything that happened in New Jersey. And then I talk about what happened with the parking lot fight and how bad I felt about it afterward.

  I tell her that I’m probably goi
ng to lose my badge, and I’m not even sad about it. I could live in this little house on a permanent basis, help out on the ranch, and eventually take it over as my parents get older and older.

  “I’m not sure I’m cut out for law enforcement,” I say.

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself,” she says. “It sounds like you’ve made some mistakes, but there’s at least one good thing you did.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You stopped Cal from killing himself,” she says. “If you hadn’t, he might not have been alive to sucker punch you.”

  Her face breaks into a wry smile, and I can’t help but laugh.

  I take her inside and show her my humble home.

  “I like it,” she says. “Cozy.”

  My gun belt is lying on the floor next to the bed, and Willow asks if I can put it away somewhere. I pick it up and stash it in the closet.

  I can understand her discomfort with having the gun in the room, especially next to the bed if we’re going to do what I think we’re going to do.

  Willow flicks the light switch off, leaving the room illuminated by only the ghostly moonlight coming in through the windows.

  I take her in my arms, pulling her body in tight against mine, and we begin to kiss—long, slow, sensual kisses, one right after the other.

  Willow untucks my shirt and starts to unbutton it. She decides that will take too long, so she grabs it and yanks it open, sending buttons flying everywhere. She peels the shirt down over my shoulders and discards it on the plywood floor. She runs her fingers up and down my chest, sending tingling sensations throughout my body.

  Tonight, she’s wearing a loose-fitting dress, and I reach down, run my hands up her legs, and slowly pull the dress off over her head. She stands before me in only her bra, underwear, and cowboy boots.

  Her skin smells like jasmine. I kiss her neck and taste a hint of salt from the sweat of performing onstage. I lower my head and kiss the swell of her breast, then kneel in front of her and kiss her flat stomach, her navel, her pelvis just above her panty line. She sits on the edge of the bed and holds up a leg. I take off her boots one at a time, roll the socks off her feet. I stand back up and she undoes my belt and slides my pants down.

  Willow takes off her bra, tosses it aside, and then slips off her underwear. She scoots back on the bed, her body bathed in milky moonlight.

  Willow says, “Make love to me, Rory. Make love to me like you’ve never made love to another woman before.”

  I crawl into bed and lower my mouth to hers. She wraps her strong legs around me, and I slide into her, like we were made to fit together.

  I’m faintly aware of my telephone buzzing from far away. My phone is in the back pocket of my pants, on the floor, but it seems a hundred miles away.

  It never occurs to me that it might be DeAndre Purvis calling to tell me who the fingerprints belong to.

  Chapter 82

  CAL STANDS IN front of the restroom sink, trying to wash the blood off his face. The cut on his eye has stopped bleeding, but the skin around it has swollen to the point that he can hardly see out of the eye. Both of his nostrils are plugged with wads of toilet paper. His nose throbs with a pain so deep it seems to be reverberating throughout his skull.

  Someone comes in to use the bathroom, sees Cal leaning over the blood-splattered sink, and does an about-face.

  Cal takes a paper towel and begins to dry himself off. The music of the jukebox throbs through the walls.

  When DeAndre Purvis told him they found a gun and that his back door had been kicked in, he assumed it was all Rory. At first, it made a certain amount of sense that Rory would frame him. Rory was sure Cal did it but didn’t have the evidence, so he could plant a gun and then come chase Cal across the country.

  It even made sense that Rory would stop Cal from killing himself. He wanted Cal to face the consequences of the crime, not take the easy way out.

  But Cal doesn’t believe that Rory planted the gun anymore.

  As much as he hates the son of a bitch, Cal never thought Rory would kill Anne or Patty, even as he was throwing his first punch. His attack came from feelings of frustration more than anything else. Rory has pursued and persecuted him ever since Anne’s death. And even though Anne never said as much, Cal always felt like he never measured up to him—Rory Yates, the football star, the Texas Ranger, the town’s favored son.

  Cal had enough, even if he didn’t really believe Rory was the killer.

  He only wishes Rory thought the same about him. Sure, Cal made mistakes—he had sex with another woman when he was in love with Anne, to give the latest and most obvious example.

  But he is no murderer. Why can’t Rory see it?

  Cal finishes drying his face and then spits a red string of saliva into the sink. He was planning to get a drink, but now he just wants to head back to his rig and take eight hundred milligrams of ibuprofen. Alcohol seems to make everything worse.

  As crazy as it seems, he feels as though getting his ass kicked might have been just what he needed. He’s been a drunken suicidal wreck on a path of self-destruction. Now, standing in a bar bathroom with a broken, throbbing nose and a gashed, swollen eye, he’s hit rock bottom. It’s time to crawl out of the gutter and get back to being the man Anne always thought he was.

  As he’s reaching for the door, it comes banging open. Sara Beth stands there, her cheeks flushed, her eyes burning with urgency.

  “There you are,” she says. “I need your help. Come with me.”

  “Where?” he asks, his voice nasal.

  “To save Rory.”

  “What?”

  “I know you hate the guy—and I’m pretty pissed at him right now myself—but it’s what Anne would want you to do.”

  She grabs his hand and pulls, leading him through the bar toward the door.

  “What the hell is going on?” Cal says.

  “I figured it out,” Sara Beth says. “It’s Willow Dawes. There’s something Rory doesn’t know about her.”

  Chapter 83

  WILLOW AND I lie on the mattress, our arms and legs tangled around each other. We can’t stop smiling. Our bodies are slick with sweat, glistening in the moonlight. Willow reaches down and pulls up a sheet to cover us as our bodies start to cool.

  For the first time since I arrived home three weeks ago, I’m not thinking about Anne’s murderer.

  Maybe Willow is the one for me. Maybe Anne, as much as I loved her, was meant to be with Cal, and this woman—smiling at me in the moonlight—is the soul mate I’ve always been looking for.

  I haven’t believed in God for a long time, but this attraction I feel does make me think there are divine forces in the universe. I feel a sense of the inevitable. When we first shared the stage at the Pale Horse, the magnetism we felt was undeniable.

  Willow asks if she can have a glass of water, and I climb out of bed to get it for her. Before I jump back under the sheet, I use the tiny restroom in the back. I click on the light and look at myself in the mirror. I can’t even recognize the person I’m looking at—he seems so happy and relaxed.

  I grab a pair of sweatpants out of the hamper and slip them on.

  When I get back to the bed, Willow says, “What are you doing putting pants on? We’re not done yet.”

  I laugh and kiss her.

  From the floor, my phone buzzes again, and I remember it ringing earlier.

  “I better get that,” I tell Willow.

  “Oh, let it ring,” she says, with an exaggerated whine.

  I almost do as she says, but I decide I better check. I can only ignore the real world for so long. As I’m kneeling on the floor, rooting through the pile of clothes, I hear something.

  Loud.

  Rumbling.

  I recognize the sound right away because I heard it clearly only two days earlier, when I was pinned inside my pickup on the New Jersey freeway.

  It’s a semi-truck.

  And it sounds like Cal’s.

  I find my
phone and see that the calls came from DeAndre Purvis. There are messages, but I can’t listen to them right now. I head toward the window to see where the sound is coming from.

  There is a semi roaring down the gravel road toward my parents’ ranch. It’s Cal’s truck, and he is accelerating even though the road isn’t made for high speeds.

  The truck angles into my parents’ driveway, but then it races into the meadow, headed toward my casita. The headlights are blasting right at me, and I squint my eyes. He shifts gears again, gaining speed. The truck is only about twenty yards away now.

  The phone buzzes once in my hand, and I glance at it.

  It’s a text from DeAndre Purvis.

  The message tells me who the killer is.

  I spin around to look for Willow.

  She is standing five feet behind me, holding my gun belt in her hands.

  Chapter 84

  I TACKLE WILLOW right as the truck comes ripping through the wall.

  The noise is earsplitting. Boards snap, metal scrapes against wood, and the truck roars. The air is filled with drywall dust and the smell of oil.

  The bumper of the truck comes to a stop inches from where I’m lying on top of Willow. I can feel the heat of the engine, as if it’s some kind of metal monster exhaling its hot breath onto us.

  The truck shifts gears and starts to lumber backward, making more tearing and snapping noises.

  A pane of Sheetrock drops from the ceiling, and I shield Willow from its fall. It cracks against my back. A two-by-twelve swings down like a pendulum, and I don’t move fast enough to block this one. It hammers against Willow’s ankle.

  I hear bone snap.

  She gasps in pain but doesn’t cry out.

  “Here,” she says through gritted teeth. “Take this.”

  She holds my gun belt out to me.

  I grab it and leap off the floor. The truck is backing away from the wrecked casita. It looks like a giant has just taken a bite out of my little house. A pipe must have broken somewhere because there’s a mist of water spraying through the wreckage.