Lone Star on a Cowboy Heart

by Marie S. Crosswell

  Montgomery looks at him. “It’s a yes or no question, Sam.”

  Sam holds eye contact with him and doesn’t answer for several seconds. “If he gave me no choice and I had a clear shot,” he says.

  Montgomery looks away again. “You sound like you’d regret it even if you couldn’t do anything else.”

  “You think I should enjoy shooting people?”

  “Maybe not enjoy it. But you can feel justified.”

  Sam can’t know how he would feel after shooting someone until he does it, but he imagines that a sense of righteousness would not be his, regardless of what his victim did to force his hand.

  It’s dark now, new stars appearing all over the sky with each passing minute but no moon. There isn’t an electrical light anywhere in sight. Montgomery gets up and ambles back to the truck, opens the driver’s door and leans in to stick his key in the ignition, turning the truck’s electrical system on to power the tail lights and head lights. He comes back and reoccupies his spot on the ground next to Sam, the truck’s tail lights glowing red behind them just enough that their faces are visible to each other.

  Sam watches Montgomery smoke the cigarette, as he nurses his second beer, and wonders again about Montgomery’s ex-wife Annalee. Marriages happen and fail all the time, but the story of Montgomery’s marriage is an empty shape in Sam’s mind that piques endless curiosity, not least of all because Sam can’t imagine Montgomery falling in love with anyone, much less what kind of woman it takes to make it happen.

  “I know it’s a ways off, but I was wondering what your plans are for Thanksgiving,” Sam says. “If you go see family or stay here.”

  Montgomery shoots him a look. “You think I need someone to take me in?”

  “Well, I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking. Somebody’s gotta be on call for the department that day, and I volunteered because I’m the new guy. But I got a dinner invitation from Lauren, and I figured if you want company…”

  “Who’s Lauren?” Montgomery says, staring at the sky and the black shapes of the mountains.

  Sam pauses. “This woman I’ve been seeing.”

  Montgomery doesn’t respond, his mouth set into a flat line and his face inscrutable.

  “Well,” Sam says. “We’re not really dating, we’re just—having sex.”

  “How long’s that been going on?”

  “A few months.”

  “You gettin’ serious about her?” Montgomery asks, still looking away from Sam.

  “No. Not really. I mean, I like her and all, but I don’t want it to be more than what it is. Neither does she.”

  Montgomery looks over his shoulder at Sam with a skeptical eyebrow. “You sure about that?”

  “Yeah,” Sam says. “Lauren’s not like most women. She’s—I don’t know how to describe it—she’s just different.”

  Montgomery’s quiet for a minute, then says, “She your way of gettin’ over your wife?”

  Sam looks at him. “She’s company. She’s someone I can have sex with who doesn’t want to be my girlfriend, which is just about the last thing I’m interested in right now.”

  “Hell, you’re fixing to have Thanksgiving dinner with the woman. What are you interested in?”

  You, Sam thinks.

  “Friends can spend holidays together,” he says. “Lauren and I like hanging out once in a while, and she’s being nice because she knows I don’t have any family here, that’s all. She’s not even going to cook. I think we’re ordering take-out or something.”

  Montgomery finishes his cigarette without any more protest, sticking the butt in one of his empty beer cans. He doesn’t look at Sam, but Sam looks over at him every other minute, trying to detect some emotion in Montgomery’s face. There isn’t any.

  “You ever have a best friend?” Sam says, putting on a casual tone. He’s on his third beer now.

  “No,” says Montgomery.

  Something about the way he says it—sounds like it isn’t the whole truth.

  They lie there in silence until the beer’s gone, watching the stars. There’s too many of them to count without getting lost. Sam can’t even make out any constellations.

  When they’re both sitting in the truck again, Montgomery pauses after starting the engine and looks across the bench seat at Sam in the dark.

  “I know where Joel Troutman is,” he says.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Sam goes to find Troutman’s hideout by himself after he gets off work on Monday afternoon, taking his own unmarked car instead of his unit. Montgomery never saw Troutman, only a blue pick-up truck parked outside the camper that looked like the same one Troutman used to flee the scene of the robbery. Sam wants to confirm that it’s the right man hiding out, before he brings the information to his lieutenant’s attention.

  He follows Montgomery’s directions scrawled on a piece of paper ripped from a notepad, taking the various paved and unpaved roads snaking north off Highway 169, slowing the car as he begins to pass through an archway of leafless trees and brush. The branches reach up and crowd out the sky, white and pointy, like the skeletons of men who died with their hands up. Sam worries that this is the only access road to wherever Troutman’s parked his camper, but he keeps driving because this is what Montgomery’s note tells him to do.

  A few minutes onto this dirt path, Sam sees another one forking off into the trees on his right, just wide enough for him to take it without the limbs scraping against the car. He decides to follow the path and see if it provides a view of Troutman’s hideout without leading directly to it. Not knowing how close he is to the campsite and wanting to be as undetectable as possible, he inches the car along as slow as he can. The trail curves to the left, toward the main drag and wherever it leads. Sam keeps going until the trail thins out to a walking path. He can see the old steel Airstream through the trees; the car’s facing the campsite. He kills the engine, figuring it’s better not to risk anyone hearing it, and waits.

  He can make out the blue pick-up truck that Willa Rae Troutman confirmed her husband drives, the same truck that Sam saw Joel drive off in the night of the robbery. But a lot of people in the quad-city area drive trucks, and plenty of them are blue or Fords or both.

  Sam checks his watch and settles in. He doesn’t have anywhere to be tonight, but he doesn’t plan on staking out the campsite after dark. He’s got about an hour before the sun sets, maybe less. He switches his cell phone onto silent mode and tries not to wish that he had someone with him in the car.

  Forty-five minutes pass. He starts to resign to the possibility that it could take hours for anyone to come out of the camper, let alone leave, when he sees him. Troutman, no different than he was the night of the robbery except for several days’ worth of facial hair, swings the camper door open on creaky hinges and lumbers down the steps in a pair of work boots. He’s lighting up a cigarette as he moves, and he stops a few yards away from the Airstream and just stands there a minute, surveying his surroundings. He looks up at the sky, probably figuring that nightfall is due within the hour.

  Sam holds his breath as he watches, hoping like hell that his vehicle really is as obscured in the bush as he thought it would be when he picked this spot. Troutman’s back is to him. It occurs to Sam that maybe he came out of the camper not to smoke but to investigate the noise of Sam’s car getting within spying distance. He has no idea what he’ll do if he’s found.

  But Troutman turns around and goes back into the Airstream without a suspicious look on his face and without pausing to check the lot more closely. He reemerges a minute later wearing a jacket with his keys in hand. He shuts the camper door behind him but doesn’t lock it, then gets into his blue pick-up and heads down the dirt path.

  Sam waits until the sound of the truck fades out into nothing, then grabs his sidearm off the passenger seat and gets out of the car making as little noise as possible. He leaves his badge behind, clipped to the driver’s side visor. He’s wearing a hooded sweatshirt over a t-shirt an
d jeans. If he gets caught, nothing about his appearance will give him away as a sheriff’s deputy.

  It’s silent here, except for his own footsteps scratching at the ground. He follows the walking path around to the back end of the camp site, through the dead trees, and wonders if Troutman lies awake at night in partial disbelief that he ended up here, with nothing to show for his sacrifice of wife, baby, and real bed in a real house, except a sad sack of cash that wouldn’t last him two weeks on the road as a fugitive. Maybe the money’s gone already—spent on food and gas these weeks he’s been hiding, to avoid leaving a trail of credit card charges.

  Sam cuts through the trees when he’s directly behind the Airstream, pauses and listens, almost afraid that Troutman’s about to return right this second. He wishes there was a back door, a second way in and out, but there isn’t. If Troutman comes back too soon, Sam’s going to have to punch him and run. He rounds the front end of the camper, tense and hyper-alert, and hurries up the fold out steps to the door, which he shuts behind him.

  Inside the camper, there’s a double bed built into the rear end from wall to wall, an old refrigerator, a couch only deep enough for a man of average build to lie across it length wise, a four-person table with booth seats, a small kitchen with a sink and combination stove oven, a bathroom, several cabinets, and a storage closet. The floor of the camper is a nutty brown wood, and there are several area rugs. An old TV set is sitting on a small table across from the sofa, pushed up against the side of the refrigerator.

  The wastebasket is almost overflowing, and there are dozens of empty beer bottles all over the little kitchen counter. Three empty pizza boxes are stacked on top of the refrigerator. There are a few dirty dishes and utensils in the sink and clean ones left out on the drying pad next to it, the glasses and mugs upside down. Troutman’s got a vintage pin-up themed calendar tacked to the wall; Miss October’s wearing a witch hat and sitting on a giant pumpkin. Sam wants to turn the page—it’s November now—but he needs to go undetected. He searches the cupboards and drawers, the refrigerator and freezer, the dishwasher and the oven but doesn’t find anything.

  There are bottles of nail polish lining one of the shelves in the narrow bathroom: the first sign of Donna Rey in the camper. Sam also guesses the teddy bear sitting in the corner of the bed belongs to her, too, probably a gift from Troutman. The bed is unmade, and Troutman’s dirty clothes have been left in a heap on the floor. A small, potted cactus with one pink flower sits in the window above the bed. The dresser top is covered in loose change, receipts, buttons, condoms, a few business cards, a photo booth strip featuring Troutman and Donna smiling and kissing, a man’s watch, a dirty coffee mug, and movie ticket stubs from a theater in Prescott Valley.

  Sam searches the skinny closet for the money and the gun but doesn’t find anything except some of Troutman’s clothes, a vacuum cleaner, and unused hangers. He checks the dresser drawers with no luck but does find a glass pipe with remnants of smoked grass in the top drawer. A smear of lipstick is still caked onto the underside of the pipe’s neck. Jen, his ex-wife, used to smoke weed in college and through most of her twenties. She asked him once if he had any drug experience, maybe assuming that a sheriff’s deputy would either have none or lie about it if he did. Sam told her the truth, as always. He’d never tried it, and he didn’t care that she had.

  When he glances up on impulse, he finds a road map of the United States taped to the ceiling above the bed. He can see Troutman and Donna lying in bed together, looking at the map, dreaming out loud about escaping Dewey-Humboldt, Arizona, and traveling the country—knowing the whole time that they never would. He looks down again and sees a baby blue sleeve peeping out of the bedding that’s twisted and bunched up. He pulls on it and sees that it’s a long button-down shirt, something that must belong to Donna, either something she slept in or wore after sex just to bum around the camp site. It smells a little bit like perfume, something sweet and floral. Sam wonders for the first time how Troutman feels about her, if he loves this woman who isn’t his wife or if she’s just uncomplicated fun and good sex. If he believes what Donna claims, Troutman hasn’t contacted her since the robbery, but then again, he hasn’t reached out to Willa Rae either.

  Sam goes back to the front end of the Airstream and plops down on the couch with a sigh. Even if the Sheriff’s Department arrests Troutman as a suspect in the diner robbery, they can’t charge him for anything without hard evidence tying him to the crime. He never took off his mask, so there’s no way to make a positive ID based on looks alone. Everyone who was in the diner heard Troutman’s voice that night, but witness memory is often shoddy at best. Sam saw him drive off in the blue pick-up but didn’t get the plate number, so that won’t be enough on its own. Without the cash in the collection sack that Troutman and Decker brought or the gun that Troutman used in the hold-up, there’s nothing concrete that ties him to the robbery. He doesn’t have an alibi for that night, and his disappearance since doesn’t look good. But getting a prosecution team to press charges against him or a jury to convict based on those two details alone would be more than a long shot. Even the stolen money would be a hard sell in court. If it’s all cash, no credit or debit cards, proving that it came from the patrons of the diner that night would be next to impossible. The prosecution would have to track Troutman’s bank activity to show a jury that the amount of cash, assuming Sam or someone else finds it all, was never withdrawn from the only account that Troutman’s got, and even then, it wouldn’t be difficult for him to come up with some explanation about where the money came from. They’re going to have to search his emails, his text messages, his call log, to find proof of Troutman and Decker planning the robbery. There was nothing on Decker’s end that the sheriff’s department found.

  Maybe Sam was naive to think that he’d find anything here. Troutman could be keeping the money and the gun in his truck. He could’ve buried the stuff somewhere, for all anyone knows. Or maybe Montgomery was right and Willa Rae is covering for her husband, lying to the cops, hiding the money for him until he figures out what to do. Maybe it’s Donna. Neither woman made Sam suspicious, but that doesn’t mean they’re being honest.

  He gets up off the couch and surveys the Airstream interior one last time, about to walk out defeated. He pauses when he notices the coffee can in the kitchen, tucked behind the coffee maker. He peeks out the window to make sure Troutman isn’t coming up the dirt road, then moves into the kitchen. He peels the coffee can lid open and there in the dark grounds is a wad of cash rubber banded together. He smiles to himself a little.

  Sam checks his watch, looks over his shoulder at the door, then takes the cash out of the can and counts it. Six hundred and seventy-three dollars. He wraps the rubber band around the stack again and puts it back in the can.

  He walks out of the Airstream and goes around to the mouth of the path behind it, in no hurry as he returns to his car. He wonders if Troutman keeps a picture of his son in the truck or in his wallet. There’s no trace of the boy here.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Montgomery’s soaking in his standalone bath tub on a Saturday evening, smoking a cigarette and thinking about the people he’s been close to in his life. All of them gone, moved on from him, now different than who they were when he knew them or maybe just in a different place that he wouldn’t fit into. The girls he dated before Al, the first in high school and the others in his late teens and early twenties. He sees their faces, remembers the softness of their skin and their hair and the way they looked at him, their lips sometimes smooth and sometimes dry and chapped in the heat or the cold. The smallness of their hands in his, the way they smelled along the slopes of their necks, their floral print dresses and how they talked at him all the time to fill his silence. There were only three before Al, and each one he hoped would be his companion forever. Each one he let go when they tired of him, wanted something or someone else, or sensed that whatever they were looking for Montgomery didn’t have.

  He
thinks about the men, too: his best friend in high school who joined the Army after graduation and the young man he met on his first ranching job, a wrangler who was a few years older than Montgomery. Bo Davis. They used to go drinking at their favorite bar, The Steering Wheel, a roadside dive along Highway 290. They’d disappear from the world for days, herding and caring for cattle on thousands of acres of land and camping on the trail, just the two of them sometimes. Montgomery didn’t want for anything when they were alone together in the wilderness. Bo was the one who took Montgomery to that Fourth of July party where he met Al. Bo was the best man at Montgomery and Al’s wedding. He was Montgomery’s closest friend besides Al until the day Montgomery left Texas in his rearview mirror, unable to follow the other man because of his long-time girlfriend and son in Luckenbach.

  There were other men, too, ranch hands in Texas and New Mexico and southern Arizona. Men he worked with every day for ten or twelve hours straight, men he shared meals with three times a day, shoulder to shoulder at the table. He was never as close to any of them as he was to Bo or his high school best friend, but there was something about their collective presence, their voices around him, the heat of their bodies that made him feel less alone in the world. It was easier when he was young, when they were all young and single and childless. There wasn’t anything to stand between them, no reason for him to look at those other men hopelessly. Montgomery hasn’t spent any time being friendly with the guys he works with on Barbee’s ranch here in Skull Valley; by the time he moved to town, he was tired of trying to believe that someone could be the friend he needed.

  He used to think it was Al. And some part of him still wants it to be her, holds the image of her face in secret, a fantasy of returning to her and the two of them being happy together as the best of friends. But Montgomery’s not stupid or naïve. He knows that the woman in his fantasy isn’t the real Al, that if it could’ve worked between them, he wouldn’t be here now. Still, he lets himself see her sometimes when he closes his eyes, sees their house with the sun setting the sky on fire behind it, remembers when they were happy.