Deflating like a pool toy with the air let out of it, Purvis pulled the Escort over to the side of the road and got out of the car. “Reece?” he said. “Is something wrong?”
Reece’s face looked even more rugged than usual in the shadows of evening. He glanced toward the car and probably saw Nelly sitting there in the passenger seat. “I wanted to tell you myself,” he said, “before the delegation shows up.”
“Tell me what?” Purvis asked.
Reece heaved a sigh and looked about as reluctant as Purvis had ever seen a man look. “There was a special meeting of the town council tonight,” he said, in that resonant baritone voice that was familiar to almost everybody in Springwater. “As you probably know, most of them are members of the Cattleman’s Association. They voted to serve you notice, Purvis. As of the first of August, you’re out of a job.”
Purvis wasn’t exactly surprised, but the news knocked the wind out of him for a few moments all the same. He just stood there on the sidewalk in front of his office and the jail, trying to absorb it.
“For what it’s worth,” Reece went on, “I put up an argument and voted to keep you on, but the motion carried.” He slapped Purvis’s shoulder with a big, work-hardened hand. “I’m sorry.”
Purvis found his voice at long last. “It’s all right, Reece,” he said, trying to sound like he meant it. “I’ve been thinking it was time for a change anyhow.”
Reece gazed into Purvis’s face, his somber eyes missing nothing, and then nodded. “I’d better get on home,” he said, and attempted a smile of his own. “That redheaded woman of mine thinks I’m chasing around town with somebody else. I’d rather not add fuel to the fire by staying gone too long.”
Purvis nodded, glancing toward the Escort. He could see Nelly peering through the windshield, her face pale in the darkness. Then he turned back to Reece. “Thanks for letting me know what’s going on,” he said. “I appreciate it.”
“I’m real sorry,” Reece reiterated. Then he crossed the road, got into that big RV of his, and drove off toward home.
Purvis’s feet felt almost as heavy as his heart as he made his way back to the car, back to Nelly.
“What happened?” she asked.
Purvis sighed, staring straight ahead over the top of the steering wheel. There was no easy way to say it. “I just lost my job,” he replied, after a long struggle with the taut muscles in the back of his throat.
Nelly’s fingers rested lightly on his forearm, but she didn’t say anything, and that was fine with Purvis. If she’d tried to comfort him, he wasn’t sure how he would have reacted.
“I’ll take you home to Maple Creek,” he said, starting the car.
She didn’t protest.
Billy set his jaw along with the emergency brake in his beat-up old truck. The old cattle trail up behind J.T.’s place was awash in mud, since the creek had overflowed with the recent rains, and he’d be lucky if he didn’t get stuck there. Lucky, he thought, with a rueful smile, if he didn’t get the hell beat out of him, or worse.
Travis and Randy Hough were up ahead, in Odell’s old Chevy, and though they must have known somebody was following them, they hadn’t tried to shake him. He watched as they got out of the car and started back toward him.
He drew a deep breath, let it out slowly.
A truck rolled in behind him, blocking him in, and he shifted uncomfortably in the seat. He had his hunting rifle along with him, a thirty-thirty his dad had left behind fifteen years ago when he hit the road, looking for greener pastures. Billy didn’t reach for the gun, but simply waited, his heartbeat thundering in his ears.
Nobody got out of the truck in back of him, but Randy Hough grabbed the handle on Billy’s door and gave it a yank that made the whole cab rock on its wheels. Billy pulled up the old-fashioned lock and got out to face his half-brother’s friend. Out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of Travis, but he couldn’t make out his expression.
He cleared his throat, but before he could speak, Randy grabbed the front of his jacket in both hands and hurled him hard against the truck.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Hough demanded, forcing the words through his teeth. The headlights from the other truck raised a blinding glare and turned both Travis and Randy into looming shadows. When Billy didn’t find his tongue right away, Randy rammed him against the steel door again. “Well?”
“Take it easy,” he heard Travis say, but he sounded scared, and Billy didn’t figure he was going to rush to the rescue anytime soon.
“What are you doing here?” Randy spat. “So help me God, if J. T. Wainwright shows up, or Purvis Digg—”
“They don’t know anything about this,” Billy said, in all truth. He was scared shitless, but by some miracle, his voice came out steady, almost normal sounding, at least in his own ears. “I came on my own.”
“Why?” Travis asked.
With no warning at all, Randy landed a punch in the middle of Billy’s gut, dropping him to his knees. “Yeah,” Hough snarled. “Why?”
“Let him talk,” Travis said. He was almost begging, and Billy was ashamed of him, and not just for the usual reasons.
Randy dragged Billy back to his feet by the front of his jacket. “Talk!” he rasped.
Billy gasped a couple of times before he caught his breath. Hough packed a hell of a punch. “J.T. doesn’t pay me spit,” he said. “I want to get my hands on some real money.”
“What makes you think we can do anything for you?” Randy barked.
Travis shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans and said nothing.
“Just a hunch,” Billy said. And that was the truth. He squinted toward into the glare of the headlights. “Who is that?”
“Nobody you need to know anything about,” growled Randy. “I ought to break your neck, right here. Thanks to you, we’re all as good as dead.”
Just then, a door slammed, and Billy saw the shadow of a man moving toward them, a rifle dangling from his right hand. He was wearing a long coat and a western hat pulled down low over his face, but there was something familiar in his stride.
“Shit,” Travis breathed.
“What—?” Billy began, but before he could frame the rest of the sentence, the shadow man cocked the rifle, aimed it from the hip, and fired.
Randy whirled away into the darkness like a dancer moving in slow motion, arms spread, flinging an arc of blood from his chest as he went. Travis let out a schoolgirl shriek and turned to flee, and another shot flared from the rifle barrel, sending him sprawling face first into the mud.
Billy had a few moments to think about Cindy and the baby she carried, and then the bullet came, tearing into his middle, setting off black fireworks inside his head, and he went down, feeling the cold steel of the truck door, even through his clothes, as he slid. He was all but blind with pain and shock, but he kept his eyes open, staring the way he’d seen men do in the movies. He caught a brief glimpse of his assailant, bending down to make sure he was dead, before he lost consciousness.
Cindy was in the kitchen, clad in gray socks and an old bathrobe, when J.T. let himself into the house early the next morning. Leaving Maggie behind in that warm bed had not been easy, sweet and supple and ready for more, but he was a rancher with stock to look after. The chores wouldn’t wait.
J.T. picked up the carafe from the coffee machine, went to the sink, and started running water into it. “Something wrong?” he asked.
“Is Billy with you?”
He felt a pang of worry, glanced toward the backdoor, half-expecting and more than half hoping to see his youthful ranch hand step over the threshold. “No,” he said. “I haven’t seen him since we fed the cattle last night, down by the creek.”
Tears brimmed in her eyes. Her blond hair was fastened on top of her head in some kind of plastic squeeze comb and, once again, he was struck by how young she was, and how pregnant, and how vulnerable to a world that tended to play rough. “He—he didn’t come home.”
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “We didn’t have a fight. And he would have called me anyway.”
J.T. folded his arms and leaned one hip against the counter while he waited for the coffee to brew. “I’ll go out looking for him,” he replied, “as soon as I’ve taken care of the chores.”
She nodded, but she was still pale, and her eyes were wider than ever.
“If you have any theories,” J.T. urged gently, “I’d like to hear them.”
She opened her mouth, closed it again. Then one hand went to rest protectively on her belly, and J.T. felt a rush of sympathy for her as tears filled her eyes again. “He might have gotten tangled up with my brother Randy and that bunch he hangs out with.”
“What bunch would that be?” J.T. asked calmly, though he felt a leap of instinct in the core of his gut. He also remembered the conversation he’d had with Billy a few days back. Billy suspected DuPres and Hough of setting the barn fire, and he’d made noises about doing some detective work. J.T. had warned him off, but that didn’t mean the kid had listened.
“I don’t know,” Cindy said miserably.
Just then the telephone rang and, for a fraction of a second, J.T. was afraid to answer. Then, thinking of Quinn, away from home for the night, and Maggie, possibly suffering from self-recriminations concerning the wild night the two of them had just passed in her bed, he reached for the receiver.
“J.T.?”
Alarm shot through J.T.’s insides at the sound of Purvis’s voice. It was, for all intents and purposes, the middle of the night, and the town marshal was calling him, his only deputy. That could not be good. “What is it?”
A sigh. “Something’s happened, J.T. Randy Hough and Travis DuPres are dead of gunshot wounds, and Billy Raynor is on his way to the hospital in Maple Creek by ambulance. He’s barely holding on.”
J.T. looked at Cindy, knew she’d somehow guessed the essentials, and stretched the phone cord to its limit to catch her by the arm before her knees buckled. He pressed her into a chair and went to the sink to get her a glass of water. Although she wasn’t making a sound, there was no color at all in her face, and she began to rock back and forth, her cheeks glistening.
He stood with a hand resting firmly on her shoulder. “Who called in the report?” he asked.
“Billy,” Purvis said wearily. “God knows how he managed it, but he got hold of Hough’s cell phone somehow and called 911. He didn’t say anything, just made some noises, but they were able to run a trace. The sheriff called me, and I met him and his deputies at the scene. It’s bad, J.T.”
“Have you called Doris?”
Cindy looked up at J.T.’s question, and he tightened his grip because her eyes rolled back in her head and she started to pitch forward.
“That’s next on my list,” Purvis said. “You’ll tell Cindy?”
“I think she knows,” J.T. replied gruffly. “Look, we’re heading for the hospital. You’ve got my cell number?”
“Yeah,” Purvis answered. “I’ll catch up to you later.”
“Right,” J.T. said, and hung up.
“Billy,” Cindy whispered.
J.T. crouched, gripping both her hands in his, and looked into her ravaged face. Unfortunately, the bad news went further. He had to tell her that her brother was dead, as was Travis DuPres. Like everybody else in Springwater, J.T. knew that DuPres was the father of her baby. “He was shot tonight,” he said, and imagined someone saying those words to Doreen, after Murphy was killed in that warehouse.
“Is he dead?” Her voice was heartbreakingly small.
J.T. shook his head. “No,” he said. And then added quickly, before the spark of hope he saw in her eyes could flare up into something bigger, “But he’s not in good shape, Cindy. And there’s something else. Something pretty terrible.”
She straightened her spine, waited.
There was no kind way to say it. “Your brother Randy was shot, too, and so was Travis DuPres. I’m sorry, Cindy.”
She made a small, mewling sound, then bit her lower lip and braced herself up, drawing on an inner strength J.T. hadn’t guessed she had. He felt an ache of admiration for her.
“I’ll get dressed,” she said. “You’ll take me to the hospital, won’t you? To see Billy?”
“Of course,” he said, choked up.
She nodded, got to her feet, and swayed. “I’m—I’m all right,” she insisted, when J.T. reached out for her again, afraid she’d fall.
Less than ten minutes later they were in J.T.’s truck on their way to the next town. Cindy stared blindly out the window and said nothing at all, while J.T. drove as fast as he dared. He was painfully conscious that Cindy could go into premature labor at any moment, from shock if not from bouncing over rutted country roads, and there was already tragedy enough in their little family, with Billy dead, or dying, years before his time.
The telephone was ringing. Maggie raised herself onto one elbow, the memory of the night just past aching in every muscle and cell, and she groaned as she groped for the receiver. Sadie bounded through the open doorway and landed on the bed, thirty pounds of exuberant beagle.
“Hello?” Maggie managed. She felt hungover, though she hadn’t had anything to drink. No, indeed, she and J.T. had never even eaten the pizza he’d brought, nor had they watched the rented movie. Instead, they’d gone straight to bed, practically shedding their clothes as they went down the hall.
The answer was a soft, gasplike sob.
“Hello?” Maggie said again, sitting up straight now, every instinct on red alert.
“She’s back.” It was Daphne’s voice.
“Who’s back?” she asked, though even as the words left her mouth, she knew what her friend’s answer would be.
“Tiffany’s mother.”
Maggie hoisted the dog to one side and kicked her way out of the tangled sheets and blankets. The fresh-air-and-musk scent of J.T. rose from the linens to taunt her. “Oh, Daph,” she said.
Daphne sniffled, and Maggie knew she was trying to smile. “I know what you’re thinking. It’s a good thing, not a bad one. And you’re right, it is—but—”
“That isn’t what I was going to say at all,” Maggie protested softly. “Who is this woman? Where has she been?”
Another sniffle. “She’s not a woman, she’s a girl, like Cindy,” Daphne said. “Just seventeen. She and her boyfriend—Tiffany’s father—were driving across country, hoping to find work along the way, and they got into a big fight at the rest stop, and he went off and left her and the baby there. She saw the older couple in the RV pull in and—I don’t know what she was thinking—but she apparently believed Tiffany would be better off with them. So she wrote the baby’s name on her little hand and hid—” Daphne’s voice fell away into another sob, but it didn’t matter. Maggie knew what she’d been going to say.
“I’ll be right over,” she said. “Is Ben there?”
“He must have gone to work early,” Daphne said. “The phone woke me up—it was the Social Services people—”
“Do you want me to call him?”
“I’ve already done that. He wasn’t in the office, so I left a message.”
Maggie was already partially dressed. “Daph, we can handle this.”
“Oh, Maggie, they’re coming for Tiffany,” Daphne said, as though she hadn’t spoken, breaking down again. “They’re going to take her away.”
“Hold on,” Maggie ordered. Less than five minutes later, after giving her teeth a quick brushing, washing her face, and finger combing her short hair, she wa
s standing on Daphne’s porch, ringing the bell.
“Another murder?” Kathleen said, horrified. She stared at her estranged husband, who stood in their kitchen, next to the counter, pouring a cup of tea for her. It was an incongruous sight, Reece performing such a delicate task, but he was actually quite graceful at it. He’d evidently come back from his morning walk while she was still in the shower and, as usual, he’d managed to garner all the night’s news over coffee at the Stagecoach CafÈ.
“Randy Hough and Travis DuPres are both dead,” he said. “Shot to death. Worse, Billy Raynor was badly wounded. He may not survive.”
Kathleen pressed a hand to her mouth. She didn’t know Billy well, but she’d gotten acquainted with Cindy, his young wife, who worked over at the Springwater Station with Maggie. “That’s dreadful,” she whispered, feeling sick.
Reece drew back a chair and sank into it. “What’s this world coming to?” he asked, speaking as much to himself as to Kathleen, it seemed. “Springwater used to be a safe place—”
Kathleen reached out, rather shakily, and touched his hand. “What in God’s name happened?”
“Purvis says Billy called for help on a cell phone. Nobody knows who the shooter was, but it happened on J. T. Wainwright’s ranch.”
“J.T. didn’t hear anything? See anyone?”
Reece met her gaze squarely. “J.T. was at the Station most of the night,” he said. “With Maggie.”
Kathleen absorbed the implications of that. “Oh,” she said. Their fingers interlocked, probably out of old habit, and they didn’t pull apart. “Then—”
They knew each other so well that she didn’t have to finish the sentence, and he could answer with just one word. Reece nodded. “Yes,” he said.
“How did you happen to—I mean—”
“I went looking for Purvis after the town council meeting last night, and I saw J.T.’s truck parked at the Station. When I drove past again, on my way back here, the truck was still there and all the lights were out.” He paused. “I heard about the murders at the cafÈ this morning. Purvis was there, with a lot of people from the sheriff’s department, and he told me what happened.”
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