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“Thanks, I might if I make it that far.”
Jake keyed off, grateful for his daughter’s boyfriend, although boyfriend seemed too feeble a word—best friend and confidante came closer. He just hoped Lucy appreciated Mike’s devotion and that Mike could hold her steady long enough to finish high school. She certainly had no use for anything her father said.
He squeezed his eyes shut. “Annie, I don’t know how to talk to her. Why’d you go and leave me?” He bowed his head against the steering wheel. “I didn’t mean it, girl—I know you hung on as long as you could.”
No pressure now to get on the road—he could go back inside but reckoned he wouldn’t. He’d seen too many dads hanging around behind the chutes acting like jerks, treating their sons like kids still riding in high school rodeos. Luke and Tom had done a man’s work on the ranch before they could shave. They didn’t need him riding herd on them.
And he wanted to go home. Not to the empty house, but to the ranch just north of the New Mexico border. The land sustained him like breath and blood.
His hand brushed the bottle in its brown paper bag when he stuck his phone in the center console. With Annie gone, sleep eluded him like a rope-wise old horse endlessly dodging a loop. He could generally drop off at a decent hour by timing sips of bourbon through the evening—better than pills, he supposed.
He’d bought two bottles in Albuquerque, cheaper than close to home. Jake had gone to school with the clerk at the local liquor store and didn’t need Alma gossiping about how much he bought in a month. The bag rustled seductively under his hand. A Bud with a plate of nachos had been hours ago—a little taste now couldn’t hurt, just to take the edge off the lonely drive.
He peered over his shoulder—no one watching. He broke the seal on the quart of Beam, admiring its warm amber translucency, anticipating its sweet fiery slide down his throat, and tipped the bottle to his lips. Before the first drop hit his tongue, he lowered it and screwed the cap on. Through all the heartache with Annie, he had developed a fanatical reverence for life, hard and painful as it might be. Be damned if he would take to the road liquored up, landing at the bottom of a canyon or drifting into oncoming traffic, maybe taking innocent lives with him. He thrust the bottle away and followed the last vehicles out of the parking lot.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_0ac1207d-323c-5fbe-b011-8d73f7e04fc4)
SHELBY DOUCETTE’S DOG leaped down from the cab of the Kenworth and she followed, dragging her backpack and the bag holding her saddle behind her. She slammed the door on the stream of curses, nothing original, and stepped well back off the breakdown lane. The rear of the trailer twitched toward the spot where she would have been standing, and then the big rig roared away with a spray of gravel and an insolent blast of the air horn.
She made a rude gesture at the retreating taillights. “Thanks for nothing!”
Shelby looked around. The late afternoon overcast flattened details of the ravines and low buttes and lent a sepia tint to the broken landscape. Clouds like dirty cotton batting half hid the mountain peaks to the north. Half a dozen white-faced steers stared over a barbed-wire fence, but she saw no sign of a ranch house and couldn’t recall how far back it might be to the last mailbox.
She dug a large Milk-Bone from her pack and broke it in half for the rough-coated dog standing waist-high at her side. “Sorry, Stranger,” she said, pocketing the other piece. “Gotta make these last.”
An empty cattle hauler roared past, headed south; otherwise the road stretched empty in both directions.
“Guess we’re on our own,” she said, slinging her pack over one shoulder and her saddle over the other. “Let’s keep moving.”
Her old car breaking down south of Albuquerque had been bad luck, but at least she’d found a mechanic willing to work on it. She knew she should swap the 1990 Town Car for something more reliable, but the vehicle was her last link to the part of her past she wanted to remember.
“Stop it!” she said with a shudder. The dog looked up at her. “It’s okay, boy. Just smacking myself upside the head.” She talked more to the dog and to the horses she trained than she did with humans. “You told me not to trust that guy, but we were due in Colorado yesterday.”
Her new boss had been sympathetic when she’d called this morning—sure, he could pick her up in Durango. Maybe he’d be willing to fetch her from... She looked around for some kind of landmark. From wherever they were.
She checked her cell phone—no signal, of course. Just as well—she hated asking favors. Which left her on foot somewhere north of Hind Shoe, New Mexico, with daylight fading fast and a veil of snow advancing on the wind.
She’d been comfortable in shirtsleeves when they’d set out from Albuquerque, but she’d felt a bite in the air at the last truck stop and had slipped on the good down jacket she’d bought for ten bucks at a Lubbock flea market. The wind picked up, sending occasional tumbleweeds bounding across the road and whipping the first snowflakes in her face. She zipped the jacket to her chin and pulled up the hood of her sweatshirt.
She started walking. If she didn’t catch a ride, she and Stranger could hunker down under the next bridge until the snow passed. Not bitter cold—the tiny thermometer dangling from her zipper pull read thirty-one degrees. Stranger generated a lot of heat, and she could wrap her saddle blanket around her feet and legs. With luck, she could find dry wood for a fire. They’d be okay.
Wet snow began clinging to the ragged bushes dotting the landscape, looking like the blossoms on the blackberry bushes back home. Stranger shook his rough coat from time to time, and Shelby brushed the dampness from her hood before it could soak through. In the distance a dark slash marked the whitening landscape; she hoped the gully would be deep enough to warrant a bridge.
Intent on reaching shelter, she didn’t hear the big pickup until it whooshed past in the inch of slush already built up on the pavement. She dropped the saddle to wave her arms, but the taillights were already flashing. The driver was braking too hard. She began to run as the truck fishtailed in a slow-motion pirouette and crashed nose down in the shallow ditch.
She didn’t think the truck had hit hard enough to rupture the fuel line, but the engine was still running. Slipping in the snow, she yanked open the driver’s door. The whiskey fumes hit her when she reached in to turn off the ignition. An uncapped bottle rolled into the ditch.
Blood ran from the driver’s nose—idiot wasn’t wearing his seat belt—and he had a nasty scrape on one cheekbone. His hair shone silver as he fumbled off his brown felt hat and gave her a lopsided grin. “Howdy, miss—you need a lift?”
She caught him as he slumped toward her.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_e85edd49-2c29-5079-9c9b-592705aace96)
DARKNESS BROKEN BY glaring light, sleet like tiny burns on his face, then falling and wet and cold. A woman’s voice: “Work with me, cowboy.” Darkness again.
The woman’s voice roused him: “Jacob, can you hear me? Open your eyes.”
He must be dead! No one but Ma ever called him Jacob.
“Come on, open your eyes.” A Southern voice, not his mother’s. He gave a grunting gasp of relief and squinted into a bright light.
“Open ’em wide—good. How many fingers?”
He managed to count three fingers.
“You know what day it is?”
He wrinkled his forehead, rummaging for the right answer. “Yesterday?”
She laughed. “Fair enough. Okay, you can go back to sleep.”
* * *
JAKE OPENED HIS eyes to level sunlight throwing shadows across stained ceiling tiles. Where was he?
He thought he remembered a woman’s voice, a silhouette bending over him. A soft rustle to his right made him turn his head. The room spun, his stomach heaved. Closed his eyes, waited and then tried again. Someone in the next bed—he could see only a wild mane of dark hair.
“Annie?” He knew it couldn’t be Annie.
The woman threw back the covers and swung her denim-clad legs out of bed. She yawned widely and pushed her hair back from her face before crossing to where he lay.
“Welcome back,” she said. “How do you feel?”
Like he’d been trampled by a flock of dirty sheep. The left side of his face ached and so did his nose. He made a wordless sound of disgust.
“That good, huh? Could have been lots worse, with Jim Beam as your copilot.”
“Wha...?”
“You remember anything?”
He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to order his thoughts. “Bull riding ended about four—I hung around maybe half an hour. I called home before I hit the road...” No, that didn’t sound right. “I called my neighbor.” And opened the bottle. Had he taken a drink? Pretty sure he hadn’t.
He opened his eyes. “You called me Jacob.”
“That’s your name, isn’t it? The picture on your license even looks like you.”
He grabbed for the region where his wallet should have been and discovered he wore only his briefs.
“I hung your clothes to dry,” she said, gesturing toward his shirt and Wranglers draped over a chair. “You slipped in the snow and got pretty wet, plus whiskey all over your jeans. Don’t worry, your wallet’s on the table, minus fifteen bucks for your half of the room.”
He jacked himself up on his elbows and promptly fell back, groaning. “I gotta tell you, miss, I don’t recall a thing except...” A bizarre image surfaced. “I could swear I saw someone leading a calf...”
She laughed. “You saw Stranger. Stranger, come.”
Jake found himself looking up into a grizzled brown face, pink tongue lolling between massive jaws. “Whoa, he’s bigger than a calf!”
“Maybe a little bigger—he’s a mastiff-wolfhound mix, the vet thought. Or deerhound and Great Dane. We were hoping for a ride. I thought you were going to stop, then you started to skid—”
Bile rose in his throat. “Did I wreck my rig?”
“Not to speak of, just nose-dived into the ditch. The rear wheels were still on hard gravel, so I got it back on the road—you had passed out.” She frowned. “Maybe I should have gotten you to an emergency room, but you didn’t seem much hurt, and you smelled like a distillery. I didn’t want you to have trouble with the cops or your insurance.”
She moved toward him. “Need some help sitting up? Let me—”
“No! I mean, no, thanks.” He heaved himself up against the vinyl-padded headboard and took a couple deep breaths. When his head cleared, he took his first good look at his rescuer.
Tall, probably close to his own five-ten, with arms and shoulders toned like a gymnast. Thick wavy hair, more black than brown, green eyes and amber skin over high cheekbones. Part Indian, he’d lay money, but he couldn’t guess which tribe. With the jeans she wore a black tank top. Maybe in her early thirties, but wariness in her eyes added years and reminded him of a she-coyote watching from just out of range.
“Guess I owe you for getting me out of the ditch last night,” he said.
She shrugged. “Maybe you wouldn’t have crashed if you hadn’t tried to stop for us. Call it even—Stranger and I didn’t have to spend the night under a bridge.”
Jake looked around—faded floral spreads on the beds, a blond bedside table scarred with cigarette burns and a single armchair upholstered in cracked pink vinyl. “Where did we spend the night?”
“I passed a sign that said Welcome to Cuba, wherever that is,” she said, “and pulled in at the first Vacancy sign—the Plainsman Motel.”
“Did the clerk offer you the hourly rate?”
Her face flamed. “You mean...”
“So I’ve heard—I wouldn’t know personally.”
“No wonder the guy looked at me funny when I asked for two beds.” Her chin came up. “Who cares? He’ll never see me again.”
“You know my name,” Jake said. He had a monster headache, but at least the room had stopped spinning. “What’s yours?”
“Shelby.”
Jake waited.
“Doucette,” she said.
“Cajun, am I right? I used to rodeo with a cowboy from Louisiana.” He stuck his hand out. “Howdy, Shelby Doucette. Where you headed?”
“A ranch near Durango,” she said, touching his hand briefly. “A lady adopted a couple mustangs—her husband wants me to start them.”
“That’ll be Ross Norquist—I heard about those horses. He can’t say no to Liz, but he’s scared she’ll get herself killed. You any good at breaking horses?”
“I gentle horses. And I am good at it—I’ve been doing it for more than ten years.” She took a deep breath. “I hate to ask, but could I ride with you as far north as you’re going? I can ask Mr. Norquist to pick me up from wherever you drop me off.”
“Shoot, girl, my spread’s less than an hour west from his. I’ll drive you straight to his corral.” He started to throw the covers back and then grinned. “If you’ll toss me my britches.”
He refused her offer of help into the bathroom—shaming enough she’d dragged him in here and undressed him. He braced his hands on the sink before looking into the mirror and then swore.
“You okay in there?”
“Yeah, fine—just got a look at my face.”
He heard her chuckle. “Pretty scary.”
She had cleaned most of the blood off his face and fixed a strip of adhesive tape across the bridge of his nose. He touched it gingerly—probably broken, not for the first time. Two black eyes and a long scrape along his right cheek made him look like the loser in a bar brawl.
By the time he came out fully dressed, he felt closer to normal. Shelby had covered the tank top with a blue plaid flannel shirt and had tamed her hair into a thick braid tied with red yarn.
The morning sun had already reduced last night’s snow to slushy puddles in the graveled parking lot. Jake squinted up and down the row of concrete block units, relieved he didn’t see any familiar vehicles. Bad enough he’d be answering questions about his face without explaining his rig parked outside a hot-pillow joint.
“I threw the floor mat in the back last night,” Shelby said, “and left the windows open a crack to air out the cab.”
Jake shook his head. “Must have been close to a quart of bourbon spilled—I guess I didn’t screw the cap on tight.”
She held out his keys, but he waved them off. “You drive,” he said. “There’s a good little diner about ten miles north—we’ll get breakfast there.”
* * *
A ROUND-CHEEKED WOMAN wearing a snowy apron bustled out to greet them when they entered Rosie’s Kitchen. “Jake, I was so scared for your boy last night, when we watching on the TV. That bull, stepping right on his leg!” She pinched his chin and turned his face right and left. “What, you’re riding bulls, too? Crazy like Tom?”
“Nothing that exciting, Rosie,” he said, giving her a quick hug. “Smacked into my steering wheel.” He nodded toward Shelby. “This lady came along and got my rig out of the ditch.”
“You’re one lucky hombre.” She swatted his chest with her order pad. “Coffee first, while I fix your usual.” She took Shelby’s order for a cheese omelet and returned to the kitchen, yelling in Spanish at a doleful-looking man at the grill—her husband, Martin, Jake told Shelby.
“You want some bacon or sausage with your omelet?” Jake asked.
“I’d love some,” Shelby said, “but I lay off meat for a few days before I start new horses, especially ones that haven’t been around people much. Horses are prey animals. It’s better if I don’t smell like I might want them for my next meal.”
“Where’d you learn that? I never heard it before, but it makes sense.”
“From my granddaddy, and he heard it from his granddaddy. I don’t know if it matters, but what can it hurt?”
“How’d you hear about Ross’s mustangs?”
“I keep a standing ad in Western Horseman,” she said, “but most of my jobs come by word of mouth. The rancher I worked for last in Lubbock knew Mr. Norquist.”
By the time Jake had downed his first cup of coffee and most of his cheese and bean enchilada with green chili, the headache had retreated to a small zone behind his left eye. He slouched on the red leatherette and watched Shelby devour her omelet.
“You being afoot the backside of nowhere, I’m guessing your car broke down,” he said. “Where abouts?”
She grimaced. “Albuquerque. I had to leave it at the Lincoln dealership—they need to find a fuel filler tube for a ’90 Town Car.”
