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A dull crimson flush throbbed in what passed for Roy’s neck, though his head seemed to sit pretty much square with his shoulders. He tightened one grubby fist, too, wanting to hit somebody.
“You lookin’ for a fight, cowboy?” he asked Tyler.
“Nope,” Tyler said. “But I won’t run from one if the opportunity happens to present itself.”
The flush spread into Roy’s hound-dog face.
Evidently, Tyler reflected, Doreen had given up on teaching men how to treat a woman. This guy had no clue how to treat anybody.
Roy rubbed his beard-stubbled chin, narrowing his eyes thoughtfully. Thought, Tyler figured, was probably painful for him, and thus avoided except in the most dire circumstances.
“You talked to Jim Huntinghorse,” Roy speculated peevishly. He glanced down at Davie, his expression so poisonous that the very atmosphere seemed polluted by it. “The kid lies. I never done nothin’ to him he didn’t deserve.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Tyler spotted Doreen, peering around one of the slot machines edging the restaurant. On the one hand, he felt sorry for her. On the other, he was furious that she wouldn’t step up and protect her own child. She’d probably never had two nickels to rub together, but she’d had spirit once, she’d lived by her own rules, and she hadn’t just survived, she’d thrived . She’d had tattoos, for God’s sake, in an era when women simply didn’t do things like that. She’d traveled with biker gangs and rock bands. She’d taught him to use his fingers and his tongue in ways that bordered on sacred knowledge that had stood him in good stead ever since.
What the hell had happened to her?
The same thing that had happened to his mother, he supposed, in the next moment. Life had simply beaten her down. She’d taken one too many hard knocks, one too many disappointments.
Roy must have seemed like the last train out of town.
Damned if that wasn’t depressing.
“Come on,” Roy barked, gesturing to Davie.
Davie started to get out of the booth. Then, at a glance from Tyler, he stayed where he was.
“He’s not going anyplace,” Tyler said.
“I ought to knock your teeth down your throat,” Roy replied. It wasn’t clear whether he was addressing Tyler or Davie.
“You’re welcome to try,” Tyler told him cordially. “You ever fight a man, Roy? Or just kids and women?”
Roy looked apoplectic. “You ain’t heard the last of me,” he said.
“Not only tough,” Tyler observed, “but original, too. What’s next? ‘This town ain’t big enough for both of us’?”
Davie ducked his head at that, like he was expecting a blow.
And that made Tyler want to tear Roy’s head off, right there in the restaurant. He’d end up as an overnight guest of the sheriff’s if he did, a prospect he didn’t relish after the last experience five years before, but the temptation was fierce just the same.
Roy grunted, shook his head once, like a man plagued by a swarm of flies, and then turned and lumbered out.
“He’ll get you, Tyler,” Davie said pragmatically. “He’ll get me, too. He’s like that.”
“I know what he’s like,” Tyler said, watching Roy disappear.
When he was gone, Doreen came out of hiding. She looked sheepish and scared as hell. Davie didn’t have to go home—Tyler would hand-deliver the kid to the child-protection people before he’d see that happen—but she did.
“You go back and wait in the employees’ lounge,” she told Davie, showing a faint semblance of the old Doreen, the one who’d lived wild and free. “Roy won’t be able to get at you there.”
Davie hesitated, nodded and left the table, then the restaurant.
Tyler gestured for Doreen to sit down. Both of them could have wished for a more private place to hold the forthcoming conversation, but it wasn’t to be, and Tyler, for one, was resigned to that.
Doreen slid into the booth, hunching in the same way Davie had.
Tyler sat down across from her. Drew a deep breath.
“Things are pretty bad, I guess,” he said, when Doreen didn’t speak.
She nodded. “Worse than bad.”
“Is he mine?” The words were out before Tyler had a chance to think them over. Not that thinking would have changed anything, but he might have been more diplomatic.
For a few moments, Doreen pretended not to understand. Tyler simply stared her down.
“No,” she finally said. “Davie isn’t yours. I wish he was, though. God, how I wish he was.”
Tyler felt a combination of relief and disappointment, and he still wasn’t fully convinced that Doreen was telling the truth. “How old is Davie?” he asked quietly.
“Thirteen,” Doreen admitted, after some lip-biting and some hand-wringing.
“The math works,” Tyler said.
Doreen gave a rueful little laugh. Raised and lowered her stooped shoulders. “Yeah,” she said. “For a lot of guys, Ty. Not just you. Davie belongs to a trucker who stopped by Skivvie’s one summer night, crying in his beer because his wife didn’t understand him. I cheered him up. And Davie looks just like him.”
“Okay,” Tyler said. “So why do you let the boyfriend bounce Davie off walls?”
Tears filled Doreen’s eyes. “I’ve been fighting things all my life,” she said. “One day, I just ran out of fight.”
“Tough break for Davie,” Tyler said evenly.
“You think I don’t hate myself for that? For all of it?” Doreen straightened her spine a little—though not enough, unfortunately. “I never expected to end up like this. I could have had an abortion—Davie’s father offered to pay for one—but I had this crazy idea that I’d find a good man someday. Davie and I and the prince.” She laughed again. “What a fairy tale.”
“Let me take Davie home with me. Just for a while. Until you can get things under control.”
Doreen stared at him, clearly amazed. “Why? Why would you do that?”
“Because I was a kid once, with a crazy father,” Tyler said, as surprised to say what he did as Doreen probably was to hear him admit it. He’d been in denial about Jake Creed all his life, even written songs about him, for Christ’s sake. “What you’re doing now isn’t working, Doreen. Time to try something different.”
“You don’t understand,” Doreen whispered, in a teary rush of words and breath. “Davie’s a handful. He has problems, Tyler. And Roy—well, you don’t know what Roy’s like. He’ll lay for you. He’ll never forget the run-in you and him had tonight. If he has to wait the rest of his life, he’ll find a way to pay you back, and when he does, it won’t be pretty.”
“I can handle Roy,” Tyler said. “Seems to me, the more immediate concern is what he might do to you, or to Davie. Let me drive you someplace, Doreen. Right now, tonight. There are shelters, or you could stay at Cassie’s place—”
Doreen’s face turned to stone. “I know what those ‘shelters’ are like. My mother and I were in and out of them when I was a little girl. Church women, looking down their noses at us. Secondhand clothes. It was like being in prison, and all it did was make my dad even meaner, once he caught up with us. And he always caught up with us.”
“That was then, Doreen, and this is now.”
“Take Davie home with you,” Doreen said, stiff now, and flushed with shame and fury and frustration and God only knew what else. “You’ll want to give him back soon enough.”
“Maybe,” Tyler agreed. But he was remembering all those times when Cassie had stood toe-to-toe with Jake Creed and refused to let him drag his youngest son home by the hair. What would have happened to him if it hadn’t been for Cassie and, to a lesser degree, for Logan and Dylan?
Payback time.
There was a kid in trouble, and he couldn’t ignore that.
Doreen looked at her watch. A little of her favorite tattoo showed on her upper arm—a phoenix, rising majestically from the ashes. “Do what you want,” she said. “Play hero. You’ll be sorry, Tyler. You will be sorry. And that’s the last warning you’re going to get from me.”
Tyler reached for a napkin, gestured for Doreen to hand over the pen she used for taking down food and drink orders. Scrawled his cell number on it.
“Call if you need help,” he said.
Doreen eyed the number with contempt, but she took it in the end. Stuffed it into her apron pocket in a wad.
Tyler watched her go. Settled up for the coffee. Made his way through the casino to the employees’ lounge. He’d gone to high school with the security guard posted in the hallway, and hung out with Jim Huntinghorse when he was still managing the place, so nobody got in his way.
Davie sat hunkered down in a chair in the corner, alone in the room, clutching the library book in both hands.
“Time to ride,” Tyler said.
“What if he’s out there?” Davie asked. “What if Roy’s out there?”
“I couldn’t get that lucky,” Tyler told him, with a grin.
But Roy wasn’t waiting in the parking lot. Davie was surprised; Tyler wasn’t. Roy would strike back, but not when there was a chance of getting his ass kicked in a public parking lot. He was the come-from-behind type. He’d use a tire iron, or maybe even a gun.
Serious business. But Tyler had had a lot of practice at watching his back. A lifetime of it, in fact.
And being a Creed, he didn’t have sense enough to be scared.
So he and Davie made a quick stop at Wal-Mart, for a sleeping bag and a cot, the usual personal grooming necessities and a change of clothes for Davie.
“You don’t actually expect me to wear these, do you?” Davie protested, once they were back in Kristy’s Blazer, headed for Cassie’s place to pick up the dog. He was holding up the pair of jeans Tyler had chosen for him. “They are definitely not cool.”
“Being cool is the least of your problems,” Tyler pointed out. “You’ll wear them.”
Kit Carson greeted them at the door when they got to Cassie’s, probably relieved to learn that he hadn’t been dumped there for the duration. Not that Cassie wouldn’t have been good to him—she was a little rough around the edges, Cassie was, but she had a gentle soul, a heart for lost dogs. And lost boys.
“Picking up strays now?” she asked, under the bug-flecked cone of light on her porch, watching as Davie hoisted Kit Carson into the back of the borrowed Blazer.
Tyler grinned. “Just carrying on the tradition,” he said.
Stillwater Springs was a small town. Cassie, having lived there since before the Battle of the Little Big Horn, had to know Davie, and his mother, too. Maybe she even remembered the summer Tyler had spent in Doreen’s bed, in the little room above Skivvie’s Tavern, learning to be a man.
“Is he yours?” she asked, proving Tyler’s theory.
“Could be,” Tyler answered. “His mother denies it, but she could have lots of reasons for doing that.”
“Like what?” Cassie countered reasonably.
“Like not wanting me to have a claim on him, back when he was little and she could still handle him,” Tyler said. “Doreen was always independent to a fault. Maybe there’s still a little of that left in her, even now.”
“This is going to complicate your life,” Cassie predicted, sounding resigned.
“Maybe my life has gotten too simple,” Tyler replied.
“Spoken like a true Creed,” Cassie retorted, but she was smiling—with her mouth, anyway. Her dark eyes were serious. “Folks have long memories, Tyler. Everybody—including Lily Ryder—is going to recall what happened between you and Doreen, and put two and two together.”
Tyler sighed. He hadn’t let on to anybody that Lily was on his mind, but Cassie knew him too well to be fooled by lies of omission. “Is she involved with anybody? Remarried maybe?” he asked, his voice sounding husky. He wouldn’t have put that particular question to anyone else on earth, not even Lily. His pride wouldn’t have allowed that. But Cassie, a wise middle-aged Native American with a teepee in her yard, was like a grandmother to him.
“No,” Cassie said. And she put a hand on his arm, a signal that she was about to say something he wouldn’t want to hear. “Her husband was a pilot. He killed himself two years ago.”
Suicide.
Tyler closed his eyes, thrust right back into the bad old days as surely and suddenly as if he’d stumbled into a time warp. He might have been a kid again, not a man standing on Cassie’s front porch, but a boy hiding on the other side of the kitchen door, out at the home place, listening as Sheriff Floyd Book, Jim Huntinghorse’s legendary predecessor, broke the news to Jake.
Angie’s dead. I’m so sorry. We found her at the Skylight Motel, on the old state highway. It was an overdose, Jake… .
Tyler had heard a wail, primitive and piercing, and thought it was Jake.
He’d only realized the sound was coming from his own throat when Dylan and Logan each took one of his arms and hauled him up off his knees, braced him between them.
Cassie squeezed his arm, hard, brought him back from the abyss, the place where the questions never stopped.
All of them started with the same word.
Why?
“What could be that bad?” he rasped. “A wife like Lily. A little girl like Tess. What would make a man throw them away?”
“You’re trying to understand again,” Cassie pointed out gently. “And there is no understanding, Tyler. People are fragile. They can break. It’s as simple—and as complicated—as that.”
Don’t try to understand.
How many times had he heard that advice, from how many people? Dylan, certainly. Logan, too. Even his late wife, Shawna, when she’d been trying to pull him out of some slump. And it wasn’t the first time Cassie had offered it, either.
The problem was, he couldn’t help going over the old ground, looking for clues. Analyzing. His mother’s suicide was the reason for so many things that had happened—and not happened—in his life. It drove him half-crazy sometimes, the need to know why she’d done it. Why she hadn’t been able to hold on, leave Jake, make a new start somewhere else.
“You’ll be seeing Lily, I suppose?” Cassie ventured.
“We’re having dinner tomorrow night,” Tyler answered, braced for more advice.
Leave it alone, Cassie had told him, after the breakup that summer, when he’d wanted to go back to Lily, beg her to forgive him for sleeping with Doreen, give him another chance.
Forget the girl, Jake had counseled. She’s too good for you, anyway .
Are you nuts? Logan had demanded, after bouncing him off the back wall of the barn a couple of times. Rolling in the hay with a waitress twice your age when Lily’s crazy about you?
