Page 2 of Merry with a Ranger

Today’s Nash let her go.

I dug my toes into the sand and finally achieved some of those tiny cuts I’d been trying for. Most of them were hardly scratches on the surface of my skin, but it was a start.

The corner of my mouth curled into a sadistic smile.

Bonnie Little could run, but in a town like Love Beach, she couldn’t hide. Not for long. She had no chance. Not with me.

Not with an obsession that had been brewing since I last saw her ten years ago. No, this assignment just got a whole lot more interesting. Maybe Love Beach wouldn’t be as boring as I expected.

I mentally flipped over the ring that had lived in my pocket since she ran away. Since I never got to give it to the girl who should have been my prom date, but when I went to get her, she wasn’t there.

No, Texas could wait.

Sand etched its way along my ass crack despite the three showers I’d taken since I got back from the beach where I spotted my ghost girl who should never have been there in the first place.

The waste of water ingrained in my blood still got to me despite the years I spent outside of Texas. It didn’t matter how much of the stuff floated around me or that I was back on the coast, for now. What had been bred into me couldn’t be cancelled out on a whim, even for particles as annoying as the tiny grits that seemed determined to mine their way into every unavailable orifice.

But a few grits didn’t change my focus as I sifted through files I knew by heart. Photos and names printed in blacks and whites, as well as color covered the resort bed. For the umpteenth time I worked back through the final night of a man’s life laid out in front of me, but nothing could change the death of the bomber who knew information about my grandfather he took to the literal grave, albeit in several pieces.

When he blew himself back to hell in County, he left me with a message about the KKK grandmaster I hated who was still attached to my bloodline. I spent a decade away from Texas just to remove myself from the taint of my grandfather’s actions, alienating myself from the family who still claimed me despite my pushing them away.

Even with the bomber dead and my grandfather whiling his final years away in respite care, I still scrubbed his sins from my skin daily even though they weren’t mine.

Archer, my new boss at the Texas Ranger unit I’d become attached to when he offered me a position after the FBI failed to provide me with what I needed, had a penchant for manila folders and hard copy files. The resort coffee table and oversized, overstuffed and unsupportive bed was covered with beige cardboard.

The man might be the cream of Texas Rangers down south, but right now I cursed him for his lack of ability to file a digital report like any other human in this century.

Not that Archer was old by any means; I was lucky if he had a decade on me. But from the moment I walked into his office, wary yet keen to accept a second chance and a reason to be back on Texas home soil, I could see the pain etched in his face that haunted the stocky Texas Ranger, his chestnut hair shot with occasional strand of silver.

His office was bare. Not in a rustic sense but stark enough to show he had no personal attachment to anything in it.

But I knew instinctively that it wasn’t the things in his office, the tiny little space filled only with a scarred desk as old as the man seated behind it, and a row of equally marred filing cabinets that were the important things in the bigger picture to him. No, that would be the team that sat outside his office. Those were the critical factors in Rhys Archer’s life, and that small fact instinctively told me this was a man I wanted to work for.

Especially when the first thing he did was hand me the one case we both knew I had chased for years, and would never refuse.

My grandfather’s eyes stared up at me from the bed in a black-and-white photo. There were color ones of him that existed, sepia even, but I preferred this one. It showed a man in his prime, carrying that hideous white sheath in his unmarked hands. Glowing cheeks that, like so many psychos out there, didn’t reflect the insanity festering within.

An insanity I feared might be contained inside me, too.

Not racism. I didn’t give a fuck what my grandfather stood, or what sort of twisted moral PR agenda he pushed. That part disgusted me to the worst degree, and I wanted no part of it. No, the part of him that terrified me was that perhaps his darkness somehow passed down to me in some sick gene, and that nomatter what I fought for, that part of him would always be a part of me.

That concept terrified me every damn day.

The rest of the local contingent of assholes pictured around him were either dead for the greater majority, or well into their eighties and nineties, living in nursing homes scattered about the state, unable to leave Texas if they wanted to. On the rarer occasion, the pictures weren’t as pleasant, and some of my grandfather’s cohort stared at the lens with accusing eyes like they expected the technology to steal their souls.

Okay, so for some of them their brand of insanity sat closer to the surface. I didn’t glance at my own reflection in the small resort mirror, unwilling to see if my own insanity peeked through just yet.

My phone buzzed beside me. I tapped the screen without looking at it. A picture popped up in my periphery. Flicking the folder closed on my grandfather’s face, I glanced across.

Archer:He left you a message.

The single line message accompanied the photograph. I stared at the collection of memorabilia spread across Archer’s desk as bile rose into my throat.

Trophies were displayed in one image. My grandfather's personal collection. Proof of his life, his twistedsuccesses, delivered courtesy of a dead man. Jewelry, a perfume bottle. Feather fans taken from someone’s house he no doubt burned to the ground.

One of his favorite methods. I wanted to retch, but my eye caught on a picture of a pale hair comb just out of focus, similar to a gift I gave to a pretty girl once. But there were more. A diary, pens with men’s names engraved on them.

Bowls of crosses, some with burn marks on them. A sickening orgy of evidence, more than I needed.

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