Page 37 of Running to the Cowboy

Olivia

The next morning, I wake up extra early to cook the boys breakfast, but I find them all already seated around the kitchen table. Curly’s back, too.

“Dang,” I say. “How am I supposed to keep my job if you guys keep waking up earlier than me?”

My little joke falls on deaf ears. Curious, I approach the group huddled around the kitchen table, a legal pad with writing on it.

As I approach, I see a map of the property, with a rough sketch of the compound.

“What in the hell is that?” I ask.

Wylie turns to me. “We’re formulating a plan,” he says, with all the seriousness of the world in his eyes.

“A plan?” I say, horrified.

“More of an idea than a plan,” says Ennis.

“A kernel of an idea of a plan,” says Jake.

“A suicide mission, if you ask me,” says Curly.

“Tell me you boys are not thinking of doing anything rash,” I say.

“Rash? No,” Wylie says. “That’s why it’s called a plan.”

I shake my head. “No. You don’t know what you’re doing. This is a bad idea.”

“You said yourself that you have family in there. Sisters. Mothers.”

“We have to call the police, not go in with guns blazing.”

Curly shakes his head. “I already talked to the sheriff. He says without any evidence of abuse, they can’t do anything.”

I stomp my foot. “We call the FBI!”

“You ever see what happened at Waco?” Ennis asks.

“What’s a Waco?” I ask.

The boys all exchange a look.

Wylie turns to me. “Baby. We gotta go in and do it our way.”

I shake my head stubbornly. “This is not a cowboy job. There are three of you, and there are dozens of men with a cache of weapons. Even more women who are so brainwashed they would shoot you dead as soon as they’d spit at you.”

“Then what do you propose?”

I pace the room.

“The only thing I think I can do is get them out one by one. We can’t scare the children. What we can do is pinpoint extraction.”

“I don’t understand,” says Jake.

Something I saw at the store once upon a time pricks my memory. Pamphlets from a battered women’s shelter, left in the public restroom.

“It sounds silly, but it might work. Do you boys have a printer?”

I explain what I plan to do, and the boys exchange a skeptical look. All of them, except for Wylie.

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