Page 2 of The Outsider

It was quiet. She kind of liked that. She wasn’t used to quiet. When they lived in the mountains in their cabin, there were still a lot of loud familial fights. When they’d lived in the trailer park, they’d been able to hear the whole neighborhood fighting. She’d been on her own for a couple of years now, but she’d never lived anywhere quiet.

She looked at her fishing pole, and wondered if she should head down to the river. Technically, she supposed she was a poacher. But she ate everything that she caught, and her dad, she believed, was right about a few things.

One of them was the fact that the state monetizing things like fishing, trapping and hunting by making you get permits made it impossible for people to be self-sufficient.

And if there was one thing Bix prized it was her independence and self-sufficiency.

That was two things. But whatever.

She had some ramen and other easy, cheap foods in her pack, but fish would be nice.

Decisively, she got up and snagged her pole, heading down a path in the woods that she knew led to the river. She bent down and started digging in the dirt, finding an earthworm and baiting her hook as she walked down to the river’s edge.

She wasn’t often thankful for her dad. But he had taught her how to get along. So right then, she sent up a nice thought for him—and whatever cell he was in currently—and cast her hook into the water. She had a couple of fishhooks in her backpack, but she had to be very careful in rivers like this. If she got her hook hung up on the rocks and lost it, then it was going to make her life a lot harder. And she really didn’t need her life to be any harder than it already was.

She felt her line jerk, then go tight, and she yanked upward, making sure that if there was a fish on, she’d gotten it secured. And then she started to reel it in. The movement on the line told her that she absolutely had something.

She said a little prayer of thanks to whoever was watching out for her. Then she realized it was herself.

“Thanks, me,” she said, as she reeled the line in, and brought in a wiggly rainbow trout.

She was looking at the fish when she heard a sound. She looked up, and there across the river, emerging from the trees, was a man.

He was tall. And broad. Well muscled, with a tight black T-shirt and cowboy hat. There was an air ofauthority about him that made everything inside of her go quiet. It was familiar.

Hewasn’t specifically. It was the vibe he gave off.

A cop.

That was what he reminded her of. She could feel that big pig energy radiating from across the river. She was frozen, with a wiggling fish on the end of the line that she was holding up, and she knew that he saw her, and yet he hadn’t said anything. She wasn’t going to lose her fish. She grabbed it, defiantly, and dispatched it. Then she gathered her things and took off at a run, up the path, and headed back into the woods. He wouldn’t be able to see where she went.

Her heart was pounding. Terror and adrenaline pumped through her in equal measure.

This spot was perfect. She was not going to let the sighting of one man ruin it. She would give it twenty-four hours. If he came back, came sniffing around, she would leave. But she had a roof over her head for the first time in a while, and she didn’t want to lose it. She looked at the fish and knew a moment of despair. Because she was not going to be able to risk lighting a fire tonight. She didn’t want to waste it either.

She was never going to kill an animal and then not make use of it. Even if it was an ugly fish.

She blinked hard, denying all of the emotion that rose up inside of her. She wasn’t going to cry.

It was cold outside. Or at least, pretty cold. And she knew she had a couple of options. She dug in her backpack for a plastic bag, and took it out. She decided to wrap the fish carefully, and bury it in the cold dirt.Deep enough that hopefully it wouldn’t attract any bears, and that it would also be insulated. She trusted the idea well enough, or at least, trusted it as much as she did anything. Because hey. If there was one thing Bix Carpenter knew, it was how to survive.

“I think we might have a squatter.”

“And what evidence do you have, Sheriff?”

Daughtry King leaned back in his chair, and took a long drink of his beer. He could argue with his brother about him calling him Sheriff. He was a state trooper, not a sheriff. He didn’t even work for the sheriff’s department. But then, his brother obviously knew that, and was just being difficult.

A hallmark of Justice King if ever there was one. Oftentimes he could appreciate that—today not so much. He was tired. And if he said anything about being tired then his brother would remind him that taking two jobs was his idea.

True.

But, he considered it part and parcel of trying to do something to redeem the King name.

So when he’d decided to go into law enforcement, he hadn’t even bothered to have the discussion about the fact that he was trying to carry a new legacy for the family on his shoulders. Especially at the time, Arizona hadn’t cared at all. Denver and Justice still didn’t. Landry understood. But then, his younger brother had always seemed to care just a bit more about the things their father had done to them. And what they might have to do to fix it.

Especially now that his brother was a father—well, his brother had been a father for thirteen years; it was just that the kid had lived with him, and the rest of them hadn’t known—but now that he was actually the custodial parent of his daughter, and had another kid on the way, if anything Landry cared even more.

Mostly though, being understood wasn’t high on Daughtry’s list of things he needed.

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