Page 46 of Hell and Gone
“This?” Everett waved to the carnage, Bart’s body, the crystal pool and its silent tomb of corpses. “This is cleanup. Someone has been running an operation and decided to wrap it up. Someone who knows the area and knows the Crazies. Someone who has worked the land and knows the history here. Someone who knows enough to maneuver you and box you in. Frame you. And,” he said slowly, “who knows how to disappear and knows they won’t be missed, because they’re already supposed to be gone.”
It clicked, like a shotgun racking. “Dell and Aaron.”
“They’d be ghosts if it weren’t for you making a fuss about them vanishing. But their disappearing act spooked Bill Warner at the Heart’s Rafter. He split after that, right?”
Lawrence nodded.
“The ranch has been abandoned. That’s a whole lot of land to run a stolen herd. And with everyone focusing on their missing cattle, no one is looking at an abandoned ranch’s wild fields.”
“And Carson?”
Everett’s lips thinned. “That was personal.”
The fire inside him flared. His vision narrowed, the tunnel vision of a predator, pure blood lust. “You’re God damn right it was,” he growled. “And I’ll make it personal right back.”
He’d kill them. He’d kill them both for what they’d done.
Everett’s hand on his fist broke the fury, shattered the rage like a wave breaking against shore. He was almost dizzy, and he stumbled slightly against the sudden emptiness. “They’ll pay,” Everett said quietly. “Don’t throw away your life on them, though. They aren’t worth it.”
He closed his eyes. Tried to swallow. Everett’s hand squeezed his fist, and he turned his hand over. Laced their fingers together. Stood in the silence with Everett for a minute.
“All right,” he said, pulling away. “Let’s get to Heart’s Rafter. I want to find the herd.”
* * *
Heart’s Rafterwas a broken ranch.
Her fences had fallen and the gate swung wide and rattled in the wind. The barn paint had peeled, and someone had used the broad side for target practice. Shotgun pellet holes dotted the whole damn thing. Someone was either an especially shit shot, or they had been drunk. Blind drunk.
The main drive to Heart’s Rafter led to the empty ranch house. Broken windows on the back porch revealed the break in, and the back door had been forced out of its frame. Someone had been squatting inside. They’d burned fires in the fireplace, read porn magazines, and left a mess in the kitchen.
“Touch nothing,” Everett said. “We’ll get this all fingerprinted.”
They slipped back out and stood on the porch, looking at the pastures rolling up the Crazies. There was a horse in the corral, unbranded, unsaddled. A mare, and she snorted at them while Lawrence found a bale of hay in the barn. By the way she ate, it had been some time since she’d been fed.
“According to the map, they would have driven the herd into the pasture beyond that rise.” Everett pointed beyond a wooded glen and a slope leading uphill a mile away.
“Good place to hide them.”
They set off, riding Trigger across the fields. The sun beat down, hot enough to pull sweat from their skin even as it started to fall behind the tip of Crazy Peak. Exhaustion tore at Lawrence, jerked on his soul. He leaned into Everett, resting his forehead on Everett’s shoulder, and closed his eyes.
Months he’d been trying to rustle up support to search for Dell and Aaron. Months he’d thought they’d fallen victim to predators, had been attacked, taken, murdered. He hated them, sure, but no man deserved to be forgotten. Not even rotten Bart Conway.
Had they been rustling cattle even before the brawl with the truckers? Had getting told to get gone just been their excuse to turn to ghosts?
Had what Lawrence did, the beating he’d put on them, been the reason they’d turned on Carson?
Had he caused Carson’s death?
His hand snaked around Everett’s hip, and he squeezed, holding Everett close. His breath shuddered, feathered over Everett’s neck.
Everett’s hand landed on his. Squeezed.
And then Trigger was trotting up the rise, and they were pushing through the cottonwoods, and before them lay Heart’s Rafter’s back pasture, a private, hidden slice of golden grass and trickling streams, enough for five hundred head of cattle to graze at their leisure.
There they were. Almost three hundred head of cattle lazing in the sunshine, turned out in the pasture. They sported new Box 88 brands, an 88 inside of a square, laid on top of their old brands. Some still were healing.
Everett sighed, his back pushing into Lawrence’s chest. “We found them.”
