Page 58 of Hell and Gone
The side of the truck read,Montana Department of Agriculture: Stock Detective.
This time, he didn’t take Trigger. He ambled down the drive himself, taking a drag from his beer as he walked. The sun was high in the sky, midsummer’s heat burning down on the Crazies, and he’d traded his button-down for a t-shirt. Sweat dappled his chest, the canyon of his spine. His new cowboy hat shielded his face, and he pulled the brim down low.
“Can I help you, Detective?” He leaned against the gate, arms crossed over the top, head tilted, one boot kicked forward.
“I was looking for the Delaney Ranch. Seems I can’t find it.”
Lawrence downed a long swallow of his beer. “There ain’t a Delaney Ranch no more. He sold it. This here is the Jackson Ranch.” He pointed to his sign. “Says so right there.”
Everett squinted at the cardboard from underneath hisStock Detectiveball cap. His elbow hung out the driver’s window and a slow smile curled up his lips. “I do see that now. Well, congratulations are in order.”
Lawrence tipped his hat. Raised his beer. “Might feel like celebratin’ with someone. If someone was interested.”
This time, Everett really smiled wide. “Open the gate. I’ll show you how interested I am.”
Hesitation curdled Lawrence’s stomach. Made him hesitate. “It’s been two months. I called.” He pulled out his cell phone, brand new and bought from Wal-Mart. It was one of those fancy ones with a full screen. Delaney had helped him install satellite internet before selling the place, and now, he had access to the world from the palm of his hand.
All he wanted, though, was one phone call. “You forget how to use one of these?”
“I needed time.” Everett swallowed. “I was put on medical leave. My shoulder was shot to shit. I left Montana for a while. I was in Walter Reed, getting treated there. And I went to Arlington.” He looked away. “I visited Holt.”
Lawrence’s gaze hit the dirt. He nodded. “I buried Carson, too. He didn’t have much in the way of family. I did what I thought he’d like, though.”
He’d finally read the suicide note, too. Was Carson really going to do it? Or was that note something he’d written one night when he was down and out, but had then put away? Something he hadn’t gotten around to deleting? The date on it was six weeks before he’d been murdered, right when he was really struggling with losing Endless Sky. And losing Jim Burke, a man who had been a father to him.You keep me here, Law,he’d said.You and Endless Sky, and I’ve lost one and I’m losing the other. If I didn’t have you, I wouldn’t have any reason to be here, and I wouldn’t know who I was no more. Maybe we never should have met—
The note had ended on that line.
In the six weeks after he’d written the note, they’d had good times. Eventually, it became clear they weren’t right for each other, not the way they’d hoped for, and Carson was talking about moving on. Going to Wyoming, or Utah. He had plans for the future.
He wasn’t going to do it, Lawrence decided.Believed. Clung to, with all his heart. He wasn’t going to do it. He was down one day, and that got the better of him, but he had a future in mind, something Jim Burke stole from him.
When he’d found out about the rustlers, that Endless Sky hands were the ones doing it, had he thought bringing that to Jim Burke would get him back on at Endless Sky? Had he had a desperate wish to go back to the way things were? Was he hoping for his job, his old life, back?
Carson never would have been a part of their scheme. As soon as he knew the truth, he was marked for death. And Jim Burke was the man who’d killed him, a man he’d thought of as his father, a man he had looked up to since he was fifteen years old.
“I thought about what you said, too. Thought a lot about it.” Everett turned back to him and held Lawrence’s gaze, shaking him out of his reverie. “I think you’re right. Montana, this. It’s a chance for me. And I think I want to take it.”
Lawrence’s heart skipped a beat. “What? Bein’ a stock detective? Huntin’ rustlers and chasin’ cattle thieves?”
“That’s part of it. Part of what I want.”
Slowly, Lawrence smiled. He pushed the controls to open the gate. Stepped back, and waited for Everett to come in.
Everett beat him back up the drive. He parked in front of the ash pile, the remnants of the ranch house that weren’t hauled away. Across from the heap, Lawrence’s new trailer waited, two new lawn chairs in front of a shiny new fire pit, all still with that brand-new smell on them from Wal-Mart. He’d built the place for two instead of one, purely on hope.
A cooler rested between the two chairs, long neck bottles of beer chilling on ice.
Everett hopped out of his truck and nodded to the cooler and the chairs when Lawrence ambled up the drive. “Got company?”
“I was hopin’ for someone to come by eventually.”
When Everett beamed, Lawrence melted, all of him going loose and weak inside, his stomach slip-sliding as his heart burst. “I love that,” he blurted out. “Your smile. God, I love it. Makes me go crazy.”
To his delight, Everett kept smiling. “My supervisor has released me from probation and assigned me my area of Montana to cover: the southwest, including the Crazies.”
“Big area.”
“It is. So I asked him, where should I live if I have to manage such a big area? What’s a good central location?”
