Page 1 of Colt
1
COLT
When I was electedsheriff of Devil’s Ditch and the surrounding county, I hadn’t expected it to be like the TV town Mayberry, where the town drunk was one of my friends who slept off his benders in an unlocked jail cell. Or that the only bad stuff that would happen was helping an old lady locked out of her house or scaring some kids straight about drinking and driving.
Not murder.
I pulled into a cleared spot at the ER entrance for the county hospital. The snow had been plowed from the recent huge spring blizzard. Mounds of it. But it was April and the weather would–hopefully–start towarm. The facility was small, but had competent and qualified professionals who took care of the community. Alive and dead.
Besides enforcing the law, I was also the county coroner. I responded when someone, like Mr. Caternary last month, died in his sleep at the age of ninety-three. I also responded when someone fell down the stairs under suspicious circumstances like Lance Mann.
While I attended the death, crime or not, it was absolutely not my job to be the medical examiner. Thank fuck. I’d seen some gruesome, unpleasant shit in my time, but I had no interest–nor was remotely qualified–to cut a corpse open and find the cause of death.
We had a new medical examiner, who acquired that role when she became Chief of Emergency Medicine, a fancy title for head of the ER in a small town hospital. I entered through the sliding glass door and got hit with warm air. I spoke briefly with Sarah, the triage nurse, to ask where to find the new doc. She directed me to cut through the ER and down the hallway to the morgue where Dr. Molly Simon, who’d performed the autopsy on Lance Mann, was waiting for me.
The past two days, I–and the local newspaper–wasrunning with the notion that Mann’s fall had been intentional, that someone had helped him tumble to the bottom of his stairs and die. In my mind, that person was Conrad Trout, the fucker who’d paid off Mann’s debts in exchange for marrying his daughter.
A modern day arranged marriage.
Except Ellie had fled before the nuptials and ended up being rescued from the snowstorm by my brother, Trig. While technically they wed so Trout’s plan was ruined, Trig would’ve married her anyway. One look, he’d said, and she knew she belonged to him.
That was great and all, but it was my job to keep the town safe. Especially with the town reading about a possible murderer on the loose. If Trout was murdering people when they crossed him, then I wanted him–or whoever did it–behind bars. Ellie was nervous, which meant Trig was pissed, which meant I had to find out who the fuck killed her father, Lance Mann.
Until then, Trig was keeping Ellie close. They’d also only married last week, so he was keeping herveryclose for completely different reasons. I wasn’t sure if they’d even left the house.
My radio squawked at my hip, so I adjusted the volume as I pushed open the heavy door to themorgue. This wasn’t my first rodeo in this part of the hospital, but I still didn’t like it. It was made of three rooms. The autopsy room, the refrigerator room where the bodies were stored, and a basic office area with a desk and computer. I was content remaining in this space to wait for the doctor. I’d received a message through dispatch to meet her at one. Glancing at the clock on the wall, I was two minutes early.
The door from the autopsy suite swung open and a woman in blue scrubs and a white doctor’s coat came out. On her head was a surgical cap. She had black hair, cut to chin length so it peeked out the bottom and skimmed straight along her jawline. Her eyes–
Holy fucking hell.
She looked up from a file she was holding and met my gaze. Those dark eyes widened in recognition. Quick and startling. She remembered me, too.
“It’s you,” I breathed. My heart thrummed. My dick instantly hardened.
The one who got away.
2
Six months ago
MOLLY
What was I doing?WHAT WAS I DOING?
What I was doing was kissing a guy. Not a peck on the cheek, but fully pressed against a door in a janitor’s closet at the event center, making out like it was an Olympic sport and we were going for gold.
Yup, me. I was making out with a hot, sexy stranger in a supply closet. This wasn’t me. Not at all. More like my sister, Missy, who did everything that was crazy. This guy and I, we hadn’t even exchanged names!
One minute we were eyeing each other across the arena, the next, we were in a closet and he had his hand beneath my shirt and was cupping my boob.
I was working the four-day long rodeo as one of the event’s doctors. There was a paramedic crew with an ambulance on standby just off the arena floor, but because of the danger of bull riding and other events and the size of the crowd, the organizers had a doctor on site as well. There were three of us and I’d finished my six hour time slot.
I’d lived in Cheyenne for a few months and had yet to see a rodeo, the quintessential western sport. New to town and having only a few acquaintances to keep me company, I’d volunteered to work at the event on the days I didn’t have shifts at the ER. It was hard to become friends with people when I had to up and relocate. It’d happened twice since I finished my residency because of my sister. I didn’t even want to think back on what she’d done before then.
Turned out, with my med shift finished for the day, the organizers offered me tickets to watch the evening event. My seat was near the chutes and I’d had a close up view of the cowboys settling atop a bucking bronc or a furious bull before the gate was swung open and off they went, trying to remain atop for as long as possible.
Amazingly, the only injury I’d had to tend to was a broken collarbone, which meant he didn’t need my lifesaving skills and had been taken to the hospital by the paramedics.
