Cowboy Sing Me Home (24 page)

            Helen paced and chewed her lip, her brow
furrowed.  As she passed by Dusty, she turned to her, her face intent.  “I’m
glad you’re here.”

            Caught off guard by the fervor in her
voice, Dusty could only nod.  Where else would she be? she thought inanely. 

            “Luke cares about you, more than even he
realizes.  He’ll be very glad to know you’re here.  When he finds out.  When I
go back there and talk to him and see him and tell him all his friends were
here, he’ll be very happy to know…” 

            Dusty hugged her again, and this time
didn’t let go.  When Colt and Becca came through the door – and more people
Dusty recognized but didn’t know – Dusty stayed with her arm around Helen, two
women who waited with their hearts in their throats and their nerves on edge. 
Dusty thought again of how she didn’t belong here, but none of these people
seemed to notice that, and she wasn’t going to be the one to point it out.  She
stood with Luke’s friends and family and willed him to be okay with every ounce
of strength she had.

            Then Melinda came in.  Her gaze took in
the crowd in the waiting room, and she zeroed in on Dusty.  Dusty met her stare
with one of her own, but she couldn’t help but notice the tension level in the
room rise.  She stepped away from Helen, forcing herself to keep her chin high.

            Melinda was the one who belonged here. 
Melinda knew that, Dusty knew that, and so did everyone else in the room. 
Dusty moved over to the corner and sat down beside Stevie.

            Melinda latched on to Helen.  “I’m so
worried.  I feel like I’m having a heart attack.  When will they come out and
tell us what’s going on?”

            “You’d better sit down,” Helen said,
leading Melinda to a chair.  “You don’t need to get too worked up.”

            “Thanks, Mom.”  Melinda smiled at Helen,
then turned to throw Dusty a look.

            “Don’t worry about her,” Stevie said under
his breath.

            Melinda stood again to pace the room, her
hand at the small of her back.  “I don’t feel well.  I’m so worried about
Luke.”

            “Sit down,” Helen said shortly.  “Get off
your feet.”

            “I can’t.  I’m too nervous about my
fiancée.”  She looked at Dusty again, her eyes narrowed.  “I just love him so
much.  And he loves me.  Surely God wouldn’t take him now, not when –”

            “Melinda, sit down and shut your mouth,”
Corinne ordered in the same tone she reserved for Cade when he was in trouble.

            Melinda sat, but didn’t shut her mouth. 
“I can’t help it, Corinne.  He’s the love of my life, my soul mate.”  She
stared across the room at Dusty.

            Dusty forced herself to remain calm, but
felt like her head was going to explode.  One more second of hearing Melinda
talk about how much she loved Luke, and it was going to.

            The door swung open then and a man in
green scrubs came out.  He saw Helen and crossed the room to her.

            “No big deal.  A little bullet in the
thigh, no problem for a brilliant doctor such as myself.”

            Helen sagged, and Melinda cried out,
“Thank you, thank you!”

            The rest of the group gathered around the
doctor, firing questions at him.  The room was such a commotion of relief and
joy that no one noticed when Dusty stood and began to edge her way out of the
room, except Stevie.

            He followed her to the door and asked in a
low voice.  “You want me to take you home now?”

            She nodded, and they left quietly.  Stevie
was silent on the way back to Trailertopia, and for that she was grateful.  He
walked her to the door and stood silently by as she walked in.  She remembered
at the last second to thank him for bringing her home.

            He nodded.  “And don’t worry about the
band.  We’ll work something out before the next gig on Wednesday night.  Maybe
he’ll even be well enough to play by then.”

            “Maybe.”  The thought brought a painful
relief to her, and she had to swallow before she could say, “Goodnight.”

            She sat in the same chair she’d been
sitting in when Stevie came, and glanced at the clock. Unbelievably, only an
hour and a half had passed since she’d been trying to read her book.

            Silence roared in her trailer, so heavy it
filled the small space and stretched out endlessly before her.

            She kept telling herself to turn on some
music, or turn on the television, anything to push out this overwhelming
silence that pinned her to her chair.

            But she didn’t.  She sat in her chair all
night, wondering how two completely different sentences – ‘Luke’s been shot’,
and ‘I love him and he loves me’ – could have so nearly the same effect on her.

            Luke cracked his eyes open the next
morning, to see a familiar face.

            “Man,” he croaked.  He licked dry lips
with a dry tongue.  “This must be bad if they called out the feds.  How are you
doing, Buddy?”

            “Better than you.”  Buddy Saiz stood, stretching
to his full 6’3”, and shook Luke’s hand.

            Buddy and Luke had attended the police
academy together.  Luke had come back to Aloma, and Buddy had worked his way up
to a position in the FBI.

            “How’s your head?”

            Luke swiveled his head to see Toby, standing
by the window, holding his hat in his hand.

            “Not bad enough for you to be looking like
you’re standing by my deathbed.   How’s Joanne?  Geralyn said she went home
last night.”

            “She got a bonk on the head, but she’s
fine.  No concussion. They pushed her into the cell and tied her up.  I think
she was more mad than anything.”

            “Well?  Did you get them?”

            Toby frowned and shook his head.  “Not
yet.  But we will.”

            Luke pictured again the barrel of the gun
staring him in the face, and the calm sense of satisfaction in the voice of the
shooter.

            “Don’t worry about it,” Luke said.  “I
kinda want to get them myself.”

            “Get in line.  A lot of people are looking
for your friends.”

            “How did you get involved, Buddy?  The
kid’s warrant said he’d embezzled from his company.”

            “Evidently, they weren’t just talking
about paper clips,” Toby said.  “He worked for IND, and he’d been slowly
stealing information on their new gaming system, and selling it to a rival
company.”

            Buddy said, “IND wasn’t exactly upfront
with their suspicions.  They tried to keep it in-house, until it became clear
that things were out of their hands.  What they were trying to do, we think, is
keep the whole mess under wraps and get the data back into their hands, before
their stockholders found out.  But Kenny’s partner –”

            Buddy looked at Toby, who nodded grimly.

            “Kenny’s partner, a high level executive
with IND, destroyed all that was left of the original data, leaving IND with
nothing.  So they finally gave the Seattle police the whole story, and we
jumped on board.”

            “Take a guess who Kenny’s partner is,”
Toby said.

            Luke frowned, his head aching.  “Damn. 
Wayne Schotts.”

            “Damn straight.  Right there in our
office.”

            “No wonder he wanted to come look around. 
He was casing the place.”  Luke rubbed his hands over his face.  “He must have
been laughing his head off at us the entire time.”

            “I know.  Ever since Buddy told me, I’ve
felt like an idiot.  I even took a stock tip from the bastard.”

            “There was a third guy,” Luke said.  “The
shooter.”

            “We’ve got a pretty good idea who he is,
too.  You up to looking at some pictures?”

            “Hell, I want to get out of bed and go
after them myself.  Sure I’m up to it.”

            Buddy slipped the photos from an
envelope.  “Is this the guy?”

            Luke studied the picture.  The alley had
been dark, and the streetlight behind the shooter.  Plus Luke had already been
knocked over the head when he saw the guy.

            “You don’t know how much I want to say for
sure that’s him.  It could be.”

            “His name is Derek Broeker.  All our leads
point to him as the accomplice, the one who’s been doing the running from Kenny
to the other company, plus he has a criminal history that fits right into this
picture.”

            “Do you know who the buyer is?”

            “IND’s CEO gave us a few leads, and we’ve
got some guys watching them right now.”  Buddy slid the pictures back into the
envelope.  “We’ll get them, Luke.”

            “What were they doing in Aloma?”

            “The only thing we can figure out is that
this was the rendezvous point to hand off the information.  Kenny suddenly quit
IND about four days before he showed up here, and it wasn’t until after he left
that they figured out what he’d been doing.  When they started looking around,
some fingers pointed to Schotts as being involved, and since he and the CEO are
good friends from way back, he called Schotts onto the carpet and forced him to
leave the building, but offered the guy a chance to make it right before he got
the law involved.  Instead, Schotts hit the road, and only then did IND
discover that all the information they have is scrambled.  Getting it back into
working order is going to take some time.  In the meanwhile, a clean copy is
floating around somewhere, maybe already to the buyer by now.”

            “Kenny didn’t have anything on him when I
arrested him.”

            “If he’d already delivered it, I doubt
Wayne would have bothered with breaking him out of jail.  He would have his
money and be in another country by now, so he probably wouldn’t care if Kenny
talked or not.  We feel like he hid the data somewhere before he was arrested,
and Schotts came to bust Kenny out so he could take him to it.”

            “What are we looking for?  Anything on
paper?  Or…like a disk or something? A jump drive?”

            “Probably a jump drive, but I’m betting
it’s long gone by now.  If Kenny hid it somewhere, they got it last night,
after they broke out.  Our best bet right now is to keep an eye on the
potential buyers.  That will lead us to these guys.”

            Dusty opened the cabinet under the sink in
Tumbleweeds’ ladies room and narrowed her eyes at the empty space.  Evidently
it was asking too much for Rodney to keep the bathroom stocked.  She slammed
the door.

            She checked the storeroom, and found an
old umbrella stand full of broken pool cues and a busted fluorescent beer sign,
but nothing of any use.  She muttered under her breath and went in search of
Rodney.  She’d been on edge all night and all morning, and she needed someone
to take it out on. 

            Rodney was behind the bar, as usual,
mixing something in a blender.  “Here, taste this and see what you think.  I’m
going to call it the Rain Dance.”  He poured some of the frozen concoction into
a cup and slid it across the bar toward her.

            “There’s no toilet paper in the ladies
room.  None in the store room, either.”

            “Oh, man!  I was supposed to order that
last week.”

            “Oh man!” she mocked.  “And you forgot,
didn’t you?  The way you forget about everything unless it’s right in front of
you.  In the meantime, we’re going to have several hundred women in here
drinking alcohol.  Do you know what happens when women drink alcohol, Rodney?”

            She was aware that she was verging on a
shriek.  She took a deep breath and lowered the pitch.  “Not to mention that
I’m here, you’re here, and we may need some.”

            “Um…” He cleared his throat and silently
slid a pile of cocktail napkins across the bar to her.

            Dusty looked at the pile of napkins, then
raised an eyebrow at him.  “Where’s the checkbook?”

            A horrified look crept across Rodney’s
face, and Dusty shook her head in disgust.  “I want you to sign a check so I
can go into town and get some supplies.”

            “Oh!  Good idea.”  He bent, then rose and
slapped the checkbook on the bar.  “Very good idea.  You know, I need somebody
like you around here to help me keep things in order.”

            “You need something.”

            As he signed the check, he said, “You want
a job?  Singing and playing with the band on weekends, managing the bar during
the week?”  He held out the check across the bar.

            Dusty was surprised to see that he was
serious.  She stared at his outstretched hand, then at him.  “You mean permanently?”