Love, Like Water (10 page)

“N
O
J
OSH
this morning?”

Eli looked up from his breakfast, as did the four other hands sitting with him. “I ain’t seen him,” Ray volunteered, scratching his neck with his fork. Sarafina smacked his hand with her spatula, then took it over to the sink to wash it noisily. Ray exchanged a grin with Eli, who turned to Tucker.

“I haven’t seen him either, but that’s not unusual. He’s probably still sleeping.”

“Go check on him, Tucker,” Sarafina said, “and bring back the dishes from his supper. I don’t want creatures moving in.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Tucker saluted. “Will my breakfast be ready when I come back?”

“If I feel like it.”

Tucker grinned and headed down the hall to Josh’s room. While Josh had avoided suppers, where all the hands came in at once, he lately had been coming to early breakfast, when there was no more than a handful of men in the kitchen. But Eli was probably right—Josh was still sleeping. Seemed he’d had a restless night; when Tucker had come down for a drink of water about 1:00 a.m., he’d heard Josh pacing in his room. Apparently he was still having trouble with nightmares.

He knocked on the closed door. “Josh? Er, Joshua?”

Nothing. He frowned, knocked again, then opened the door.

The room was empty, the bathroom equally so. The closet door was open and half of his clothes were gone, along with his backpack. A piece of paper lay on the neatly made bed. Shaken, Tucker picked up the paper.

Uncle Tucker,

I’m really sorry. This is not going to work. I don’t belong here.

I’m sorry. Thank you for trying.

Love,

Joshua

“Shit!” Tucker bolted for the back door. Six pairs of startled eyes watched him charge out onto the porch. He stopped and counted vehicles. The Silverado, Eli’s F150, the bigger ranch vehicles, the assortment of cars and trucks owned by the men: all were parked neatly in the side lot. None were missing. Did that stupid kid…?

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” Tucker swore, and went back into the house. To the others in the kitchen, he said, “Josh is gone. Took off. Must be walkin’, ’cause all the cars are here. Idiot thinks he can get to Miller on foot. Goddammit! It’s forty miles. I’m going to pick him up. Sara, call Whitey at the police station in town and ask him to send someone out to look for him. He’s probably on the road between here and Miller somewhere, but there are a couple turnoffs and he musta left before light.”

“Sure he’s gone to Miller?” Eli asked as he got up. He gulped the last of his coffee, forked in the rest of his eggs, swallowed, and started for the door. Tucker put a hand out.

“No disrespect meant, son, but I think I better handle this. I don’t know what went on yesterday, but it sure put a bug up his ass, for him to take off like this.” He ignored Eli’s stunned expression and went on, “And yeah, Miller. He’s probably thinking he can catch the bus there to Albuquerque. But it’s a long walk to town and he’s not in the best shape. I want to catch him before the sun’s too high. It’s still hot enough for him to get heatstroke. Jesus.” He grabbed his hat off the hook by the door and slapped it on. “I’ll call when I find him. In the meantime, Eli, get the hands working their regular shifts.”

“If he went off course….”

Tucker waved Eli off. “If I don’t find him on the road to Miller, I’ll call in help. I ain’t stupid, son.”

I
T
WAS
10:00 a.m. by the time Tuck called Eli on his sat phone. Eli dropped the fork he’d been using to dump hay in the corral for the horses there and fumbled at his belt for the phone. “Yeah. Tuck. What’s going on? Did you find him?”

“No.” Tuck’s answer was curt, but Eli could hear the strain in his voice. “Whitey’s got the State Police involved—they’re sending a copter out.”

Joshua had been missing since before dawn, and it was near ninety this morning already. Shit. “Did you check….”

“Son, we’ve had folks driving up and down every possible road, path, trail, and gully between here and town. We even checked out at the Rocking J to see if he holed up there.” Tucker sounded like he was on the verge of tears—or swearing.

“What can I do?”

“Hang tight. Keep your sat phone with you. Keep your eyes peeled for anything that might show where he’s gone. Dammit, I wish I’d gotten another hound dog after we lost Rambo and Rosey. Whitey’s Paco is coming out to the ranch with his coonhounds. They might be able to track him. He says they’re good trackers. And Sandia Search and Rescue are bringing out their dogs, but it’ll be a couple hours before they can get here.” In this heat, a couple of hours was a damn long time.

“You want me to send any of the hands out?”

Tucker said wearily, “We’ve got all of Whitey’s men out, plus the local volunteer fire department, but a few more pairs of eyes won’t hurt. Maybe send ’em out on horseback—they’ll cover more ground that way. Half the sheriff’s department are mounted. Here’s the coordinates we’re based at.” He rattled off a series of GPS coordinates for their sat phones to track. “But I want you to stay there to coordinate with Paco.”

“Sarafina….” But Tucker had hung up.

Tempted to hurl the phone across the stable yard, Eli put it back in the belt holder instead and bent to pick up the discarded fork.

Billy stuck his head out the stable door. “That Tuck?”

“Yeah. They still haven’t found Josh. Tuck wants anyone who can to saddle up and join them—wouldn’t hurt to spread out and search while you’re on the way. I have the coordinates.”

“Lay ’em on me.” Billy took out his own phone and plugged in the numbers. “I’ll get the rest of the guys together. You coming?”

“No.” Eli shoved the fork into the hay bale with more force than necessary. “I’m stuck here. Paco’s coming out with his coonhounds to try and track Joshua from here. Not that Sarafina couldn’t deal with them.” He tried not to sound bitter.

“What the hell happened that he took off like that?” Billy asked. “Did you guys get into a fight?”

“No.
Nothing
happened. Josh just freaked out for some reason. Don’t matter. Go. Get the guys together and get the hell out of here. It’s getting later and the sun’s getting higher.”

Billy nodded and took off at a run. Eli watched him and tried not to hate the boy. Or Tuck.

H
E
FINISHED
putting out the hay for the horses in the corral, filled the water troughs in each of the paddocks with horses in them, then went into the small barn to check on the inhabitants. The shade of the barn was a relief after the growing heat outside, and he tried not to worry about fragile Joshua out in that, and no doubt dressed in the black clothes that seemed to make up most of his wardrobe. He hoped to God they found him soon, before heatstroke took its toll—there was at least a handful of heatstroke deaths every year in the area, mostly of people who didn’t know better. Like Joshua. He’d noticed as they rode out that each of the hands was carrying the bulky saddlebags that held bottled water, a standard accessory when going out on the range, and a necessary one when the heat got this bad. Hell, it was September. They should be cooling off by now, but the few cool days at the beginning of the month seemed to have been a false forecast.

The rescued horses were fine, their stalls clean enough to pass muster and their water barrels full. He put a scoop of high-calorie grain mix in each manger to augment the hay they’d gotten this morning. Two of the horses were already looking better after just a day. A third looked at him with dull eyes, and he made a mental note to call Rodney. The fourth wasn’t looking that much better, but its tail was in motion, switching away flies, and it raised its head in interest when Eli added the grain.

The fifth was Rory in the loose box. Eli made a soft clucking sound with his tongue to let the horse know he was there before opening the door and stepping in. He went through the same motions of checking the water and augmenting the feed, then took a can of the cat food the ASPCA had sent with the cat, and crouched to open the kennel door.

The cat retreated to the furthest corner and hissed a little, but his tail wasn’t puffed and his back wasn’t arched, so Eli figured he was just making a point. He popped the top of the can and dumped it in the food bowl, then checked to make sure the water bowl was full, which it was.

It was as he was backing his arm out of the kennel that he glanced through the wire to see something black stuffed behind it. Frowning, he closed the kennel door and reached around to snag the bundle.

It was Joshua’s backpack.

He stared at it in confusion, not sure if he was seeing right. But it was black, just like Josh’s backpack, and no one else on the ranch had a black one. The ones they all used for overnight trips or long hauls were plain old khaki canvas ones from the feed store and mercantile in town. This was a fancy North Face model, not a working backpack, and when Eli opened it, he found clothes stuffed in it. There was something stiff in the pocket, so Eli opened that, too, to find Josh’s wallet.

Why the hell would he leave his wallet?

He stared at it. Then a slow, horrible realization crept in. When it reached his brain, he leapt to his feet, startling the horse and cat, and ran to the back door of the barn. Flinging it open, he looked out across the small attached corral to where the desert stretched for miles towards the distant fuzz of forest and the blue smoke that was the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The corral was mostly used for the rescue horses, and all five of their current crop were in the stable, so it shouldn’t have mattered that the small back gate, the one they used when they were bringing in culls and ran out of room in the other paddock, was open.

To Eli, that was as good as a signed certificate. He bolted for the house.

Ten minutes later, armed with frozen blue freezer packs and water in insulated saddlebags, he finished tacking up Milagro, the fastest of the tamed mustangs in the herd. He had called and left a message for Tucker, telling him what he’d found, told Sarafina that when Paco got there with the dogs that they should start with the backpack in the stables and he’d lay odds that they’d head in the same direction he was, made sure he had a full first aid and emergency kit, then got Milagro out of the corral and into the crossties to saddle.

He rode around the small barn to the gate, then turned the horse to gaze across the desert toward the mountains. He hadn’t the foggiest idea if Josh had gone straight that way, but people had a tendency to aim for something, even if their ultimate goal was to get lost completely. Psychology always won out, and the habits of a lifetime even more—he’d bet Josh was a goal-oriented kinda guy, if he was a field agent for the FBI by the time he was twenty-five. He
prayed
that was how Josh was, because right now, it was the only chance he had.

Eli shoved his hat further down on his head, crouched a little in the saddle, and let Milagro go. The horse took off at a dead run and Eli let him, let him stretch his legs and find his own rhythm. He’d only been gentled a little over a year, and still had that streak of wildness in him that let him run far, and fast, and gave him the smarts to know when he needed to slow to a steady canter. It was why Eli had chosen him—the horse would think, so Eli didn’t have to.

All he wanted to do was look, his eyes scanning across the swath of desert in search of a silhouette in black. He prayed that when he found it, it would be upright, but feared that that was a forlorn hope. So he just looked. As soon as Milagro shifted into a canter, he unhooked the binoculars from their case on his saddle and raised them one-handed to his eyes. He didn’t know what route Joshua would have taken, but the one he was on was the easiest, with the fewest gullies and washes, the least amount of rocks and prickly sagebrush, the most level. The path of least resistance. He thought, as much as he could understand Joshua’s thinking, that Joshua would want to get as far away from the ranch as quickly as he could before deviating off to wherever it was he wanted to go and….

He stopped thinking and just
hoped
.

They’d gotten a good eight miles out when Eli spotted the jacket. It was a ways off the trail, such as it was, and looked like it had been thrown, rather than dropped. The sight of it was such a relief Eli nearly cried.

But it was nearly half an hour and another eight miles later that he found Joshua.

H
E
’
D
veered somewhat from the level ground Eli had been covering, and if it hadn’t been for the binoculars Eli might have passed him by. But the lenses had caught the bit of black against the sage-brown earth of the wash, a bit of darkness in a monochrome world, and Eli drew Milagro up sharp and pivoted to let the surefooted mustang pick his way into the shallow gully. As soon as the rocks cleared and Eli got to the crumpled form of Tuck’s nephew, he slid from the saddle, dropped the reins, and shoved a rock on them to hold Milagro in place. Then he crouched beside Joshua, reaching for the pulse point in his neck.

His skin was hot and dry, and the pulse thudded rapidly under his searching fingers.
Shit
. Heatstroke. Probably dehydration. Eli stood and unbuckled the saddlebags with the water and cold packs and started to get to work, tucking the cold packs into Joshua’s armpits and groin and behind his neck, and soaking a towel with a bottleful of water to lay on Joshua’s chest. His face was red with both sunburn and the heatstroke; Eli wetted a handkerchief to carefully blot his face. Then he pulled out the sat phone and called first Whitey, the town’s police chief, to get the NMSP copter out here, then Tucker again.

“Where the hell are you, Elian?” Tucker demanded when he answered. “If you’ve gone off on a wild goose chase….”

“Shut the fuck up, Tucker!” Eli yelled back. “I’ve found your fucking nephew and he’s out here with heatstroke and if I hadn’t gone off on the fucking wild goose chase, he’d be fucking dead right now. No guarantees he won’t still die if the fucking helicopter doesn’t get here like
now
.”