Love, Like Water (3 page)

And he was
skinny
. Not just lanky, not just lean, but skinny, sick skinny. Guy his size should weigh maybe 180, but Eli judged him to be down around 130. His wrists were gaunt where they stuck out from the sleeves of the denim jacket, like sticks, the hint of ribs visible through the T-shirt under the open jacket. As he walked toward the truck, he shambled like an old man, but his upper body was held tight and stiff, like he was braced for a blow. He walked like the human version of the abused animals the Triple C got sometimes, like a horse beaten too long for no reason at all.

And then Eli met the guy’s dead eyes, and thought, shaken,
If I saw a horse with those eyes, I’d shoot it myself.

“Triple C?” the guy said.

Eli swung his legs down off the tailgate and offered a gloved hand. “Elian Kelly,” he said. “Call me Eli.”

The guy’s handshake was firm, but with no real strength behind it. “Joshua Chastain. My uncle said you’re the ranch foreman?”

“Yep.” Eli took the duffel and tossed it into the truck bed, closed the tailgate, then gestured at the passenger side door. “Hop in. We’re about forty minutes from town—should be home for supper. Sorry about the long ride from the airport. Tuck really wanted to pick you up there himself, but the meeting in Colorado’s about some government contracts, and he needed to be there. He handles all the business stuff. I just handle the ranch.”

“It’s all right,” the man said. He buckled himself in with hands that shook. Cursing under his breath, he wrapped his arms around the backpack in his lap and focused on the road ahead.

Eli turned the truck on and looked over at him. “You okay?” he asked quietly. “Tuck said you were in the hospital—not recovered yet?”

“No.” The guy stared forward expressionlessly.

“Well, the Triple C’s a good place to recuperate,” Eli said cheerfully. “Fresh air, plenty of exercise, and we’ve got a helluva good cook. Tuck’s always complaining that he’s putting on weight. I just tell him to get out and work more with the stock. We could always use the help. You ride?”

“Used to.”

“It’s like riding a bicycle. God knows with all the horses we’ve got, we can find a good match for you.”

Joshua nodded. Eli waited for him to comment, then realized he wasn’t going to. Shit. This was going to be a long drive.

“I don’t know how much you remember of the Triple C,” he said, in an effort to get a conversation going. “Tuck said you were a kid the last time you were here.”

“Yes.”

“Right. Well. What do you know about it?”

“Nothing. It’s a horse ranch. I didn’t think people still did that.”

“Well, we do. Not saying it’s easy keeping your head above water, especially in this economy, but your uncle Tuck has a really good reputation in the community for his training techniques. Especially with problem horses. He trains people as much as he trains horses—we’ve usually got a handful of students on site at any time. We’re in between right now—there are a couple coming in a couple of weeks.”

Silence.

Eli went on doggedly, “We get horses from private owners to train. We also take rescues from the ASPCA and rehabilitate them. And we participate in the mustang culls the government runs to manage the wild horse population.”

“You break them for the government?”

Eli winced. “We don’t ‘break’ horses. We tame them and train them and whatdayacallit, socialize them. Then they get sold to people and organizations who work with them. Don’t let Tuck hear you call it ‘breaking’ them—too many people do, and then it’s up to him to fix ’em.”

“Doesn’t sound like there’s much money in it. Sounds like a social service.”

“Well, not in that part, no. But Tuck also trains performance horses. Rodeo, mostly, barrel-racing, cutters, that sort of thing. Some movie stock. Sales of that pretty much finance the other stuff. And the private training. The ranch is really more like a training facility than a working horse ranch.”

J
OSHUA
sat and listened to the guy talk, finding a whisper of interest he wouldn’t have thought still existed in his blackened soul. The guy had a soft, easy voice, restful and slow, like he was smiling inside. It made Joshua feel like he was in a completely different universe, one where people actually cared about what happened. Rescued animals? Fixing broken horses? The guy made Uncle Tucker sound like the Saint Francis some of the mamás in the bodegas talked about. Nobody was like that. Joshua was willing to bet even the saint had spin doctors working full time for him. He wondered what it was he was going to find at the ranch, and how this soft-spoken, laconic man fit in as foreman.

He barely remembered Uncle Tucker—just as a big guy in a big hat who always smelled like horses. Joshua’s grandfather had still been in charge of the ranch then. Joshua must have been about eleven the last time he’d been here, so that would be about sixteen years ago, since his grandfather had died when he was still in junior high. There hadn’t been a lot of money to travel by that point; his mother had gone back to the ranch for the funeral alone, and when she’d come back, she didn’t talk about the ranch for a long time. It wasn’t hard to figure out that she and Uncle Tucker had had a fight of some kind. But apparently the war was now over, with his mother and Tucker reconnecting sometime during the three years Joshua had been on assignment. That was good. She needed some man she could depend on. God knew she couldn’t depend on
him
.

At a break in the monologue, as the driver made a tight turn down an unmarked road, Joshua asked, “Why did he send you?”

“Say what?”

“Why did he send you? You’re the foreman, and it’s a big ranch—why not send some other less important person to pick me up?” He wasn’t sure what made him ask. Maybe the easy voice made him feel interested himself. It just seemed peculiar to Joshua.

“Well, you’re Tuck’s nephew.”

“So?”

“So, you’re his nephew. Wouldn’t be right sending some joe to pick you up, like you were a stranger or something.”

“I am a stranger,” Joshua pointed out. “He hasn’t seen me in sixteen years.”

“Don’t matter. You’re family. Wouldn’t be polite. The men know this. Tuck sends one of them to pick you up, means you’re not important. Start you off on the wrong foot.”

Joshua considered this in silence as they drove. Status. Honor. He understood that. It was important on the street, too. Maybe more important than anything else. Except greed.

There were fences along this stretch, and once a fading sign, with a J tilted on its side. Kelly noticed his glance and said, “The Rocking J. Went into foreclosure a couple of years ago when the owner died. No kids, nobody worth leaving it to. Shook Tuck up, I think. He started talking to his sister—your mama—more, then. Guess he was already thinking about bringing you out here, but thought you were pretty much set with the FBI.” He pronounced it as three separate letters, F-B-I, instead of running it together the way Easterners did,
efbeye.
“Tuck’s negotiating with the bank to see if he can pick up some of the acreage, but thinks the price is too high. There’s water, though, and that matters. He’ll probably get it, if he wants it. Usually does. Can talk a squirrel outta its nuts.” They drove a few minutes, then Kelly said, “Shame about the ranch, though. Hate to see it go. Getting fewer and fewer of the old ranches left—too hard to make it out here. Suppose someone might buy up the rest of it, turn it into a dude ranch or something—that wouldn’t be too bad. We bought some of the stock for the Triple C. I think they auctioned the rest to put towards the balance of the mortgage.”

“There’s a mortgage?”

“The Triple C? No. Had one a few years back, but Tuck sold a bunch of stock to a movie ranch near Cupertino and was able to pay it off. Tuck don’t like being indebted.”

Neither do I,
Joshua thought,
but see where that’s got me.
He shrugged and turned back to the window, tightening his arms around the backpack. He was getting tired—it was a three-hour flight from Chicago, prefaced by two hours at the airport and followed by a four-hour bus ride, and now this. The sun was starting to lower—already the truck’s shadow on the passenger side was lengthening. Tired, but not sleepy; his nerves buzzed anxiously and he felt sick. Stressed about the traveling, stressed having to make conversation with a stranger, stressed with moving to a completely different part of the country and a different way of life. Tiredness and stress were bad; they fed the hunger and the weakness. He wanted the drug—he always wanted the drug, but when he was tired and stressed he wanted it more.

A part of his brain was taking in and processing what the driver was saying, the way it always did. It would store it and let him access it when he needed to. This strange quirk of his brain was part of what made him so good at undercover operations; he never needed to take notes that might be found, or make phone calls that might be overheard, or upload data that might be hacked. Everything he saw, everything he heard was his own uploaded data, even if he wasn’t paying attention to whatever it was that was going on, even if he was in a situation that required his attention while things went on in the background. He could carry on a conversation, deal with bosses and dealers and junkies and whores in his José persona, and Joshua’s brain would be noticing and noting everything. Even when he was strung out, high, or barely conscious, he kept collecting data.

The problem with that was that he never forgot anything.

“You know?”

Joshua tracked back, found the comment, “Can’t tell Tuck anything,” and responded, “Yeah.” That was sufficient. The driver went on talking. Joshua went on not listening.

But the guy’s voice was nice, low and easy and soft, a gentle voice, a kind voice. The kind of voice that might lure animals into trusting it. Too bad Joshua wasn’t an animal, and any trust had been burned out of him long ago. But the voice was nice.

“… here.”

Joshua opened his eyes just as they turned under a wooden arch similar to the one they’d passed with the tilted J, but this one was freshly painted and new-looking. The three C’s of the Triple C—for Joshua’s grandfather Charles and
his
parents, Claude and Catherine—were picked out in deep green paint on a tan background, the letters turned so that the open ends faced each other and made a sort of Celtic knot design. There was a wire gate beneath it, but it was open to let them drive under the arch and down the drive to the house, bumping over the wooden bridge that crossed one of the creeks that watered the ranch.

It was smaller than Joshua remembered but still big enough: a two-story adobe style with an arched front entrance leading into an open-air courtyard with a tiled patio and central fountain, and nestled in a grove of ancient cottonwoods, the green coolness a welcome relief from the endless high desert he’d been traveling through all day. It had been a showplace of sorts at one time, Joshua remembered from stories his mother had told, but he could see through the arch that the fountain was dry. The creek was running though, the water clear and sparkling, so it wasn’t from drought.

Where the drive branched to circle around the front of the house, Kelly kept the truck to the right and headed for the back. There, the house had a wide wooden porch overlooking a dusty yard, a paved side lot with a handful of cars and pickups parked, and the paddocks and corrals surrounding the stables and barns. There was quite a lot of activity going on, even this late in the evening. A pair of cowboys on Appaloosas were corralling a small herd of dusty horses while a third hung on the open gate, waving the horses in with his hat, and another couple of guys were unloading bales of hay from a flatbed and carrying them into a pole barn. At the stables, a young boy was leading a rangy bluish-gray horse in through the wide doorway; he stopped as the truck came to a halt a few yards away and tipped his hat at them.

“That’s Jesse,” the foreman said as he put the truck in park. “He’s the youngest of our trainees and a natural. His mother’s our cook, so he’s lived here most of his life. You have any questions and Tuck or I ain’t around, go to Jesse.” He got out of the truck and Joshua followed suit.

The foreman picked up Joshua’s duffel and slung it over his shoulder, waiting for Joshua to get out of the truck. He didn’t seem impatient, though a faint frown crossed his face when Joshua lost his balance a moment and had to lean on the truck. He said nothing, however, just waited until Joshua was stable again, then led the way into the house. “Tuck said he fixed up the downstairs guest suite for you for now, since you’re still on the mend. Later if you like, you and him can decide where you want to be—there’s a half a dozen rooms upstairs nobody’s usin’.”

The back entrance led into the kitchen, where a plump little woman was bustling between stove and center island, getting supper ready, Joshua supposed. She looked up when they came in and grinned widely. “Señor Joshua!”

“Sarafina?” He blinked. How did she get so
small
? In his memory, she was a giantess, wielding her wooden spoon like Little John did his quarterstaff.

“
Sí
! You think I’d go away? No, I’m here forever, I think. Come, sit down, eat. You are much, much too thin!” Now her round face creased in distress as she took in the full glory of Joshua’s heroin-junkie gauntness. “You have been sick!” she accused.

Well, that was one way of putting it. “Yeah,” he said.

“Tucker said that, but this….” She tsked sternly. “We’ll fix this.”

Joshua gave her a faint smile and sat down at the table in the chair she directed him to. He set the backpack on the floor beside him and looked up at the foreman, who was grinning in amusement. “I take it you two are old friends?” he said.

“I remember her,” Joshua said.

“Yeah, I get that. Well, you just sit there and get some chow down you. I’ll drop this in your room—it’s the second door on the right down the hall.”

“You tell those
vaqueros
that dinner will be ready in a half an hour,” Sarafina instructed Eli. “Give me a little while to get some food down Joshua and get him tucked in. He’s tired. He won’t want to be bothered his first night home.”