The Cowboy (16 page)

Callie’s sweaty cheek was burrowed against Trace’s equally sweaty neck. She was panting, trying to suck enough air to keep her alive. The race had been run, the battle fought. The cliff had definitely been leaped.

And she had come crashing back to earth.

“Oh, God,” she whispered. “What have I done?”

Callie shoved herself off Trace, felt their bodies separate, felt the chill air against her damp flesh. There was enough predawn light to see the wary look in his eyes. To see the downturn of his mouth as she scrambled to find her panties, which seemed to have gotten lost in the shadowed depths of the vast front seat. She finally pulled on her jeans without them and stuffed her feet back in her boots.

She found her bra on the burled dashboard. As she snapped herself into it, she couldn’t help noticing how calmly Trace shifted his briefs and jeans back up over his hips, how he buttoned them up with one slow, easy hand,
while his eyes remained steady on her. The rattle of his belt being buckled unnerved her, and she met his gaze. And wished she hadn’t.

She wanted out of this confined space with a predator she was certain had not had his fill of her.

Trace reached for her, and she jerked away. “No! Don’t touch me.” She grabbed her wrinkled Western shirt from the spotted cowhide carpeting under her feet and shoved her arms into the sleeves, then pushed open the door. Before she could step down, a cell phone rang.

Callie froze. Where was her phone? What had she done with it? It had been in her Levi’s jacket. Where was her jacket? She bent down to search under the seat, then looked in the seat behind her, where she discovered her plain cotton panties hanging from a crystal decanter. She grabbed them and stuffed them into her front jeans pocket.

“It’s mine,” Trace said.

“What?”

“It’s not your phone, it’s mine.”

Callie watched as Trace retrieved his cell phone from the pocket of his jacket and answered it. She listened to the side of the conversation she could hear.

“No, we haven’t found them, Russ. Organize the men in pairs. Have them meet me—” He turned to her and said, “Where do you want everyone to meet?”

Callie realized it would be awkward—maybe even dangerous—to have a dozen Bitter Creek cowboys show up at the door to Three Oaks. “How about right here?”

Trace gave directions to the camp house to the Bitter Creek
segundo
. the middle-aged cowboy who’d been his father’s right-hand man as long as he could remember,
then disconnected the call. “Let’s go make some coffee,” he said. “We’re going to need it.”

Callie bristled at the idea of taking orders from Trace, but realized he was only asking her to do what she knew she ought to be doing anyway. Fortunately, the camp house was set up to provide meals for working cowboys. She paused before entering the house and stared at the sunrise. The sky was bigger in Texas, every Texas sunrise more extravagant than the last. Pinks and oranges and yellows lit the immense sky.

“I love the dawn, the hope of a new day. It’s always so beautiful,” Callie said wistfully.

“Yeah,” Trace agreed as he came up behind her. “It was never quite like this in—” He cut himself off.

She angled her head and eyed him over her shoulder. “Where?” She turned and confronted him. “Where have you been all these years, Trace?”

“Here and there,” he said with a teasing wink. “We’d better get that coffee started.” He took her hand and walked with her into the camp house.

What was the big mystery? Callie wondered. Why was Trace being so secretive about his past? What had he been doing that was so great—or so awful—that he didn’t want her to know about it?

Callie had no time to ponder the question. Or to consider what the results of her lapse with Trace might be. They had left things unfinished in Houston. This morning she’d acted without caution, recklessly seeking the escape she’d found in his embrace.

But whatever solace she’d found had long since disappeared. Callie was edgy and anxious, frightened and fretful. She called home and told a worried Sam—he’d
sobered up overnight and insisted on speaking to her—that some neighbors had volunteered to help her continue the search.

“No. Don’t call Bay yet,” she told him. “There’s no need to worry her at school until we know … until we have more information about … Just don’t call her,” she finished in frustration.

She asked to speak to Luke and ended up having to both beg and threaten to convince him he could help most by taking care of Eli and Hannah. “I’ll explain to the school later why you and Eli took off today.” Though she didn’t say it, it was understood that Luke was also to keep an eye on Sam.

Callie barely had time to get a fire started in the stove and get coffee made before the first of the cowhands arrived.

Russell Handy, the Bitter Creek
segundo
, was the perfect mix of deferential cowboy and authoritative leader. That is to say, he deferred to Trace and made sure every cowboy in the bunch that showed up obeyed him without question. He looked like most working cowboys Callie had known, lean and wiry, with skin tanned to leather by the sun.

He could have been any age from thirty to fifty, but Callie figured he was somewhere in between. He had a thick mustache trimmed to the edge of his lips, a straight, thin nose, and eyes so dark brown they looked black in the shadow of the straw Stetson he’d pulled low on his forehead.

“Sorry to hear about your parents bein’ lost, Mizz Monroe,” Handy said, touching a finger to his hat brim.
“Don’t you worry none. If they’re out there, we’ll find ’em.”

“Thank you, Mr. Handy,” Callie replied.

Callie had feared she’d get stuck making coffee all day at the camp house, but the
segundo
had brought along a cook with rations of frijoles and tortillas to feed the men if their search should go beyond noon. Callie was grateful for his foresight and terrified at the thought her parents could remain unfound for so long.

“You might want to give the sheriff’s office another call,” Trace said.

“They said I had to wait a full twenty-four hours,” Callie said, her voice catching. “I’ll bet if your parents were missing, every lawman in the county would be out looking for them right now.”

“You’d never catch my parents on a picnic together,” Trace said with a wry smile.

Callie looked up when she heard the distinctive
WHUP-WHUP-WHUP
of a helicopter, shading her eyes to locate it against the sun. “Yours?” she asked Trace.

“I decided it might save us some time if we can locate your father’s truck from the air.”

Callie felt her throat swell with gratitude. Three Oaks also used a chopper for rounding up cattle, but they hadn’t been able to keep up the payments on the one they’d briefly owned, so now they rented one when they needed it. “What is Blackjack going to say when he finds out you appropriated a Bitter Creek helicopter to search for my parents?”

“He’ll be glad the search was shortened,” Trace said with a grin. “Especially since work at Bitter Creek is going to be at a standstill until we find your parents.”

“Oh,” Callie said. “Oh, God.”

“What is it?”

“I think I know where they might have gone.”

“Somewhere in the south pasture?”

“No. There’s a stock pond in the middle pasture. Daddy forbade us to go there, because there’s a sinkhole nearby. It’s fenced, but he was always afraid one of us—But he would have been sure of being alone there. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it yesterday. I checked every pond, every shady spot I could think of in the south pasture. I just never thought—”

“Give me directions, and I’ll have the helicopter take a look,” Trace said.

Callie wanted to jump in Trace’s hunting car and drive there, but Trace insisted she wait until the helicopter could fly over the area.

Minutes later Trace got a radio response. “My pilot found the truck. It looks abandoned. He didn’t see any sign of your parents.”

Callie’s heart was in her throat. “They must be there. We have to go there.”

The drive to the middle pasture seemed interminable. By cell phone, Trace had directed Russell Handy to have his men head there to continue the search. As they drove up to the pond, her stomach tightened at the sight of buzzards circling overhead.

Handy was waiting for them. “We found them,” he said.

“Where are they? How are they?” Callie asked as she tumbled out of the luxurious convertible.

Handy didn’t answer her, merely looked at Trace and shook his head. She felt Trace slide a supporting arm
around her waist. She wanted to shrug it off, but her knees threatened to buckle, and she was afraid that without his support she would fall. Her chest felt as though she’d been kicked by a mule, and she couldn’t seem to catch her breath.

“Where are they?” Callie managed to say. “I want to see them.”

“Your mom’s alive,” Handy said.

Which meant her father was not. Callie felt her insides go flying and mentally coiled a rope around herself to pull things in tight. She couldn’t fall apart. Everyone was depending on her. She’d been needed by her family all her life, but never so much as now.

“They’ve been shot,” Handy said.

For half an instant Callie thought her father might have shot her mother in a jealous rage.

“Looks like the bullet hit your father in the back, went through him, and struck your mother.”

That couldn’t have been a self-inflicted wound, Callie realized. So someone else had shot them. But who? And why?

“We haven’t moved her yet,” she heard Handy say. “I think the bullet might have broken her shoulder. She doesn’t seem to be hurt anywhere else. She won’t let go of your dad, and we didn’t want to force her. Maybe you can talk to her.”

That meant her mother was conscious. That meant her mother was talking. That was good news.

Callie wished she hadn’t gotten her hopes up, because they fell like hail, hard and painful, when she caught sight of her parents lying half on, half off the gray wool blanket she’d packed for them to use as a ground cover the previous
day. The woven straw picnic basket lay open, the contents scattered. Two paper plates that bore the remnants of fried chicken and potato salad were covered with black ants.

Nature was consuming the dead. She glanced up at the circling buzzards. And waiting for the dying.

Callie forced her gaze back to the grizzly tableau. Her father had fallen on top of her mother and lay almost on his side, half covering her. There was a small brown stain on the back of his plaid Western shirt, but otherwise she could see nothing wrong with him. The entire bodice of her mother’s beautiful yellow sundress was stained an ugly brown with dried blood.

Her mother had one arm wrapped around her father’s neck. The other arm lay still at her side. Her shoulder had a ragged wound filled with a black pool of seeping blood, where the bullet had torn the thin strap in half. The copper smell of blood was cloying, and the incessant buzzing of the circling flies made Callie feel nauseated.

The wail escaped without warning. Callie put her hands over her mouth to stifle the sound, but there was no shutting off her grief. It spilled from her eyes in huge tears that blinded her. She reached for Trace with a groping hand as her body sagged, but a moment later she pulled free and was on her knees beside her parents.

She swiped at her eyes with her fingertips, wanting to see. And was devastated by what she found. Another wail of anguish escaped as she focused on her father’s still, gray face. She brushed futilely at the flies, which buzzed angrily, then returned. Her skin crawled, as though the irksome insects were walking on her own sensitive flesh.

“Callie … your father is dead,” her mother said in a whispery voice.

“I know, Momma,” Callie croaked. “We have to get you to the hospital. You have to let him go now.”

There was no new blood, only dried, crusted brown covering her mother’s hand, where it clutched her father’s collar. Callie felt another tear slide down her cheek and licked it away when it reached her mouth. She untangled her mother’s stiff fingers from the soft fabric, then looked up at Trace.

“I’m afraid to move her. I don’t want to hurt her.”

“The sooner we get her to a hospital, the better,” Trace said.

Her mother’s glazed eyes were barely open, but her lips were moving. Callie put her ear next to her mother’s mouth to catch the faint sound and couldn’t help inhaling the sickly sweet smell of blood. Though her nose wrinkled against the stench, she forced herself to remain still and listen.

“Your father said … he loves you all.”

Callie choked back the sob in her throat, afraid she would miss something her mother said. It was appalling to realize her father hadn’t died right away, that if she had let him take his cell phone along, her parents might have called for help. He might be alive right now. This was all her fault!

“Not your fault,” her mother rasped, as though she had read Callie’s mind. “Died too fast … for help …”

“Don’t talk,” Callie whispered past the knot in her throat. “Save your strength.”

She felt her mother’s fingertips tighten against her own.

“May not … make it. Take care of … everybody. Up to you …”

Her mother’s eyes rolled up in her head, and Callie felt a surge of panic. “Don’t die, Momma! Please, don’t die!” She frantically searched for a pulse at her mother’s throat. “I can’t find her pulse!”

Trace knelt beside her and put his fingertips to her mother’s throat. “It’s thready, but it’s there.”

“What are we waiting for?” Callie demanded. “We have to get her to the hospital!”

“As thick as the mesquite is, there’s no place around here where we can set down the helicopter,” Trace said. “We can rig a soft pallet for her in the bed of one of the trucks.”

“What if we hurt her worse by moving her?” Callie asked.

“We don’t have much choice,” Trace said reasonably. He took Callie by her shoulders and pulled her to her feet. “Or much time.”

Callie looked at the Bitter Creek
segundo
and the other cowboy standing nearby, waiting for orders from Trace. “All right,” she said. “But be careful. Don’t hurt her!”