The Love of a Lawman, The Callister Trilogy, Book 3 (37 page)

"So you see, neither one of us could stay home. I had terrible grades in school and no one believed I would ever graduate. I started nagging at Billy about leaving Callister. Everyone thinks it was Billy who lured me away, but that isn't true. He left here because I wanted to. He wasn't hard to persuade. His life at home wasn't great either."

"You were kids. I don't know how you survived."

"Billy wasn't. He was twenty. We went to Nevada and looked for ranch work. We had it figured out that we'd get jobs on some spread about as remote as it could possibly be. You can get completely lost on some of those desert ranches. It could have been dangerous for him because I was underage. After I turned eighteen, we left Nevada and went to Arizona, then Southern California, then back to Arizona. Finally ended up in Texas."

"Training horses?"

"Yes. I loved it and Billy followed along. In those days he always followed along. We didn't have this great romance, but we sort of occupied the same cage and we depended on each other.

"I was so grateful to him I tolerated worse treatment from him than I should have and stayed with him too long. Maybe things could have been okay if he had been able to resist all that we found ourselves exposed to. Once we got to Texas, a world I never dreamed I would be a part of became our livelihood. More money than you can imagine, plus booze and drugs. Billy jumped into that huge mud hole with both feet. It's funny how life comes full circle. By the time Billy left me, he behaved a lot like Pa."

"He wasn't mean to Ava—"

"No. He didn't have that much interest in Ava."

She paused again and John heard her sniffle. "So that's my sad tale. If Billy hadn't become such a problem, I wouldn't have lost touch with Paul. I didn't even come back here when he and Sherry got married because Pa was still alive then. I hated the idea of seeing him."

"I remember when Paul and Sherry got married," John said. "I was in college, but I was home for the summer."

"Paul seemed to be getting his act together as long as he had Sherry and his kids. When she left him, he became a real mess. He's always been a maverick, but never mean. I can't desert him. He deserves to be saved. He deserves to be loved by someone in his family."

He drew her against his body, wrapped her with his arms and legs, and buried his face against her neck, as if he could shield her from hurt with his body. "It's a good thing your old man's already dead. I'd have to kill the sonofabitch."

Chapter 24

John's week began with him in high spirits. Today as he made coffee on top of the filing cabinet in the corner, he was happier than he had been in months, maybe years, maybe ever. Saturday night he and Izzy had spoken their feelings aloud for the first time. In a matter of a weekend his life had made a sea change.

He finally understood Isabelle's devotion to her brother and now knew that if a man wanted her, Paul came with her. He could learn to live with that. He believed her when she said Paul wasn't hopeless.

Typically, Mondays were spent preparing cases to be heard by Judge Morrison when he came up from Boise on Wednesday. John had an organized, disciplined mind, which had taken him to good grades in high school and college, even while being distracted by rodeoing. The same discipline and organization skills had earned Judge Morrison's respect and John did all he could to maintain that status. This week there was one domestic-abuse and one burglary case to be cleared. While he waited for the coffee, he opened the file folders and glanced through them, sorting and planning.

Disciplined or not, he couldn't keep his thoughts from drifting back to the weekend. After making love and talking for hours Saturday night, he and Isabelle had awakened together and stayed in bed 'til noon, dozing and making love more until the threat of Ava coming home from Nan Gilbert's house forced them to get up and dress.

When Ava returned, the three of them had gone to Boise, where they watched
Finding Nemo,
a movie that, along with Ava's long explanation, gave him a new perspective on fish.

While he worked on the case files, a serious plan for his future cooked in his head. Election of a real sheriff would take place in the fall. He had only a few months to find a career at which he would make enough money to pay his child support and provide for a family of three. He needed the increase in income because he couldn't imagine his future without Izzy and Ava in it. He intended to ask her to marry him. He wanted to be able to assure her that he could take care of her and Ava.

Promising opportunities were available to him. One position in particular interested him—sales for a lariat manufacturing company, with the possibility of early promotion to management. An old friend from his rodeo days had told him the company execs were chomping at the bit at the chance to hire an ex-rodeoer who had placed in the money. If he took the job, some travel would be required, but there was a good chance he could continue to live in Callister. That would work out just fine. Izzy could continue with her horses.

As he planned, a possessiveness about the sheriff's job niggled at him and he worried about who would replace him. Even with his fumbling inexperience in law enforcement, he had done some things for the office he deemed worthwhile. He had implemented a dependable 9-1-1 service—key word, "dependable."

On a few occasions, he had been able to truly help some folks and they had shown emotional displays of gratitude. A few times someone had thanked him by baking him something and one elderly woman had knitted him a wool scarf. He wasn't supposed to take gifts and he knew that, but how could a man who lived on cafe food refuse one of Georgia Plunkett's chocolate cakes or a plate of Merry Jordan's chocolate oatmeal cookies? No one with any sense could view simple gifts of that type as bribes.

Beyond helping people, he liked being the voice of sanity in an often-insane world. He believed he had built goodwill and earned the confidence of the local people. If he ran for the office, he might win.

Forget it,
he told himself. Callister County was poorer than a Third World country and almost as backward. No way would the county ever pay the sheriff a salary that could be called a decent living. The low pay was the major reason few wanted the office and the ones who did took bribes. Jim Higgins was a good example of that very problem.

He had tried unsuccessfully to convince the commissioners if they wanted a sheriff who had some smarts and who didn't take money under the table like Higgins had done, they had to pay a living wage. But, with the exception of Luke McRae, the commissioners were mossbacks determined to fend off the outside world and its customs. With no crime of great consequence in Callister, they reasoned, why did they need a professional lawman to be the sheriff?

He kept his old friend's phone number and the scant information he had about the lariat sales job in a file in his desk drawer. Finding out the salary and more details about the job was, at the moment, more enticing than studying the case of a wife beater or a petty thief, so he set aside the court case files and began to punch in his friend's phone number.

He heard the distinctive sound of the metal door from the outside open and someone came into the anteroom whistling a tune. Rooster coming to work.

As he listened through the receiver to the burr on the opposite end of the phone line, the deputy appeared in the doorway and leaned a shoulder against the jamb as he usually did when he had something to say. His face looked more dolorous than usual. "Mornin', John T."

Getting no answer to his phone call, John hung up and slipped the folder labeled job file into his middle desk drawer. "Mornin', Rooster." He walked over to the farthest filing cabinet and filled his mug with coffee. "What's up?"

"Thought I'd better tell you Mae Hamlin came in yesterday. She's worried about Frank."

Frank Hamlin, the local Fish & Game officer. John hadn't seen much of him of late, but had known him for years. Frank had moved to Callister before John left home for college. "What's he done?" John sipped, the coffee warming him from the inside out.

"She ain't seen nor heard of him since Thursday. Says it ain't like him to go off for four days and not say when he's gonna be back or even call her."

John returned to the desk chair and tilted backward, a dangerous move given his size and the age of the chair. "Did she call up Fish and Game in Boise? They must know where he is."

"She talked to somebody down there, but they told her not to worry. They said with steelhead season going on, he could be laying out looking for illegal fishermen."

"Well, there you go. Where'd she say he's supposed to be?"

"She don't know. But she's afraid he's lost or hurt."

John had been in the law enforcement community long enough to know that cops didn't rush headlong into a search for reported missing persons because a majority of them turned out not to be missing at all. Still, something tickled the hairs on the back of his neck. Frank Hamlin was a dedicated conservation officer who, in his effort to protect Idaho's wildlife and enforce the state's game laws, sometimes traveled bad roads in country only mountain goats could love. John couldn't imagine any corner of Idaho where an outdoorsman like Hamlin would get lost, but it was conceivable he could roll his truck off a grade and be injured or stranded.

"Knowing Frank, if he's prowling the river checking fishing tags, he likely lost track of time." John didn't believe it, but thinking it made him feel more comfortable.

"Humph. Mae ain't the best-looking woman I ever met," Rooster muttered, "and she's a bit of a pinch-mouth, but I can't believe Frank'd forget where home is."

John recognized the deputy's call for him to take action. "Tell you what," he said, standing up. He unhooked his jacket from the coatrack and shrugged into it, then picked up his hat. "I'll drive over to the boat landing and see if I can find him."

* * *

Swollen by the spring thaw, the Payette River zoomed like a bullet through the northern part of Callister County on its way to Hells Canyon. There it dumped its glacial contents into the Snake River. The ice-cold white water attracted sport fishermen from every state, even foreign countries. To accommodate anglers, the state and county had built boat landings along the banks at random intervals, the nearest being forty miles from town. John drove there first and met several men launching a sledboat. He learned nothing from them, so he proceeded to other boat landings, stopping and talking to cold but hopeful trout fishermen when he saw them.

Having no luck with boaters and fishermen, he left the rugged riverbanks and followed the narrow and steep back roads that paralleled the river. Along the way he dropped into the scattered stores that sold groceries and fishing gear and asked questions of owners and employees. Stopping for food in a mom-and-pop cafe, he asked more questions. Everybody knew Frank Hamlin, but nobody had seen him.

On the way back to town, as he mulled over his day, an urgency began to stew within him. He must have talked to dozens of people in twenty different locations. It made no sense that in the middle of the intensely monitored steelhead trout season, nobody along the Payette River had seen the game warden.

The Fish & Game Department offices in Boise were already closed when he reached the courthouse, but he made a mental note to call them first thing the next morning.

He called Izzy before going out to tour the streets of Callister. With Ava doing homework at the kitchen table, they kept their conversation respectable, at least on Izzy's end. She talked about Ava's day in school and the state of the horses. From his end, he teased her with naughty remarks, told her he couldn't wait to see her naked tomorrow morning and to crawl under what had become his favorite blue quilt.

He hung up on a chuckle and left the office for the Exxon service station. Sooner or later, every citizen of Callister went to the Exxon station, if for no other reason than to rent movies. The owner, Holt Johnson, reported he hadn't seen the Fish & Game pickup or its driver since Frank had filled his gas tank a week earlier.

Before going out to Izzy's the next morning, John called Fish & Game in Boise and asked after Frank. He netted no more information than he had learned along the river the day before. No one in the state office knew Frank's exact whereabouts, but none of his fellow COs appeared to be worried about him. John said thanks and hung up without discussion. No sense in unduly alarming a higher-up in Boise. Frank might come in today.