Turkey Ranch Road Rage (26 page)

I heard him, I really did, but I wasn’t okay. And as much as I love Jerry holding me, I had to get up. My whole body felt like a live wire, popping and hissing inside. I squeezed his arm then lifted it off me and hopped out of bed. I’d ping-ponged again up from the depths of oblivion and the surge of energy had to be dealt with somehow. Since I didn’t know what else to do, I scurried to the bathroom and got a drink. Unfortunately, there was a mirror in the bathroom, and more unfortunate yet, I looked into it. And began to cry.

I don’t know when Jerry came up behind me, or when I turned into him and just sobbed. I just know it happened, and I kept crying. For a long time. Somehow during the release, my brain kept working, and when I could finally breathe normally again, the first words out of my mouth were “Damon Saide.”

Jerry stepped away, grabbed a washcloth, ran warm water on it then handed it to me.

I took the warm cloth and rubbed it over my face. It did feel good, even on the raw places. “I have to find him.”

“Let’s get some sleep,” he said, wrapping an arm around my shoulders and guiding me back to bed.

I tossed the washcloth aside and went with him. I settled back into the bed, but my mind wouldn’t stop. “Do you know where he is?”

Jerry said nothing for long seconds then sighed. “He left the station about noon.”

“What about his car?”

“Most of the bullets hit the door. He drove it away.”

“He did this. You know he did.”

“We’ll find him, Jo.”

“This is just crazy, Jerry. Crazy.”

I could feel myself fading fast, yet a barrage of random thoughts flooded my mind. Most were fleeting and forgotten as fast as they appeared, but one just hung there, lingering, for no apparent reason. None of this was really about a park. Or the horny toads. “Jerry, what do you gain by turning a pasture with old oil wells on it into an RV park?”

He nudged me over, facing away from him then pulled me back against him, his breath breezing rhythmically against my neck. “About fifteen dollars a day per camper.”

“Hardly seems worth killing someone over, or even a felony kidnapping, now does it?”

“Could be more money than you’d think. But then people do stupid things for really stupid reasons.”

God knows it’s the reason behind a substantial number of activities in these parts, but this time, it just seemed too convenient. “How did Tiger die anyway?”

“He had enough drugs in his system to kill him.”

“So maybe it wasn’t murder.”

“He had cancer so there are several possibilities,” he mumbled, kissing me again. “Go to sleep, Jo.”

He hugged me a little tighter and his breathing became rhythmic, melting away my tension and fear and taking all my “what if” questions with them. In that moment I felt so safe and so loved—just like I wanted it to be for us, all the time. I snuggled against him and sighed. “This is so nice. I wish it could be like this forever.”

“Be careful what you wish for,” he mumbled.

I didn’t know for sure what he meant by that—or maybe I did and just didn’t want to spoil my lovely romantic fantasy by injecting reality into it. I knew exactly what “forever” meant with Jerry Don Parker, and it did not include moving away from his children to be with me in Colorado. That left me with the unpleasant possibility that Hell might indeed freeze over and I would stupidly find myself living in it. I shuddered at the thought, and a pained groan slipped from my lips.

His breath was steady and even, and I thought he’d fallen asleep until he said, “It won’t be like this all the time when you’re here, Jo. It won’t.”

I wondered who he was trying to convince, me or himself.

Chapter
Seventeen

Morning came entirely too soon. The bedside clock’s big red numbers said it was eight-fifty. Jerry must have just left—probably what woke me up. Oh, how really easy it would be to go back to sleep and continue my coma for about five more hours. I could do it too, in a second and a half. Except something wouldn’t let me. My subconscious had been working all night—about four hours or so—and was fairly screaming at me that I needed to do something. I pushed myself up to a sitting position to make the transition to the real world a little less painful, and I noticed several loose sheets from a note pad on the little table beside the bed. I grabbed them and begged my eyes to focus long enough to read them.

They were from Jerry, but they didn’t make a great deal of sense. “Went to get clothes. Be back soon.” Meaning, one must assume, that Jerry was gone and would be back at some point.

That he’d gone to get clothes made sense since he hadn’t brought a bag to this impromptu sleepover. But neither had I and I sure needed something better to wear than yesterday’s kidnapping costume. That thought stirred up highly unpleasant memories, which I promptly stuffed away and thought about a more agreeable subject—food. And I was indeed hungry. My stomach grumbled loudly in support. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten. Now there was a second good reason to drag myself out of bed and into the shower—a trip to the hotel restaurant.

Funny thing about me and showers, I get many of my great insights standing naked under running water. No, you don’t need a visual; it’s just the way it is. And, true to form, the message came to me as I gazed—with eyes closed, of course—upward toward the heavens. Jerry had made some pretty heady implications last night and the possibilities for interpretation were both scary and really scary. Oddly, I couldn’t decide what it was that I hoped he had meant. “For godsakes, Jolene,” I said out loud and to no one but myself. “You’re not seventeen. Stop it.”

I might not be a teenager, but sometimes it sure felt like it. Still, the reality of the situation was that Jerry hadn’t really said anything of substance, nothing had changed, and I needed to get my mind off of what might be and deal with what was. The short list I’d come up with included murder, mayhem and why my mother owned mineral rights on Bob Little’s property, if indeed she actually did.

It made no obvious sense, of course. But that meant nothing. Lucille was involved and therefore logic was not. And in order to cut down on the lies she could tell, I needed to gather as many facts as I could before I tried to corner her for answers. Mineral rights were generally recorded in property ownership records, and there should at least be a date on when she got the mineral rights and how much of a share she actually had. That meant I needed county records from the county courthouse.

I knew from unrelated experience that there were plenty of counties that had put their property ownership records online. I didn’t know about Texas, but, my typical disparaging comments aside, I doubted that the Lone Star state was any farther behind than its neighbors. That meant they’d probably started the process, but it was a county-by-county crapshoot.

If Bowman County ownership data was available online, knowing the section, township and range for Kickapoo might help me narrow the search. Then again, it occurred to me that Texas was, by its own admission a whole other country, and as such, was fairly guaranteed to have foreign ways. Indeed, now that I thought about it, I recalled some obscure something about Spanish land grants and hybrid mapping that was sure to turn a simple search into a typical Kickapoo SNAFU (look it up). Whatever the case, I was starting with what I knew and hoped that something would be relevant or at least lead me in that direction.

Longitude and latitude was a piece of cake, thanks to satellite imaging. Ha! That would be kind of cool. I could look up my mother’s house from space. And while I was at it, I could scope out the Little Ranch and see what made it so appealing for an RV park. Why hadn’t I thought of it before?

As I rinsed the hotel conditioner from my hair, my thoughts hopped to what Jerry had said about Tiger dying of an overdose. That didn’t automatically mean murder, but it didn’t automatically exclude it either. He could have accidentally killed himself, and suicide was an obvious option. But why come to Texas to die and not go out with some sort of theatrics? He’d blown up the feed store, sort of, and the exploding paint cans at the rally had been a pretty decent show, so why would a dedicated protester die alone without making some kind of major point out of it?

He wouldn’t. That meant it was either murder or it was unintentional. Or, he could have made a suicidal point, framing someone for his death and we just didn’t know about it yet.

I really wanted more information to narrow my field of choices. I doubted Perez would even take my call at this point or tell me anything even if he did. The only other source I could think of that would know more details was the medical examiner Yes, obvious, but I felt a little squeamish about it. I didn’t know of any law that said citizens couldn’t call and ask a few questions, but it sure seemed that Jerry would not be pleased to hear about my inquiring mind. Still, a dead man had been found in a motel room that was supposedly rented to my daughter. I had rights. No, actually I didn’t, and that approach was not going to get me anywhere with either Jerry or the medical examiner.

Let’s be clear. I am not good at deceit. The straightforward approach is the only one that works for me, only it wasn’t going to work this time. This time, I needed a good cover story, which is just a fancy way of saying a big fat lie. You’d think a good reporter would be good at such things, but as I may have mentioned a time or two, I am not a good reporter, investigative or otherwise. I write stories; I do not infiltrate and probe.

I snapped the big white towel from the rack on the wall, wrapped it around me and headed for the desk. The phone book was in the drawer, and after a little searching, I found the number I was looking for. After a couple of mental and oral dress rehearsals, I dialed.

After only one transfer, I hit pay dirt with a young man named Travis. “Hey, Travis, this is Barbie down at the Times and Record News,” I said, doing a pretty decent Kimberlee-esque airhead impression despite my unfortunate choice of a fake name. “Kimberlee asked me to call and get the final cause of death on that man who was found in the motel room yesterday. I’d really appreciate it if you could look that up real quick for me.”

“You’re the third person who’s called about that this morning.”

Third? Oh, crap. “Kimberlee called already? Because if she did I’m really going to be in trouble. I’m new and—”

“No one from the paper called.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” I said, although it really wasn’t since now I wanted to know who else was calling about this. “A lot of people are interested in this I guess.”

“I’ll tell you exactly what I told the others. We still don’t have all the labs back, and I can’t give you anything official until it’s official.”

I hadn’t counted on that. Actually, I guess I hadn’t counted on anything. I’d just gotten a wild idea and acted on it. That was one of my finest character traits, seeing what needed done and just doing it. It was also a fairly significant flaw in that I didn’t necessarily apply long range thinking to the process and wound up in situations just like this one where I had to then improvise. “How long do you figure he would have lived, with the cancer and all, if he hadn’t overdosed?”

“I never said he overdosed. Or that he didn’t. He could have died two months ago or lived another two, depending on what he needed to do. We leave when we’re ready.”

Huh? A philosopher? At the morgue? “Unless someone helps us along.”

“It can work either way. Read Richard Bach’s Illusions. Things aren’t always the way they seem.”

The non-Barbie Jolene was having a hard time keeping her mouth shut. I wanted to tell him that I’d read the damn book. Many times. And, I too recommended it to people who I thought needed to expand their closed little minds, so I knew what he was doing. One part of me wanted to let him know that I knew way more than he did about these topics, and the other part wanted to find out just how far down the rabbit hole the county medical examiner’s esoteric knowledge went. Neither was going to happen so I decided to put my little ego aside and do a little backhanded fishing. This is, of course, yet another skill I have not mastered. “I’ve known a lot of people who died of lung cancer. Tough to go through and tough to watch. It really sucks.”

“Death isn’t good or bad, it is simply a transition from one state of awareness to another. How it occurs can be affected by freewill and choice, ours as well as that of others. Either way, if you leave without getting the lessons you came here for, you repeat them.” He paused for a few long seconds then said, “Hepatocellular carcinoma, Barbara. Primary liver cancer. Look it up.” Click.

“It was Barbie,” I muttered, hanging up the phone.

That had been a bizarre conversation on all levels. I jotted down what he’d said on the hotel-provided notepad and I absently added “look it up.” Something about the way he’d said that had sort of stopped me in my tracks. He’d also hung up on me, which would typically really tick me off, but it didn’t. He told me what kind of cancer Tiger had, and to look it up. There was something there, I just knew it. Something he suspected but couldn’t say for sure. No doubt people around here thought him to be exceptionally weird.

I continued talking to myself all the way to the closet. I wasn’t looking forward to wearing yesterday’s clothes, but I didn’t have much choice. As I slid back the mirrored closet door, I realized I actually had no choices at all. The only things of mine in the closet were my sandals. Jerry had apparently taken everything else—and I do mean everything. My bra, semi-stained shorts, sink-washed shirt and even the borrowed white, big and tall were gone.