Kitabı oku: «Cowboys Do It Best»

One

Three days after leaving Birds’ Eye, Wyoming, Chase McGuire killed his truck. It died when he was twenty miles outside of San Antonio, and still 277 miles from his new job on an offshore drilling rig.

Built like the rodeo champion he’d been until last year, and dressed like the cowboy he still was, Chase had a livedin sort of face that looked a bit older than its thirty-two years. His collection of smile lines said he was accustomed to the tricks life got up to from time to time, and generally took them in stride.

He wasn’t smiling now.

Chase stood with the hood up on his three-year-old pickup truck and stared at his engine, so blasted disgusted with himself he could hardly see straight. The air stank of hot metal and burned oil. Chase didn’t need the smell, though, or the sight of his oil-free dipstick to tell him he’d messed up royally this time. When the gentle tap-tap-tap that had worried him for the last few miles suddenly mutated into a loud clang-clang-clang just before he coasted off onto the shoulder, he’d known all too well what was wrong.

It was a clear case of negligent homicide. His dash instruments had gone out about fifty miles back. A fuse, he’d thought, and hadn’t stopped. He was due in Port Arthur that evening and still had a lot of miles to cover. Maybe he should have gotten an earlier start this morning, but Fannie had been mighty persuasive about lingering. What kind of gentleman would turn down a request from the lady who’d been kind enough to put a weary traveler up for the night?

Especially when his hostess was built the way Fannie was.

He hadn’t figured he’d have any trouble making the time up. Of course, he hadn’t counted on some unknown road hazard puncturing his radiator during the fifty miles after his instrument panel went dark. He’d lost all his water and coolant and burned up his fuel pump, followed pretty damn fast by his motor.

Chase slammed the hood closed and walked back to the cab. He climbed up, grabbed his keys and the duffel bag that sat on the seat. He started to get out, but the sun catcher that hung from his rearview mirror caught his eye.

A friend had given him the little stained glass rainbow years ago, back when Chase left college to go on the pro rodeo circuit full-time. She’d told him he was chasing rainbows.

Chase hadn’t argued. Sure, rainbows were mostly illusion—a trick of light and moisture that fooled you into thinking you saw a bit of magic. But a man needed a rainbow or two to follow. He’d hung that sun catcher on his rearview mirror and followed it through thirty states, mailing his trophies and buckles back to his brother to keep for him.

Until last year. Fifteen months ago, to be exact.

Chase slipped the rainbow’s chain free from the mirror. He stuck it in the pocket on the duffel, stepped down from the cab and looked up and down the quiet country road.

Back the way he’d come lay the interstate. Chase preferred a more wandering sort of road, a road with more personality, some surprises along the way.

No, he couldn’t think of any reason to backtrack. The way he’d been headed, now, there were a dozen little towns spotting the countryside around San Antonio, clustered up as close and friendly as freckles on a redhead. Most of those tiny towns had a split identity these days, divided between their rural upbringing and their newer function as bedroom communities for the growing city at their center. There was bound to be one of those freckle-sized towns up the road a ways. He’d just walk until he came to it, or until someone took pity on his feet and gave him a lift.

Not that he had any idea in hell what he’d do when he got wherever he was going. He probably had enough cash on him for a tune-up. Not a new engine.

Chase put his good hat on his head and left the old one locked up in the truck, slung his tote over his shoulder and set off down the two-lane road.

He limped. He ignored that, just like he’d been doing for the past fifteen months.

The air was crisp, but hardly January cold. San Antonio was pretty far south, so far that the grass was still green. Good walking weather, he told himself.

Yeah, this was one of life’s better jokes, all right, he thought as his feet put a low hill between him and his pickup. A real zinger. Not that he was crazy about working on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. He’d done enough roughnecking from time to time, filling in between rodeos when he was starting out, to know what the work was like. But he needed something. A goal. Some kind of direction to aim at. He didn’t know exactly what he needed, but he sure as hell had to find out.

Chase had always played hard. Before he started shaving he’d understood that the only way to deal with life was to enjoy every moment you can and not take anything too seriously, because sure as anything, once you let something or someone matter too much, life pulled the rug out from under you. But ever since he’d left the circuit, he’d been playing too hard. Drinking too much and working too little. He’d started a slide down a smooth, steep shaft that led exactly nowhere.

When he woke up one morning with chunks of the night before missing, as well as most of the paycheck from his current two-bit job, he’d scared himself badly enough to take the job a friend of a friend offered him in Port Arthur.

Only now he wasn’t going to make it to Port Arthur.

Chase’s mouth drew into an unaccustomedly grim line. He’d just have to get himself straightened out some other way. He settled his tote on his other shoulder to get the weight off the side with the bad knee.

It took Chase less than a mile to decide that the road just didn’t look the same when you were hoofing it in cowboy boots with a burn knee.

Things could be worse, he told himself as he paused to stand, hip shot and thumb out, on the side of the highway as a big semi rumbled toward him. He could’ve broken down along one of those hundred-miles-of-nothing stretches back in Wyoming with freezing temperatures and snow for company. Around here, though, it wouldn’t be long before someone...

The semi thundered past in a rush of hot wind. Chase sighed, tugged down his hat and started walking again.

Not much traffic along this highway at one-fifteen in the afternoon.

Five minutes later, when the woman in the battered blue pickup slowed and pulled over, Chase knew his luck had finally taken a turn for the better. The woman who leaned out the window had thick arms, left bare in spite of the chilly air, with a rose tattoo on the left forearm.

She was the best thing Chase had seen all day.

As soon as the truck stopped, Chase started toward it at something like a trot in spite of his knee. A grin broke out across his face. “Hey, Rosie!” he yelled. “Have you finally decided to get rid of your old man and give me a try?”

The truck door opened, and a big woman leaned out. Her long ponytail was as red as Lady Clairol could make it, and the smile on her face puffed her cheeks out into twin moons. Her voice was as clear and pure as a church bell. “Chase McGuire, you idiot, what are you doing in Texas? Haven’t we passed a law against you or something? Come on, get in the truck, you fool.”

“That’s my Rosie,” Chase said, grinning like the fool she’d called him. He slung his tote in the back and climbed into the truck driven by the wife of an old rodeo buddy. “I can’t believe it. What are you doing around here? I thought you and Will had settled up in Oklahoma after he retired.”

“His ma isn’t doing so well. We packed up Joe—he’s the only one of the kids still at home—and came down to live with her last fall,” Rosie said, putting the gearshift through its paces with all the ease of a professional truck driver—which she had been, years ago. “She runs a couple hundred head just north of here and lives in Bita Creek. That’s Bita Creek you see dead ahead,” she added.

They were headed downhill at a steady seventy miles an hour toward a scattering of houses and buildings and trees—one of those freckle-sized towns Chase had counted on being nearby. He sorted through his recollections of Will Stafford, a man who’d been one of the best rodeo clowns in the business until stiffening joints and slowed reflexes made him retire. “I thought Will didn’t get along with his mom.”

“He don’t. And the old bat still hates my guts, too,” Rosie said cheerfully, slowing as they encountered the bar and gas station that signaled the outskirts of Bita Creek. “But what are you gonna do? She’s family.”

Chase nodded. He knew what she meant. If your family needed help, you helped. That’s all there was to it. Chase, of course, didn’t really need help. He was in a temporary bind, that was all. He could straighten this out just fine on his own, without calling Mike. Chase knew exactly how his big brother would react if he knew about Chase’s money problems.

No, Chase definitely wasn’t going to call on his family for help right now.

“You could’a knocked me down with a feather when I saw you strolling along the side of the road. What’s up? That your truck I saw broke down a couple miles back?”

Chase gave her a quick rundown of his recent past. He was good at making a story out of the banana peels life slipped under his feet, and Rosie laughed until she was wiping tears from her eyes. “Lordy,” she said, “you are one unlucky bastard, aren’t you? But don’t worry. Will knows lots of folks hereabouts, and anyone he don’t know, his ma does. He’ll find you some sort of job.” She reached over and patted his knee reassuringly.

Chase managed not to wince. Not that Rosie was the least bit rough. In spite of her manner and her build, she had gentle, almost dainty hands, as any number of wounded animals and banged-up kids over the years could testify. But even a normal pat hurt his knee right now, sore and swollen as it was from all his walking. That wasn’t Rosie’s fault. Somehow in telling Rosie about himself, Chase had neglected to mention the horse that had halfway crippled him last year.

“You know me, Rosie,” he said, with something close to his usual grin. “I never worry.”

Summer Callaway stood in the slanting light of the early morning sun in her bedroom. Twenty hours ago, the Bates’s sorrel gelding had tossed her on her left shoulder in the training pen, busting her collarbone and her budget, and plumb ruining her temper.

Summer considered herself a patient woman. She wasn’t a whiner, either. She just didn’t deal well with frustration.

Getting dressed wasn’t easy with a cracked collarbone and a dislocated shoulder, but so far she’d managed to pull on her panties, jeans and socks. It had hurt, but so did walking. Or sitting. Or breathing. She could live with that. Her hair—well, she’d gotten Maud to wash it for her last night after the pain pills kicked in, so at least it was clean. But she couldn’t pin it up or braid it or do anything to get it out of her way. It hung halfway down her back, some of the strands catching on the blasted clavicle brace Dr. O’Connor had strapped her into at the emergency room yesterday. That brace was supposed to keep her stable so she didn’t jostle her collarbone, but as far as she could tell, all it was good for was making it hell to take a shower. But she was mostly clean now and nearly dressed, and she figured Ricky could help her get her boots on before he went to school.

That left her with one little problem. Her bra.

Who’d have thought a woman who regularly mastered fifteen hundred pounds of some of the orneriest creatures God put on this earth would be defeated by a brassiere?

There was just no damned way to fasten the thing one-handed. She’d thought she could fasten it in front, then turn it around and ease her arms through the straps—but whichever end she wasn’t holding fell down.

She chewed on her lip, then stepped over to the worn, maple dresser that had been her mother’s once upon a time. By bending her knees to lower herself a bit, she managed to pin the bra between the dresser and her waist. But she couldn’t make the hooks come together by wishing, and one hand just wasn’t going to get the job done. “Damn!”

“That’s another quarter, Mom!” called her son’s voice.

“Right,” she muttered, standing straight and letting the stupid bra fall to the floor. Summer never went braless. Not only was it impractical for a 36-C woman who rode horses to forgo support, she didn’t... well, she just didn’t.

Today, though, it looked like she would.

“That’s seventy-five cents you owe the penalty box so far this morning,” Ricky said from the bathroom. She heard the water come on. The rest of her son’s words were distorted by the toothbrush he tried to talk around. “And a buck seventy-five from yesterday.”

“Yesterday didn’t count,” Summer said automatically. She began the laborious process of getting her left arm into the sleeve of a flannel shirt, holding her wrist in her good hand and guiding it through the armhole. “Maud agreed. Those pain pills had me temporarily incapacitated.” Ow, ow, ow and damn. Summer managed to keep the curse silent this time.

She heard Ricky enthusiastically spitting out the toothpaste. Spitting was the one part of toothbrushing he liked. “Yeah, but you said fifty cents’ worth before Aunt Maud got you to take the pain stuff.”

Strictly speaking, she’d said a good deal more than that, but Ricky hadn’t been around to hear it. She’d injured herself while he was at school. His “Aunt Maud”—a friend and neighbor, actually, rather than a blood relation—had driven Summer to the emergency room and waited with her. Maud had called the parents of the students Summer was supposed to teach riding to that day, too. She felt mortified just thinking about it. A riding teacher didn’t build confidence in the students or their parents by falling off her horse.

Maud had insisted on hanging around after bringing Summer home, fixing supper and nagging until bedtime. Summer hadn’t protested very hard. Not only had she been hurting like hellfire, there wasn’t much point. People mostly did do what Maud Hoppy told them to do. Even Summer.

Buttoning the shirt one-handed wasn’t so bad. It only took her twice as long as usual.

“I tell you what, champ,” Summer said when she heard the water in the bathroom cut off. She blinked rapidly to make her eyes stop watering and reached for the pale blue sling they’d given her yesterday. “I’ll pay up for yesterday if you can tell me what I owe, counting today. That’s fifty cents plus seventy-five cents.”

Silence. Math wasn’t one of her seven-year-old son’s strong points. Ricky took an avid interest in money, though, which was one of the reasons for the penalty box they both contributed to for minor infractions. Summer was confident she’d end up paying that box for her bad language yesterday and today. There was a new superhero movie showing in town, and the penalty box didn’t have quite enough in it yet to cover their tickets.

Settling her arm in the sling helped. She took a deep breath before opening the door, feeling more unsteady than she wanted to admit. She’d already taken ibuprofin, and she was determined not to fuzz up her head with a pain pill during the day. She’d get by. She was good at that, wasn’t she?

All the rooms in her little two-bedroom house were practically on top of each other, so she saw right away that the bathroom was empty. It was surprisingly tidy, though. Ricky’s pajamas weren’t in their usual morning spot on the floor. She glanced down the hall.

The bedroom at the end of the hall was Ricky’s. She saw right away that he had drawn his bedspread up over his pillow in his best effort at bed making. Action heroes climbed, crawled, leaped and mutated all over the twin bed.

That’s love, she thought, a lump in her throat. That’s real love. He’d already helped out by getting up early and going over to the kennel with her to feed their canine boarders. But bed making was about the most useless activity Ricky could imagine, something mothers insisted on for mysterious feminine reasons no seven-year-old boy could hope to understand. He’d made his up bed simply because it was important to her.

How had she ever gotten so lucky? Lord knew Ricky hadn’t drawn the best parent material. She did her best, but she didn’t know much about being a mother, having been raised without one herself. She’d been winging it since the day he was born. As for his father... whatever Jimmie’s sins had been, Summer reminded herself as she started down the short hall towards the kitchen, he’d paid for them. Paid dearly.

“You hungry this morning, champ?” she asked dryly as she entered the kitchen. Ricky was already at the table piling cereal into his mouth with that dribbly, rapid-action motion of his, greedy as any baby bird. The part in his dark hair was crooked, but he’d remembered to put on clean jeans as well as a clean shirt. The crumbs scattered around the cereal bowl told her he’d had one or more of the leftover muffins and hadn’t bothered with a plate. As usual.

She skipped the plate lecture and went to the cupboard for a coffee mug. When she reached up, though, even with her good arm, the motion pulled on the muscles attached to her collarbone.

Damn damn damn damn...

“Mom? You okay?”

“Sure,” she managed to say, and got the mug. “Did you feed Amos?” Since the huge orange tabby was sitting in her chair, daring her smugly to move him, she figured Ricky had already taken care of the cat. She just wanted to get his attention away from her for a minute, until she got her breath back.

How was she going to get through half the things that had to be done that day? Some of it she flat couldn’t do, like cleaning the kennels. She’d have to hire someone. Only there was no way she could afford it. The electric bill was due. Her quarterly tax payment was coming up. Then there were the property taxes, which had doubled this year. They were past due.

About the only thing paid up-to-date was the note she’d been forced to take out on the land when she inherited a rundown stable operation and a pile of medical bills after her father died. Summer paid that bill religiously. Maybe her priorities had been screwed up when she was eighteen, but not anymore. Nothing could be allowed to endanger her land.

“One twenty-five,” Ricky announced suddenly. “You owe the box a buck twenty-five, Mom.”

“I guess you got me.” She ruffled his hair with her good hand, making him duck and grimace, as she brought her coffee over to the table.

Fifteen minutes later Ricky tore out the back door, his backpack slung over one shoulder, making his usual mad dash for the school bus stop down the road. She glanced at the clock and sipped her second cup of coffee. Seven-thirty. Normally she’d start cleaning the dog pens about now. Today...well, she didn’t think she could shovel poop one-armed, but maybe she should try. Fortunately, the kennel only held five dogs right now. January was slow.

Well, she thought, pushing away from the table, sitting here brooding didn’t accomplish much. She’d do what she could and let the rest go, then come back to the house and find some way to squeeze enough from her budget to hire someone.

Summer grabbed the keys to the kennel from their hook by the door, stepped out onto the wooden porch at the back of her house, and got assaulted. Kelpie knew better than to jump up, so she ran in tight little circles and yipped. The black-and-white Border collie mix was supposed to be Ricky’s dog, but she adored everyone impartially. Two years ago Summer had found Kelpie huddled outside her fence, obviously abandoned. The dog had needed food, love and 132 dollars’ worth of trips to the vet to regain her health, and she’d been rejoicing ever since. Summer smiled and managed to stroke Kelpie’s head a few times before the animal raced off in delight.

At the end of the porch, Hannah, the aging bloodhound who had belonged to Summer’s father, limited her greeting to a dignified thump-thump of her tail.

A breath of wind stirred the sign at the main gate, the one that read “Three Oaks Kennel and Stable” with the little drawing of the oak tree on it. Summer inhaled deeply, enjoying the slight bite in the air, even enjoying the smell of the nearby stable—a smell that meant horses and home.

Some people liked to wander, she knew. Not her, not anymore. Running off with Jimmie had taught her that much. Summer needed roots. She needed to be on her own land, in her own house, with the people who were important to her nearby.

She was a lucky woman, Summer thought as she started across the big, grassy yard, heading for the kennel. She was living the life she wanted, she had a bright, wonderful son she loved more than her next heartbeat, and she’d learned a valuable lesson while still young.

Men were too damned much trouble. Period.

She had just reached the paddock that lay between the house and the kennel when a huge old Buick pulled up next to the chain-link fence that surrounded the front part of her property. Summer slowed and shook her head. She knew that car.

The woman who got out was as tiny as her car was big. She was a dried-up little dab of a woman in a faded cotton dress, with a face like crumpled tissue and thin white hair scraped back in a bun. “Summer!” the little old lady bellowed. “What do you think you’re doing? Didn’t I tell you I’d come over and take care of those dogs this morning?”

All bones and mouth, that was Maud Hoppy. Summer stopped. “Yes, you did. And I told you not to.”

Maud slammed the door of her tank shut and walked over to the small gate, the people-sized one just west of the big, truck-sized gate. “Don’t know what difference you thought that would make.”

Exasperated, Summer propped her good hand on her hip. “You’re nearly eighty, Maud. You don’t need to be shoveling dog poop.”

“I’m seventy-one.” Maud always lied very positively. She closed the gate behind her. “And I’m not going to shovel poop. I’ll just feed the silly things. Do you need me to feed the horses, too?”

“Ricky and I already fed the dogs. As for the horses, I got hold of Raul last night. He’s already been and gone.” Raul usually worked in the afternoons during the week, but he’d agreed to come early that morning to take care of the stable chores before school. He wouldn’t do the kennel, though. The strapping sixteen-year-old hunk of Latin machismo was afraid of dogs. Not that he’d ever admit it, of course.

“Good, then you and I can go back inside and drink coffee while you figure out how much you can afford to pay a hand for the next two months.” Maud took Summer’s good elbow and pulled. Her snowy white head barely reached Summer’s shoulder.

“Two months is impossible,” Summer said, towed reluctantly back towards the house by her tiny friend.

“The doctor said two months.”

“Dr. O’Connor doesn’t have to pay my bills,” she retorted. “I have to pay his.”

Still, somehow Summer found herself seated at her kitchen table with her checkbook, a pad and paper, and a computer printout of her current bills and projected expenses in front of her. Her shoulder throbbed in rhythm with her pulse as she added up a column of figures while Maud darted around the kitchen like a hummingbird, looking for things to clean.

Summer hoped Maud found something to clean soon. If she didn’t, she was apt to start cooking, and Summer really couldn’t afford to throw out whatever mess resulted. “Sit down and drink some coffee.”

“In a minute.” Maud pounced on the toaster, unplugging it and taking it over to the sink to shake the crumbs out. “Have you figured out how much you can afford to pay?”

“Yeah.” Nothing. That’s what she could afford. But by making a partial payment on her property taxes and putting the rest off another month or two—they weren’t going to seize her land, she assured herself, even if she was late—she could pay everything else that was due and hire someone for a while. “It’s not going to be easy finding someone, though. Getting someone who knows horses and doesn’t mind that the job is temporary—”

“Now there,” Maud announced in her raspy, Mae West voice, “I can help.” She turned around, toaster in hand, polishing it as she spoke. “You know Will Stafford?”

“You know I do, Maud. His wife Rosie and I are on the SPCA board together in Bica. But their son Joe already has a part-time job, doesn’t he?”

“I’m not talking about Joey. Last night Will was calling around, trying to find someone who needs a hand. Seems Will is helping out an old buddy from his rodeo days—”

“A rodeo bum.” Summer’s lip curled.

“Now, don’t you be judging everyone by that husband of yours. And it doesn’t matter, anyway, whether this fellow is like your Jimmie was or not. He’s desperate. Seems his truck died and he’s about broke. You could board him in that little room off the kennel and pay him real cheap.”

Maud sounded so satisfied with the poor man’s plight that Summer couldn’t help grinning. “Still, if the man is anything like Jimmie, I’d have a battle getting my money’s worth, no matter how little I paid him.”

“Jimmie was lazy. This fellow, though—I don’t imagine a fellow gets to be ‘Best All-Around Cowboy’ at the NFR without working for it. Besides, Will Stafford vouches for him.”

Summer frowned. “So who is this paragon?”

“Chase McGuire.”

“Chase McGuire?” she asked disbelievingly.

Maud put the toaster back where it belonged. “I’ll just make us some more coffee,” she announced. “You know this McGuire?”

Summer stood up. “Not really. I’ll make the coffee, Maud. I’m not helpless.” At least the coffee would be drinkable if Summer made it. She managed to beat Maud to the coffeepot, grabbed the glass carafe and took it to the sink.

She and Jimmie hadn’t exactly run in the same crowd as Chase McGuire. Jimmie had never made it near the top, while the other man had stayed high in the rankings for years. Why would such a man be interested in a two-bit job?

While the carafe filled with water, Summer used her good hand to shift her left arm in the sling, trying to ease the ache. “I’ve never actually met him, Maud. But no one who’s been involved with rodeo could help knowing who he is. I saw him around sometimes, back when I made the circuit with Jimmie.” Oh, yes, she’d seen him. She remembered his lean build, his shaggy blond hair and that deadly smile. And the women. She remembered that, too. He’d attracted women the way horses draw flies. “A man like that would never be satisfied with this sort of penny-ante job,” she said, and shut off the water. “No, he wouldn’t work out.”