shave. They didn’t need him riding herd on them.
And he wanted to go home. Not to the empty house, but to the ranch just north of the New Mexico border. The land sustained him like breath and blood.
His hand brushed the bottle in its brown paper bag when he stuck his phone in the center console. With Annie gone, sleep eluded him like a rope-wise old horse endlessly dodging a loop. He could generally drop off at a decent hour by timing sips of bourbon through the evening—better than pills, he supposed.
He’d bought two bottles in Albuquerque, cheaper than close to home. Jake had gone to school with the clerk at the local liquor store and didn’t need Alma gossiping about how much he bought in a month. The bag rustled seductively under his hand. A Bud with a plate of nachos had been hours ago—a little taste now couldn’t hurt, just to take the edge off the lonely drive.
He peered over his shoulder—no one watching. He broke the seal on the quart of Beam, admiring its warm amber translucency, anticipating its sweet fiery slide down his throat, and tipped the bottle to his lips. Before the first drop hit his tongue, he lowered it and screwed the cap on. Through all the heartache with Annie, he had developed a fanatical reverence for life, hard and painful as it might be. Be damned if he would take to the road liquored up, landing at the bottom of a canyon or drifting into oncoming traffic, maybe taking innocent lives with him. He thrust the bottle away and followed the last vehicles out of the parking lot.
SHELBY DOUCETTE’S DOG leaped down from the cab of the Kenworth and she followed, dragging her backpack and the bag holding her saddle behind her. She slammed the door on the stream of curses, nothing original, and stepped well back off the breakdown lane. The rear of the trailer twitched toward the spot where she would have been standing, and then the big rig roared away with a spray of gravel and an insolent blast of the air horn.
She made a rude gesture at the retreating taillights. “Thanks for nothing!”
Shelby looked around. The late afternoon overcast flattened details of the ravines and low buttes and lent a sepia tint to the broken landscape. Clouds like dirty cotton batting half hid the mountain peaks to the north. Half a dozen white-faced steers stared over a barbed-wire fence, but she saw no sign of a ranch house and couldn’t recall how far back it might be to the last mailbox.
She dug a large Milk-Bone from her pack and broke it in half for the rough-coated dog standing waist-high at her side. “Sorry, Stranger,” she said, pocketing the other piece. “Gotta make these last.”
An empty cattle hauler roared past, headed south; otherwise the road stretched empty in both directions.
“Guess we’re on our own,” she said, slinging her pack over one shoulder and her saddle over the other. “Let’s keep moving.”
Her old car breaking down south of Albuquerque had been bad luck, but at least she’d found a mechanic willing to work on it. She knew she should swap the 1990 Town Car for something more reliable, but the vehicle was her last link to the part of her past she wanted to remember.
“Stop it!” she said with a shudder. The dog looked up at her. “It’s okay, boy. Just smacking myself upside the head.” She talked more to the dog and to the horses she trained than she did with humans. “You told me not to trust that guy, but we were due in Colorado yesterday.”
Her new boss had been sympathetic when she’d called this morning—sure, he could pick her up in Durango. Maybe he’d be willing to fetch her from... She looked around for some kind of landmark. From wherever they were.
She checked her cell phone—no signal, of course. Just as well—she hated asking favors. Which left her on foot somewhere north of Hind Shoe, New Mexico, with daylight fading fast and a veil of snow advancing on the wind.
She’d been comfortable in shirtsleeves when they’d set out from Albuquerque, but she’d felt a bite in the air at the last truck stop and had slipped on the good down jacket she’d bought for ten bucks at a Lubbock flea market. The wind picked up, sending occasional tumbleweeds bounding across the road and whipping the first snowflakes in her face. She zipped the jacket to her chin and pulled up the hood of her sweatshirt.
She started walking. If she didn’t catch a ride, she and Stranger could hunker down under the next bridge until the snow passed. Not bitter cold—the tiny thermometer dangling from her zipper pull read thirty-one degrees. Stranger generated a lot of heat, and she could wrap her saddle blanket around her feet and legs. With luck, she could find dry wood for a fire. They’d be okay.
Wet snow began clinging to the ragged bushes dotting the landscape, looking like the blossoms on the blackberry bushes back home. Stranger shook his rough coat from time to time, and Shelby brushed the dampness from her hood before it could soak through. In the distance a dark slash marked the whitening landscape; she hoped the gully would be deep enough to warrant a bridge.
Intent on reaching shelter, she didn’t hear the big pickup until it whooshed past in the inch of slush already built up on the pavement. She dropped the saddle to wave her arms, but the taillights were already flashing. The driver was braking too hard. She began to run as the truck fishtailed in a slow-motion pirouette and crashed nose down in the shallow ditch.
She didn’t think the truck had hit hard enough to rupture the fuel line, but the engine was still running. Slipping in the snow, she yanked open the driver’s door. The whiskey fumes hit her when she reached in to turn off the ignition. An uncapped bottle rolled into the ditch.
Blood ran from the driver’s nose—idiot wasn’t wearing his seat belt—and he had a nasty scrape on one cheekbone. His hair shone silver as he fumbled off his brown felt hat and gave her a lopsided grin. “Howdy, miss—you need a lift?”
She caught him as he slumped toward her.
DARKNESS BROKEN BY glaring light, sleet like tiny burns on his face, then falling and wet and cold. A woman’s voice: “Work with me, cowboy.” Darkness again.
The woman’s voice roused him: “Jacob, can you hear me? Open your eyes.”
He must be dead! No one but Ma ever called him Jacob.
“Come on, open your eyes.” A Southern voice, not his mother’s. He gave a grunting gasp of relief and squinted into a bright light.
“Open ’em wide—good. How many fingers?”
He managed to count three fingers.
“You know what day it is?”
He wrinkled his forehead, rummaging for the right answer. “Yesterday?”
She laughed. “Fair enough. Okay, you can go back to sleep.”
* * *
JAKE OPENED HIS eyes to level sunlight throwing shadows across stained ceiling tiles. Where was he?
He thought he remembered a woman’s voice, a silhouette bending over him. A soft rustle to his right made him turn his head. The room spun, his stomach heaved. Closed his eyes, waited and then tried again. Someone in the next bed—he could see only a wild mane of dark hair.
“Annie?” He knew it couldn’t be Annie.
The woman threw back the covers and swung her denim-clad legs out of bed. She yawned widely and pushed her hair back from her face before crossing to where he lay.
“Welcome back,” she said. “How do you feel?”
Like he’d been trampled by a flock of dirty sheep. The left side of his face ached and so did his nose. He made a wordless sound of disgust.
“That good, huh? Could have been lots worse, with Jim Beam as your copilot.”