Bittersweet (15 page)

He raised one dark eyebrow, his eyes on her face. “Uh-huh. It's why Carol's my ex.” He let the word hang there for a moment. “Yours?”

“Ex also,” Mack said. She could feel her heart beating.

Both radios squawked, and they paused to listen. It was a rollover on 83, south of the state park, about ten miles away. He keyed his mike, spoke briefly, then listened. “Ten-four,” he said. To Mack, he added, “Gotta roll. See you in the morning, I hope.” He flashed a smile and lifted a hand. “Nice running into you like this. Ships passing in the night, huh?”

“Something like that,” she managed. “Be safe now, you hear?”

“I hear,” he said. “Mañana.” His window went up and he pulled his truck around, spinning his wheels on the gravel.

She watched as his taillights disappeared into the dark night. Her heart was beating harder now, and she felt almost breathless.

•   •   •

M
ACK
would have bet dollars to doughnuts that she'd be called out first thing Thursday morning, or he would. But it didn't happen. She hadn't gotten back from patrol until 3 a.m., so she slept until eight, then jumped
in the shower. When she got out, the message light on her answering machine was blinking, and she thought with resignation,
This is it—one of us has to cancel.
But it turned out to be Derek, apologizing for his rudeness the afternoon before and—in that bedroom voice of his—renewing the invitation to brunch with him and the girls. She played the message twice.
Then she picked up the phone and punched in Derek's number. When he answered, she said briskly, “Thanks for the invitation, Derek, but I don't think this is going to work. So let's not. Okay?”

When he protested, sounding like a hurt little boy, she interrupted him. “Excuse me. No time to talk—I've got company coming this morning. Have a nice holiday.” And she clicked off.

For a moment, she stood with the phone in her hand, wondering if she had done the right thing. Maybe she shouldn't have ended it so firmly. Maybe she should have told him that she was going out on call, and left the future open, to see what might develop. But what would have been the point of that? She knew in her heart that he wasn't special enough—to use Karen's phrase.

Then she decided that she wasn't going to worry about it and put the phone down. She just had time to run a quick comb through her hair and jump into chinos and a red sweater before she heard a knock on the door and went to answer it, Molly at her heels.

It was the first time she'd seen Ethan out of uniform. He was wearing a light brown canvas work jacket, black turtleneck, worn jeans, scuffed boots, and a black Dallas Cowboys cap. At a glance, Mack decided that it wasn't the .357 he usually wore that made him authoritative. It was just who he was, and when he came in, his strong male presence seemed to completely fill the small hallway, wall to wall, floor to ceiling.

Molly gave her usual sharp, suspicious bark—
Who are you, what are
you doing in my house, and when are you going to leave?
But when he squatted down and picked up her paw, comrade to comrade, she unbent. When he reached into his pocket, pulled out a dog treat, and told her to sit, she actually did it. Mack was surprised. Molly was usually made of sterner stuff.

“I've got two heelers at home,” he said to Mack, straightening up. “Super breed, loyal and smart as the devil but bossy as hell. You have to be top dog. If you let them think they are, they'll eat your lunch.”

“Hear that, Molly?” Mack said with a chuckle. “Better watch it, girl—he's got your number.”

Laughing, Ethan handed Mack a plastic sack. “Half pound of bacon was all I had, and I couldn't find the sausages. But my aunt sent me some real Vermont maple syrup, so I brought that, in case pancakes are still on the menu.” Up close, she saw that his eyes were the color of coffee. Strong coffee. “Toyota first, though,” he added. “I work better on an empty stomach.”

“Good man,” she said approvingly. Leaving his sack in the kitchen, she pulled on a jacket and led him out to the garage. On the way, he glanced at Cheyenne, in her paddock behind the house.

“Nice-looking paint,” he remarked. “Ride much?”

“When I can,” Mack said, adding ruefully. “During hunting season, not so much. Cheyenne thinks she's been deserted—she's expecting to spend the rest of her life in that paddock, bored out of her mind.”

“It's a problem,” Ethan acknowledged. “Same with Buddy Holly. Leave him alone too long and he gets cantankerous. Wants to eat the fence.”

She laughed. “Buddy Holly?”

“Yeah. You know who he was?”

“Do I know? One of my favorites.” Buddy Holly was a Texas musician from the fifties. When she was a kid, she'd had all his records—that was when they were actually
records
,
not a file you downloaded from the Internet.

“No kidding? Amazing. I had another horse once named Willie Nelson. Buddy and Willie. Two great Texans.” He grinned. “Listen, when your workload eases up, let me know and we'll go riding together. Friend of mine has a ranch over on Blanco Creek. Plenty of open space to work the kinks out of the horses.”

Bemused and by now a little breathless, she nodded. In the garage, she handed him the keys to the Toyota. He started the truck and let it idle for a few minutes, during which it obligingly performed its sudden RPM surge. He left it running, got out, and opened the hood. She went to stand beside him as he scanned the engine compartment for a few minutes. He had big hands, she noticed, hardworking hands, with traces of dirt under short-clipped nails. Her glance went to his cheek, where a long, thin scar traced the line of his jaw.

“Ah,” he said, bending over the motor. He reached down and wiggled something. “That's not it,” he muttered, and wiggled something else. “Not that one, either.” He reached deeper and bent closer. “Aha,” he said, and appeared to be wrestling with something. Over his shoulder, he said, “Get in and pump the accelerator, would you? Rev it up.”

She followed instructions until he stepped back, dropped the hood, and told her to shut off the engine. “Think that's got it,” he said. “But it's only a temporary fix. Probably won't last more than a few miles.”

“You're kidding,” she said, getting out of the truck. “But you didn't do anything. You never even picked up a screwdriver.”

He gave her a mock scowl. “What d'you mean, woman? I
fixed
it. For the moment, anyway.”

“But all you did was wiggle a thingy or two.”

“What I wiggled was your vacuum hoses,” he explained patiently. “Those thingies stiffen up over the years and start to leak. The business end of the bad one is cracked and loose and it needs to be replaced—there are probably some other hoses that could do with a replacement, too. Next time I'm anywhere close to an auto parts store, I'll get what you need and put them on for you. Okay?”

Mack found herself thinking that it was a whole lot better than just okay but that it might be dangerous to tell him so. She didn't stop to ask herself exactly what she meant by
dangerous
, but she knew she was right.

“I guess that means you think you're top dog,” she said instead. There was a clean shop rag on a shelf and she tossed it to him.

He gave her a hard look as he wiped his hands. “Hey. I saved you from certain highway disaster, and I'll lay odds you don't have Triple A. Is that all the thanks I'm going to get?”

“Of course not,” she said, and smiled sweetly. “I'm about to cook breakfast. How do you like your eggs?”

After the chill outside, the kitchen was warm and fragrant with the smell of fresh coffee. Molly came in and curled up on her bed in the corner beside the stove. When Ethan came in, he (like an investigator, Mack thought) began surreptitiously checking the place out, seeing that it was bachelor-girl tidy and comfortable, definitely not
House-Beautiful
pretty.

“Hey,” he said, going to her shelf of turtle shells, “you've got a Texas tortoise! Super. Did you do the preservation work on this?” Without waiting for her answer, he picked up another. “And a Texas map turtle—now, that's a nice find.”

They talked turtles for a few minutes, then Mack set to work stirring
up a batch of pancakes, frying bacon, and making eggs for two—over easy, since that (it turned out) was the way they both liked them.

While she worked, Ethan hung his jacket on the back of a chair and sat down at the table with a cup of coffee, telling her that he had moved from Williamson County because it was crowded: “Too built-up,” he said. “A twenty-acre shopping mall at every intersection, and hundreds of square miles of nothing but houses with yards the size of a newspaper.” Divorced for a couple of years, he had two children, boys of eight and six who lived with his ex-wife in Round Rock, where he had been a cop for ten years. He took out his cell phone and flipped through a half-dozen photos of smiling, bright-eyed kids for Mack to admire. In his spare time, he said, he fished and hunted and did a little woodworking in the garage of the house he rented. “Cabinets, tables, stuff like that. Nothing spectacular.” He tossed it off carelessly, but Mack heard the quiet pride behind the words.

“My dad loved woodworking,” she said, as she put the food on the table and poured Ethan's second cup of coffee. “Seems like he was always out there in his workshop, making something for Mom. I loved to hang out and watch him.” Which led to telling Ethan about her father, and how she went hunting with him as a girl, and how he had died, and why becoming a game warden had been her career dream—a mission, almost. Which further led to telling him what she loved about her work and what she didn't like so much, and eventually to the mountain lion that she and Karen had trapped and freed the day before.

“But keep that to yourself,” she added, putting the second batch of pancakes on the table. “That was an off-the-job thing. Definitely a private project. Not Parks and Wildlife policy.”

“Jeez,” he said admiringly, forking another pancake onto his plate and soaking it with syrup. “You're either a very brave woman or a freakin' idiot. I can handle a drunk with a gun, but I wouldn't want to be that close to a cougar.”

“The lion was sedated,” she said, “while a drunk with a gun can be just plain—” She was interrupted by the chirp of Ethan's cell phone lying on the table.

“Damn,” he muttered. He picked it up, listened for a moment, then said, “Where?” and “On it.” He clicked off and pocketed the phone. “Gotta get to work.” He forked up what was left of the last pancake, gulped coffee, and pushed his chair back. “I'm really sorry to screw up a perfectly good breakfast, Mack. Rain check?” He pulled his coat off the back of the chair and shrugged into it.

“Rain check,” Mack replied. She heard the sharp disappointment in her voice and blunted it with, “Don't worry about it. We were pretty much finished, anyway.” The call wasn't his fault—and how many times had the very same thing happened to her? She followed him out of the kitchen, Molly at her heels. “What's going on?” she asked.

“Somebody broke into Doc Masters' vet clinic north on 187. Likely after drugs. We had one of those down at the south end of the county a couple of weeks ago. They got a big load of narcotics.” His voice was terse, clipped. “This time, though, they got the doc.”

Mack stared. “Got the . . . doc?” She felt a flutter in her throat. “Doc Masters? Is he—”

“Yeah. He was shot. He's dead.” Ethan was shrugging into his coat. “The clinic helper—the kid who comes in to feed the boarding animals—found him.” As if in confirmation, they heard the burp and wail of the
siren at the volunteer fire department's garage on Main Street, where the local EMS was headquartered.

Mack pulled in her breath, thinking of the last thing the old vet had said to her, through the open window of her truck, at Derek's.
Nice working with you, Mack. I hope there'll be a next time.
She had smiled, glad to have won the respect she heard in his voice.
I'm sure there will
was what she'd said. And then she thought of what else he'd told her. The flutter disappeared, replaced by a numbing cold and a tightness deep in her belly, and she made up her mind.

“I'm coming with you.” She reached past the red Windbreaker on the coatrack and took down her green Parks and Wildlife jacket and her duty belt. She wouldn't take the time to put on her uniform, but this was business. Official business.

“Not your side of the street, Mack.” He fished in his jeans pocket, pulled out his badge, and pinned it on his coat. “Nothing to do with Parks and Wildlife. It was likely another drug thing, and there'll be deputies swarming all over it. Too bad about the doc, of course. But you don't need to—”

“Yes, I do.” She slung her duty belt around her hips and snapped the buckle. “I'm a law enforcement officer, and I have a reason for going to that crime scene.” Her gun safe was a step away, in the hallway closet. She unlocked it and took out her Glock. No special need for it, but it was part of her official gear. As she holstered the gun, she glanced at Ethan. “You don't know for sure that it was an actual drug theft.”

“All I know is what was reported.” He snapped his coat, watching her uneasily. “But no, I don't know for sure, not until I get over there and take a look. But what the hell else—”

Her mouth was dry and she swallowed. “Doc Masters and I worked together for the first time yesterday, on a call about some anthrax-killed deer on a ranch south of town. He told me he had seen some tattooed fawns on a cattle ranch that doesn't have a deer-farming permit from Parks and Wildlife.”

Ethan frowned. “Doesn't have—”

She zipped her jacket. “I tried to get Masters to give me a name and a location, but he said he needed to think about it. I figured he was holding back because the rancher is a friend, or a client. Or a guy who's prominent in the community—somebody who's going to face some seriously bad publicity over it.” She took her uniform cap off the shelf above the coat rack and put it on. “I told him I'd call him about it first thing tomorrow morning. That I expected him to give me the name.”