Cowboy Crazy (23 page)

Lane pulled into the parking garage across from the Carrigan building, cruising down an empty row to take a space at the end. The garage had been built by the city in some unrealistic fit of optimism during the last boom. The police department used it, so there were half a dozen cop cars parked on one side, but other than that he had his pick.

He strode down the short stretch of sidewalk and through the swinging doors to the Carrigan building. Standing in the elevator, he glanced at his reflection and quickly looked away. He’d made the mistake of gussying up for the visit to Carrigan headquarters, and now he knew where the expression “dressed to kill” came from. His brand-new Wranglers were so stiff he could barely bend his knees, and the bolo tie at his throat was slowly strangling him to death.

He wasn’t sure why he’d felt compelled to citify himself that morning. It wasn’t like he needed to impress Eric. Eric knew who he was no matter what he wore.

But it was about time he took things more seriously as far as the company was concerned. Sarah had convinced him of that much. He’d always felt a responsibility to the communities surrounding their operations, but he’d believed it was a responsibility to preserve and protect the status quo. Sarah had made him realize that wasn’t all they needed to do. He’d been right in his conviction that drilling rigs and trailer towns ruined the landscape. But he hadn’t thought about the fact that people might be more than willing to trade their pristine landscape and quaint towns for things that were more essential to survival, like medical care and law enforcement.

The West was going to change. It was his job, and Eric’s, to make sure it changed for the better. It had been Sarah’s job too, up until the day before. Maybe he could do something about that too.

“Hey, bro.” Eric lowered his feet from the desk, where his polished loafers had been crossed casually on the shining wood. “What’s with the new duds?” His face changed from mockery to dread in an instant. “Oh, shit. You’re looking for Sarah.”

“Nope. I heard.”

“It wasn’t anything personal. I just—she couldn’t…” He waved a hand helplessly. “Two Shot’s the only game we’ve got going right now, and she couldn’t do us any good there. She—wait. How did you hear?”

“I was there.”

“With Sarah?” A smile spread over Eric’s face. “I guess she can do one of us some good in Two Shot.”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“Okay. Whatever. But I’ll give her a good recommendation wherever she ends up. She’s good at what she does—she just can’t do it in Two Shot.”

“That’s between you and her.”

“Exactly. So why are you here? Must be serious. You shaved and everything.”

“I shave.”

“Yeah, once a week, whether you need it or not.”

Lane settled into the chair in front of the desk and stretched his legs out. Sitting there with Eric lording it over the big mahogany desk always made him feel like some kind of supplicant. But today, he was just that.

“I want to talk to you about Two Shot.”

“Not again,” Eric groaned. “Lane, the project’s going forward. You can’t stop it.”

“I’m thinking about a conservation easement.” Lane leaned back in his chair and folded his hands over his stomach, smug as if he’d just laid out a winning poker hand. “It won’t entirely prevent you from drilling on the ranch, but it’ll make it a pain in the ass.”

Eric paled. “Great. Do the people of Two Shot know what you’re doing to them? Hijacking the jobs and money we bring in?”

“The jobs and money come too late. You bring all those people into those small towns, there’s nowhere for them to go. You see it over and over. People slap up substandard buildings to house them. The men come on their own, because their wives won’t bring their families to these godforsaken little towns. You need to put some things in place before things get going. And if you do, I’ll cancel the easement.”

“What kind of things?”

Lane shrugged. “Ask the townspeople. You could get together with all those pillars of the community, just like you were going to have Sarah do. But instead of trying to talk them into giving us free rein, figure out how to help them get grants, loans, that kind of thing. And maybe Carrigan could get things started with a grant of their own.”

“You want me to shell out money before we even
start
?”

“Dad would have done it. If he’d have seen Midwest, he’d have wanted to prevent it from happening again.”

“So this grant…”

“They need a medical clinic and an ambulance. Right now if something happens at the drilling site you have to drive all the way to Casper. And law enforcement—the place doesn’t even have a real police station.”

“That’s millions of dollars.”

“And how much will you take out of the ground?”

Eric was silent.

“Plus when people see what you’ve done, it’ll be that much easier to get going in other places. Responsibility brings rewards. That’s what Dad always said.”

“Don’t bring Dad into this.”

“Why not? He’s the reason you do all this.” Lane gestured around the room. “You’re still trying to please him.”

Eric scowled. “It’s easy for you to make fun of that. You were always getting pats on the back with all your sports stuff.”

“He didn’t have any respect for that. Not once he figured out that winning at bronc busting didn’t translate to winning in business. He’d be proud of you, Eric. Especially if you do this.”

Eric moved a couple of pens from one side of his blotter to the other, then back again.

“Look, I’m not here to harangue you. I just wanted to make that suggestion.”

Eric huffed out a laugh. “Your suggestions sound a lot like demands.”

“Yeah, well, kind of.” Lane rose. “You want to drill on the ranch, you need to do something for the town. Otherwise, there’s going to be trouble.”

“We own those rights.” The bravado in Eric’s voice clashed with the tempo of his pencil-tapping, which was taking on the frantic urgency of a heavy metal drum solo. “You can’t stop us.”

“No, but I can make it hell for you to make so much as a tire track on the property. And if you try to get around it, I can make it news.”

Eric sighed. “How am I supposed to get all that done? We’re an oil company, not a community development company.”

“Dunno,” Lane said. “You’re the business guy. I’m just a dumb cowboy, remember?” He looked up at the ceiling as if searching for answers. “Maybe you need to hire somebody who knows what the town needs. Somebody who lived there.”

***

Sarah pulled the Malibu to a stop at the fork in the road and quickly recited the Robert Frost “The Road Not Taken” poem in her head. No, this wasn’t a case of taking the road less traveled; both roads were equally scarred and pitted, so she couldn’t even figure out which one that was. This was a matter of taking the right road.

She should go back to the cabin, grab the few belongings she’d left there, and leave. But what she wanted to do was go to the ranch and see Cinn just one more time, maybe even spend the day with him.

It would be a rash, impulsive move, the kind of thing Sarah Landon never did. She’d spent the last ten years building her career by avoiding that kind of self-indulgence. She’d taken the hard road, over and over, denying herself the freedom of turning off her predetermined path. She’d been disciplined and hardworking, responsible and dependable.

And where had it gotten her? To the crossroads of Nowhere Street and Disaster Road. What the hell did it matter which way she turned? Either way, she was screwed.

So she might as well go play with that horse.

She’d have to talk to Trevor first. Yesterday’s getting-to-know-you session hadn’t required anything but herself and the horse, but to go any further she’d need a halter, a lead, maybe a lunge whip for ground training.

That would mean facing Trevor’s teasing, and probably a bunch of questions about Lane. Maybe she should just hunt down the equipment and find the horse. It was wrong, she knew, to just go on and do what you wanted with an animal. But what had Lane said?

He’s your horse if you stay.

Well, she was staying, wasn’t she? Maybe just for today, but still—that made him hers.

Deep down, Sarah knew she was being foolish. She was liable to get attached to the horse, and then it would be even harder to leave. The best insurance would be to make plans. That’s what she’d done for the past decade: map out a plan of attack and stick with it.

Taking out her cell phone, she dialed Kelsey’s number.

“Hi, Kelse?”

“Sarah.” Her sister sounded relieved and angry all at once. “Where have you been?”

It was the way she sounded when she couldn’t spot Katie on the playground and then the girl popped out of the bushes laughing. When had Kelsey become such a mom? It was like their roles had switched.

“I stayed at the ranch.”

“With Lane?”

“No.”

“That’s too bad. He was nice.”

“Yeah, he seems that way, but he’s not. Kelsey, he was the one who bought Flash.”

“Flash?” Kelsey sounded stunned. “Wow, what a coincidence. That’s amazing. Does he still have him?”

“No.” Sarah could barely get the words out through clenched teeth. “He bred him, though. He has a colt that—well, it could be the same horse.”

“Cool.”

“Cool? Is that all you have to say?”

“Yeah. You loved that horse. Isn’t it cool to see his baby?”

“Kelsey, he stole Flash, remember? Two thousand dollars. The horse was worth twenty.”

“I know, but we had to sell him fast and—well, that’s how it worked out. It’s not like we could have kept him.”

“I could have kept him.”

“How? Without Roy…”

“It would have been hard, but I could have done it. I could have taken him to rodeos again, won some prize money.”

“How? How would you have gotten him there? Who’d drive the truck? You had to be in the trailer with him or he’d kick it to bits.”

Sarah gripped the phone so hard her hand hurt. “Never mind, Kelse.”

She didn’t need to be reminded that she should have been in that trailer. Instead she’d been putting on mascara. Primping while Roy got killed.

Kelsey knew her so well she could even read her silences. “Sarah, it wasn’t your fault.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does to you. I know it does.”

“If I’d been there, Roy would be alive.”

“No, he…”

“That’s not what I called about anyway. I need to tell you something.” Damn, this was the hardest phone conversation she’d ever had. “I lost my job.”

“Oh, Sarah.”

“It’ll be okay,” Sarah said. “You’ve got Mike now. He’s still working, right? So you and Katie’ll be okay?”

“We’ll be fine. But it’s not all about me, you know.” She muttered something Sarah could barely hear. It sounded like “it never was.”

“What did you say?”

“I said it never was.” Kelsey sounded defiant, as though she was letting loose something she’d kept bottled up a long time. “It was never about me. It was about you, needing to be—I don’t know. Needing to be needed.”

Sarah didn’t know how to respond.

“Sorry,” Kelsey added. “But that’s what Mike said. Look, I’m grateful,” Kelsey sounded sullen, “but if you hadn’t always been there taking over, I might have listened to his message. I know you were trying to help, but…”

“Kelsey, he left you and you collapsed. What the hell were all those headaches about?”

“They were about being stressed,” Kelsey admitted. “You helped, and I appreciate it. But I’m okay now, all right? I don’t need help. I can make it on my own.” She paused a moment. “With Mike. I know you think it’s wrong to take him back, but the whole thing was mostly a misunderstanding.”

“Okay,” Sarah said. The phone suddenly seemed heavy in her hand.

“What we need to talk about is you,” Kelsey said. “I can’t believe you’re still harping on the whole deal with Flash. Come on, what’s done is done. I’d forgotten all about whoever bought him. I remember you made him into some kind of bogeyman, some evil outside force that ruined our lives. Well, he didn’t.”

“We lost the ranch, Kelsey.”

“We lost it because Roy made bad decisions. He gambled on that horse, and he lost. There was something wrong with Flash, you know? I was scared to death of him.”

“I loved him.”

“I know you did, but he was screwed up. Nobody could deal with him. So stop blaming everything on somebody who took a load off our hands.”

Sarah felt like the air had been sucked out of the car. Her sister blamed Roy for what had happened to them. Roy, who had saved their family and died. Died for her, in a way.

“Look, I have to go.” She had no idea where. She wasn’t about to ask Kelsey for a place to stay anymore.

She pulled the phone away from her ear and heard her sister protesting in a tinny, faraway voice. “No, wait. Sarah, we need to talk about this.”

“I’m fine.”

“No you’re not. Jeez, Sarah, let it go. What are you hanging onto all this stuff for? You have to forgive him.” Her tone softened. “You have to forgive yourself. What happened with Flash didn’t ruin our lives. It was just the way things went, okay? It wasn’t your fault.”

“Sure.” Sarah tried to sound casual. “I know that.”

Kelsey sighed. “So what did you call about?”

“Nothing,” Sarah said. “Just letting you know where I am.”

“Which is where?”

Sarah looked out the window at the acres of sagebrush stretching from the car, the faint blue mountains in the distance. “The Carrigan Ranch,” she said. “Or the LT, or whatever. I think I might stay here a while.”

She clicked the phone shut and eased down the road to the ranch, nursing the Malibu over the ruts and ridges. Going slow wasn’t such a bad thing anyway; it gave her time to think.

By the time she reached the ranch, she’d thought, all right. She’d managed to wipe everything Kelsey said out of her mind and focus on the horse ahead of her. Horses had always been like that for her. When you worked with a horse, it was you and the animal. The rest of the world faded away.

Today, that would be a good thing. She shut off the engine and stepped out of the car, breathing in the scent of old wood, hay, and sunshine as she stared out at the complex network of corrals.

Which were empty.

Not only was there no red dun stallion, there were no horses at all.

She strode into the barn and was greeted with a chorus of impatient whinnies. The graceful heads of a dozen quarter horses hung over stall doors at regular intervals down the long wood alleyway, their soft eyes gazing expectantly at her. There was a dull thud as one of the more impatient critters kicked at his stall door.

“Hey, babies, what’s wrong? Didn’t anybody let you out?” She stopped at the first stall, where a pretty sorrel mare was nosing at the sad remnants of yesterday’s grain. “Didn’t they feed you?”

“I’m trying,” said a voice from the end of the alley. She squinted into the sunshine streaming in the doorway at the far end of the barn. She could barely make out the silhouette of a hunched figure in a wheelchair struggling to maneuver with a bucket of grain in his lap. Trevor was dragging a hose behind him, but as she approached, he dropped it. The handle on the nozzle struck the floor and squirted a column of water into the air, flipping away from him like a snake.

“Dammit.”

Sarah ducked and grabbed the hose, jerking the handle to shut off the water. She held it awkwardly in front of her, staring at Trevor. Should she give the hose back to him, or help him? She never knew how to behave with disabled people. Did he want assistance, or would he take her help as an insult?

“If you want to give that mare some water, that would help,” he said. “She’s not going out with the others today. She got a good kick from somebody yesterday and her leg swole up.”

Sarah hauled the hose over and looked in at the mare. She did indeed have a swelling on her right front cannon bone. Filling the bucket that hung next to the door, she turned to Trevor. “Does she get grain?”

“Three scoops. Then a couple flakes of hay.”

“What about the others?”

He spun to a stop in front of the next stall, which held a grey gelding who was a little on the thin side. “Blue gets grain too, but only two scoops. And we mix in a cup of sweet feed. He’s a poor keeper, has trouble keeping weight on.”

Sarah reached up to stroke a red dun nose that had poked out of the third stall on the right.

“Cinn,” she said. “Good boy.”

“That’s not Cinn. That’s Blue,” Trevor said. “Another son of Flash.”

“How many are there?”

“Just the two.” He angled her a hopeful glance. “You taking the job?”

“No, but I won’t let the horses starve.” She cussed herself mentally even as the words flew out of her mouth. The guy was doing his best, and he clearly wasn’t neglecting the horses. He just couldn’t move fast enough to get the job done, and it seemed like he’d started kind of late.

“We usually have help, but she called in at the last minute. Could you do it just for today?” He gave his legs a rueful glance. “I can do just about anything, but it takes a while and these guys don’t like waiting.”

“Who would call in and let this happen?”

“Somebody who likes their job at the diner better than working with horses.”

Sarah remembered him mentioning a high school girl who’d come to clean the cabin. “Emmy?” she asked.

“That’s her. She’s a good kid, really. She’s just young. Doesn’t think.”

“She waited on me this morning.”

He flashed her a smile. “You went back to Suze’s?”

“Sure did.”

“Always knew you had spunk. How’d it go?”

“Better.”

“Good. It’ll keep on getting better, too.” He sobered. “You ought to stay, Sarah. Quit that job with Carrigan and work for us. We’ve got to find somebody, and frankly, not everybody can handle Lane.”

Apparently he didn’t know she’d been fired. “Yeah, well, I can’t handle Lane either.”

“I heard different.” The grin was back. “But seriously, we need some help. Emmy won’t do it, because she doesn’t want to do ranch work. Only reason she took the part-time position was to make money. I think she’s kind of scared of the horses, and let me tell you, that girl is clumsy with a capital
C
. She manages to feed the horses a little grain, but mostly she spills it.”

Sarah smiled.

“It is kind of funny sometimes, but not today. I guess she thought Lane was still going to be here, because I can’t imagine she’d leave me to this on purpose.” He gestured toward the chair, the hose, the grain. “I thought he was going to be around too. He said he was getting off the road for a week or two, and then he left first thing this morning.”

So Lane hadn’t planned on leaving. He’d done it for her, and now Trevor had to deal with the fallout.

“Well, I’ll help for today,” she said, scooping grain into the gray’s feed bucket. “Where’s the sweet feed?”

***

Sarah stabbed the manure fork into the ground and watched the horses milling in the corrals. The smile on her lips felt strained, as if she hadn’t used those muscles for a while, but she felt genuinely happy for the first time in weeks—maybe months. There were a few new foals in the pens, spring babies who’d just passed the gangly, wobbly stage and were gallivanting about while their mommas watched indulgently. An older mare stood in the shade next to the barn, one leg cocked, eyes closed as she simply enjoyed the sunshiny day. Sarah felt herself relax too, picking up on the mare’s calm. That feeling of peace hadn’t been there for a long time. Once in a while her conversation with Kelsey crept into the back of her mind, but she shook it off and kept working.

She’d spent the morning feeding horses and turning them out, following Trevor’s directions as to what horse went where. Then she’d spent an hour mucking stalls, forking the leavings into a rusty old trailer that she’d hauled out to the manure pile with an ancient, wheezing tractor. She’d forked it all back out again until beads of sweat rolled down her back, prickling the skin between her shoulder blades, and she was pretty sure she’d streaked her face with grime from wiping off the sweat. Her hair hung lank and damp over her forehead. She hadn’t felt this good in years.

She’d forgotten how therapeutic hard work could be. You didn’t have to think or strategize when you cleaned stalls; you could just shut down your mind and shovel.

What if this was her job? What if she went to a place like this every day, instead of an office? She felt like herself here, not like an imposter. Maybe Lane was right, and she needed to find her old self again.

But she couldn’t do it here, with the man who bought Flash. Could she?

Maybe Kelsey had a point. Maybe she should stop blaming “the buyer” for all that had happened to her family. Now that she’d put a face on the shadowy figure who’d haunted her all these years, he seemed a whole lot less demonic.

But if she stopped blaming him, she’d have to blame herself. Because it wasn’t Roy’s mistake that had cost her family everything. It was her vanity that had cost Roy his life, and her failure that had lost Flash.

She grabbed a halter from a nail on the wall and threaded her way through the corrals, following the path pounded in the dirt. Horses lifted their heads as she passed, watching her briefly, then returning to their grazing. When she reached the corner of the barn, she looked at the round pen and smiled.

Cinnamon
Chrome.
He was two years old, barely started. And he was waiting for her.

As she approached, the horse jerked his head up and snorted, seeming to react to something inside the pen. Maybe a leaf had flipped up in the breeze, or a shadow shifted and spooked him. He’d seemed like a calm boy yesterday, but something was definitely setting him off. As she watched, he broke into a trot and moved past the gate out of sight. She watched him circle past it two more times before she got close enough to see what was happening.

The horse was loping in a circle around the pen, and at the center of the circle was Trevor. He spun his chair nimbly with one hand so he could keep the horse running. As Sarah stepped up to the gate, he gave her a grin.

“Lane said you worked this guy a little yesterday. He seemed to have some doubts you’d keep it going, so I figured I’d come out and make sure he didn’t forget what he learned.” He edged the chair to the right and Flash broke into a lope. “Seems like he’s doing good. Must be somethin’ to see after what happened with Flash, huh?”