Cowboy Justice (6 page)

She’d lost her favorite hat when she fell from Lincoln the day before, so she grabbed her back-up—a worn, soft cream felt Stetson with a braided leather band. She led Growly out, pausing at the door to reach above it and touch the smooth steel of the horseshoe mounted there, a gift from Kate Parrish’s father many years ago, that her father had nailed over the door with the promise it would bring her luck.

When she mounted Growly, a particularly sharp pain shot through her left arm. She ran her hand over the bandage and her fingers came back bloody. Dang it all, she’d probably ripped the scab open. Amy would strangle her tonight when she helped Rachel change the bandage and saw the damage. Oh, well. Nothing she could do to change that now.

She walked Growly out of the stable yard, her thoughts drifting to the day the horseshoe was given to her. The day she’d come to consider the most liberating day of her life.

She’d been ten years old.

Her memory began in the bakery section of John Justin’s Grocery Store on Main Street during one of her mom’s most intense bipolar meltdowns. Back then, Rachel had never heard of the word
bipolar,
though she lived in a house held hostage by the illness.

Rachel and her sisters’ reactions to their mom’s depression were as different as their personalities. Rachel’s anxiety was paralyzing. She clearly remembered, during Mom’s outbursts, not being able to breathe or make her legs work. Standing there—frozen, her eyes riveted to the scene—her body became a sponge, absorbing the pain of everyone around her, along with the fear. She took it all in and made it her own.

Amy, almost four years younger than Rachel, took Mom’s episodes as a personal affront. Maybe because she looked the most like Mom, or maybe because she’d been born with her heart on her sleeve, but for reasons Rachel didn’t understand—and probably Amy didn’t either—she’d exacerbate the situation, picking fights, goading Mom on. Having her own parallel meltdown.

Jenna, nine years Rachel’s junior, seemed oblivious, like she’d been born with skin too resilient for their volatile home life to penetrate. When Mom would start into an episode, she’d wander off to play. For the longest time, Rachel thought Jenna would be the one to emerge into adulthood undamaged. Then Jenna turned thirteen and she turned wild—partying, drinking, running off for days at a time until a deputy, Vaughn most always, dragged her home kicking and screaming.

Rachel couldn’t remember what Mom’s trigger had been the day of her meltdown at John Justin’s, or if there even was one, but she remembered Mom throwing loaves of bread at the store’s baker, shouting obscenities. Then six-year-old Amy started clearing loaves of bread off the shelves while screaming at the top of her lungs. Jenna, one at the time, popped Cheerios in her mouth from the stroller tray and watched.

In the midst of the anarchy, Rachel, paralyzed and fighting the churning pain of her tummy, felt her fear dissolve for the first time ever. The scene before her narrowed until it seemed as if she were watching it on a small television at the opposite end of a long hallway. Then her legs unfroze.

She took a step back. Then another. Exhilarated by her newfound freedom of movement, she turned her back on her mom and sisters. And she walked away. Stepping through the sliding glass doors of John Justin’s into the quiet, sunlit street was a feeling that would stay with her forever.

It was her moment of liberation.

Their farm was too far away for her to walk home, so she’d gone to the feed store. The Parrish family who owned it had always been kind to Rachel when she’d shopped there with her dad. They passed her sweets and told her jokes. That day, she walked into the feed store, and Mr. Parrish believed her lie that her mom had driven off and forgotten her, probably because everybody in Catcher Creek knew what Bethany Sorentino was like. Mr. Parrish gave her a peppermint and a horseshoe that had been laying on the counter, explaining that it would bring her luck. Then he drove her home, where, horseshoe in hand, she set off on foot over the fields and pastures until she was hopelessly lost.

Hours later, her father, on his horse, found her sitting against a boulder. He sat with her for a long time, and when she asked if she could start working the farm with him in the mornings and after school, he hugged her and told her,
Of course you can, Jelly Bean.

She missed her dad so much. Not the part of him who gambled and schemed their bank accounts dry, but the man who’d taught her to be a farmer. The man who found her when she was lost. This was her second spring without him, and though the loss wasn’t nearly as acute as it had been a year earlier, her grief remained, tempered only by the anger and embarrassment she felt at how blind she’d been to his faults.

A mile into the ride, when she sensed Growly had warmed up enough to handle some speed, she nudged his flanks. They took off over the landscape, both woman and horse needing the exertion of a long, hard run to ease the burden of their grief.

From his vantage point at the top of the mesa, Vaughn looked at the gash in the dirt running along the twenty-foot drop of the mesa’s face. The path Wallace Meyer Jr. took on his way to the valley. Stratis was on the scene with him, and the two had worked all morning to reconstruct a timeline of events from the previous day.

They’d begun in the canyon and followed the path of footprints around the south side of the mesa, where the slope was gentle enough to drive a truck up or walk. The footprints turned to scuffs once they reached the top of the slope, the marks of someone scooting on their knees. The scuff marks ended next to the imprint of a truck tire where, it seemed, Rachel stood and fired at the men. On the ground, scattered near the footprints, were six .38 bullet casings.

Not a good find. Not at all.

Which was why Vaughn was standing on the edge of the mesa, watching a hawk circle in the distance while he overcame his urge to kick something.

His interview with Wallace Jr. yesterday had lasted hours and yielded nothing except a grudging admittance—a demonstration of cooperation, his lawyer proclaimed—of the identity of the fourth man at the scene, the suspect currently at large with Elias Baltierra. Shawn Henigin. Henigin had a history of petty thievery and drug charges from Tucumcari to Santa Fe, the most recent arrest being a year earlier for possession of a stolen car. The charge hadn’t stuck, as the car owner had a sudden change of heart and decided he’d allowed Henigin to borrow it.

Kirby and Molina were equally unsuccessful tracking down Henigin and Baltierra. At the county line to the south, they found a truck matching the one in Rachel’s photographs as far as they could tell. Hard to determine exactly, given that it’d been torched to a crumbling shell. Four AR-15 rifles, also torched, were discovered in the backseat. That accounted for all the rifles in Rachel’s crime scene photographs, but it certainly didn’t mean Vaughn was going to amend the statewide APB out on the two suspects identifying them as armed and dangerous.

The state’s forensic lab towed the truck to their facility in Albuquerque to process it, but Vaughn didn’t have any high hopes they’d find a single trace of evidence in the wreckage.

Neither was Vaughn holding his breath in anticipation of Henigin and Baltierra’s capture. Too often in border states like New Mexico, suspects found a way to skip out of the country, perhaps with the aid of one of the many illegal immigrant smugglers who haunted border cities in both countries and knew all the tricks to sneaking across the border undetected.

Stratis sidled up next to him after a few minutes. Despite the shade created by the brim of his brown hat, he squinted as he took stock of the valley, his angular features set in a hard mask, his arms crossed over his chest.

Stratis was an indispensible member of Vaughn’s department, and with only a couple years separating their ages, everything on paper said the two of them should’ve been fast friends. Both were Quay County natives who’d worked for various law-enforcement entities for a similar number of years, and both were known for their unwavering commitment to professionalism and taking a hard line stance against police corruption, which were two of the main reasons Vaughn had promoted him to undersheriff after his election.

Hell, Stratis would’ve made a top-notch sheriff if he hadn’t had such a strong aversion to public attention. But, for whatever reason, their personalities had never quite meshed. They worked well together, but couldn’t seem to have a real conversation about anything other than a case. Not that Vaughn was looking for more friends—he had plenty—but it would’ve been nice to feel like he knew more about the man than his arrest record.

“The footprints that begin in the canyon and continue up the south side of the mesa match Rachel Sorentino’s shoe size,” Stratis said.

“I know.”

Stratis shifted to look at him. “She reloaded. Twice. You know what that means.”

Vaughn chewed the inside of his cheek. Once the flare of frustration subsided, he regarded Stratis full in the face. “Not my first case, okay? I’m well aware of what that means.”

The two shells in the canyon and the six .38 rounds scattered near the footprints meant she’d taken the time to manually remove the casings from the revolver and reload the weapon. Even more damning was that when he’d arrived on scene and took the revolver from her hand, he found six more empty casings inside. She’d fired fourteen rounds total, and even if the first two she fired from the canyon were heat of the moment shots, the act of reloading—twice—spoke of a conscious choice. Premeditation all the way. Thank goodness she’d taken photographs of the four men and their rifles, lending just cause to her actions.

“She needs to come in for another interview. Today.” Stratis paused, then added, “I think I should handle it.”

Hell, no. “Binderman called from the hospital. She was released a couple hours ago. I’ll pay her a visit this afternoon.”

Stratis’s lips smashed into a straight line. Narrowing his eyes, he looked over Vaughn’s shoulder. “She can’t be here.”

Vaughn pivoted, following Stratis’s glare, and saw Rachel racing across the valley on horseback.

Her ever-present ponytail whipped in the wind beneath a cowboy hat that seemed to be staying on her head out of pure stubbornness, despite her speed. Today, as she usually did, she drove her horse hard and fast, eating up the ground they traveled over, her body a fluid, graceful wonder.

The first time they’d met in this valley, on an afternoon two weeks into their affair, she’d ridden horseback. Vaughn had leaned against the hood of his patrol car, rendered frozen by awe and arousal at the tough, quiet command with which she moved through nature, the give and take of power, as if the land and sky and horse existed only for her, and in turn, she lived only for them. Watching her, he’d thought at the time,
She yields that power to me
. The thought had ripped through him like an orgasm. He loved controlling her pleasure, peeling away her inhibitions along with her clothes, making her as wild as the land surrounding them.

She’d made him wild too. With her, he’d become something other, something extraordinary—a part of the earth, just as she was. In this untamed valley, he’d clutched the soil in his hands as he rose above her. He’d spent himself onto the ground beneath the shade tree. Lying beside her on a blanket, he’d watched the reflection of the clouds in her eyes, the sun on her cheeks. He’d breathed in the fragrance of dried grasses and snow melting into the red earth.

But mostly, there had been Rachel—naked, open, blooming for him. Only him.

The tingling in his throat kicked to life, as if he’d swallowed bugs and they were crawling back up his esophagus. He looked away from her. Now, with his undersheriff standing next to him, wasn’t the time to get a hard-on over memories of a former lover. And this valley wasn’t a place of refuge and discovery as it once had been. It was a crime scene, and, as a person involved in the crime, Rachel wasn’t welcome there.

“Did you know she was coming?” Stratis’s voice was flat, but Vaughn read disapproval in his words, even though there was no way Stratis would know Vaughn and Rachel’s history. They’d been so careful.

Then he recalled the photograph on Rachel’s camera. Maybe Stratis did have the right idea after all. Maybe he should’ve agreed to let Stratis conduct her interview.

“Something you want to say to me, Wesley?”

He never called Stratis by his first name, and it hung in the air between them, loaded with warning. Stratis held his ground. He met Vaughn’s
don’t-fuck-with-me
stare with one of his own in a face-off that went on long enough that Vaughn knew, sooner or later, the two of them would come to blows over Rachel.

Then Stratis’s eyelid twitched. “I’m going to head to the office to touch base with my source about stolen AR-15s.” He glanced at Rachel.

Vaughn did the same. She was still a solid five minutes out. “You do that. I’ll be along shortly.”

He followed Stratis from the mesa to the patrol cars parked in the valley. While Stratis fired up his engine and got organized, Vaughn reached through the open passenger window of his own car. He groped in the glove compartment for the pack of cigarettes he kept on hand.

Stowing a pack in the car was a mind-over-matter trick he’d started his first day of quitting. There was a certain power in having the substance he was addicted to within reach and making the conscious choice every time he got behind the wheel not to succumb to temptation. Problem was, every now and then the pull of addiction was too strong to resist.

Leaning against the hood, he held the sealed pack and watched Stratis’s car disappear in a cloud of dust, his mind locked on Rachel and cigarettes. His fingers grew slick with clammy sweat, sticking to the cellophane wrapper as he tried fruitlessly to remove it. A few puffs would provide so much relief. He’d snub it out after that, but then maybe he could face Rachel without ripping his throat out to stop the tickle.

She’d smell it on me. If I took a quick smoke, she’d smell it on my breath and in my hair and on my clothes. Then again, if she got that close, I’d have bigger problems to worry about.