Death on Heels (16 page)

“You stay fresher longer.” He laughed. “It’ll warm up.”

“Thanks a bunch, Tucker.” Her tights weren’t enough to keep the cold out. Buttercup neighed, and Lacey held tight to the reins.

Buttercup was blasé about getting saddled up, but Ricochet was so excited he was dancing a jig. Tucker slid
one boot into a stirrup and swung himself up and onto the saddle with a cowboy’s grace. Ricochet settled down immediately—the horse knew the boss was here, and he was eager to get to work.

“Let’s ride, Lacey.” She hugged Buttercup gently with her stirrups and they were off.

Lacey and Tucker argued through the afternoon as they rode over the rugged terrain of snowy sagebrush flats, sandstone hogbacks, and looming red orange bluffs. Tucker led them at a walking pace through tangled draws full of willows and cottonwoods, but wherever the country opened up and left them exposed he let Ricochet break into a run. Lacey kept Buttercup glued to Ricochet’s flank, the wind stinging her face. She knew she would be saddle sore later.

She had no idea where they were. At times Lacey swore they were riding in circles, the same bluffs and draws recycling again and again. She relied on Tucker to know where he was going: down horse trails, across dirt roads and jeep tracks, and through creek beds. Her heart in her throat, Lacey held on and prayed.

It seemed like hours before they rode up over a rise and found an old cabin nestled in a draw at the edge of a small winding creek. There was even a stand of a few scraggly trees, bent low from the winds. A barbed wire fence barred their path to the cabin.

Hung on the wire gate, as if a warning to strangers, was the carcass of a long-dead animal, the size of a large dog. The long, narrow skull was smooth, bare bone, with jaws full of gleaming white teeth and an impressive set of canines. Stripped vertebrae protruded like white piano keys from the shreds of fur and skin that still clung to the body. One paw was raised as if to ask a last question.

Lacey pulled Buttercup up short and stared. “Ewww! What on earth is that?”

“Coyote.” Tucker dismounted and swung the gate open. A dead coyote was mere landscape to him. “Pretty, huh?”

“And why is a skeletal coyote hanging on the fence?”

“It’s a caution to other coyotes to stay away.”

“Does it work?”

He shrugged. “You see any other coyotes?” Lacey wasn’t sure whether he was joking. Buttercup sniffed delicately and edged, her tail swishing, past the dead coyote and its empty eye sockets. Lacey shuddered. This sure as hell wasn’t Washington, D.C. There, of course, the coyotes had a free rein, and they wore business suits.

As good-natured as Buttercup was, Lacey just wanted to get off her mount and feel the ground under her boots again. Tucker reached for Lacey as she slid off the horse on rubber legs and almost hit the ground, but he caught her and held her. Perhaps a moment too long.

“You look all done in, sunshine.”

“Me? I’m fresh as a daisy.” She yawned. “What are we doing here?”

“We’re here for the night.”

“What! The night? But we can’t stay—I mean I thought—”
What about food? And the law? And Vic? I don’t even want him to have
dinner
with his ex! I can’t stay with Tucker. Overnight?!

Tucker paid no attention to her. “We need to think. Make a plan. This is a good place.” He led the horses to shelter among the trees, where they were hidden from view. Tucker tied up Buttercup and Ricochet and filled their feedbags from Ricochet’s saddlebag.

“It looks deserted.” She didn’t know whether to be relieved or not.

“Most likely. No one uses this cabin this time of year. Not much,” Tucker said. “But we can take cover here. Owner was a friend of mine. Died a few years ago. We can stay warm, figure out what to do next. Why don’t you go on in and start a fire?”

“Start a fire?” She must have had a stupid look on her face.

Tucker fiddled with the cabin door and it opened. “Go on inside out of the wind and I’ll finish taking care of the horses. I need to haul up some water from the creek for them.”

She stood there, staring at him. “Who lives here?”

“Nobody.”

“Great,” she muttered, looking at the listing structure. “Now you’re taking me to a haunted cabin. Where are we anyway?”

“Somewhere in Yampa County. You know it’s a big crazy quilt. We’ve been crossing public land, part of it owned by the state, part of it Bureau of Land Management, right up to that fence with the coyote on it. At the moment, we’re on no-man’s-land. Move along, Chantilly.”

“My name is Lacey.” She stood stock-still. “And if you didn’t notice, it’s the middle of winter, it’s freezing, it’s the middle of nowhere!” Lacey was just warming up. “I’m starving, I’ve been on a horse half the day, I’ve been abducted, and you’re an outlaw! What happened to
you
, Tucker?”

“Stuff happens.” He shrugged again. “And,
Lacey
, sunshine, you used to be tougher.”

“I am tough! I mean—you know what I mean. Meanie.” She glared at him. She untied her tote bag, slung it over her shoulder, and stalked past him. Tucker picked up a few logs from a woodshed on the side of the cabin. She noticed there was an outhouse too, a dozen yards or so past the cabin. The thought of having to use a freezing old outhouse, or
any
kind of outhouse, made her groan.

He stacked the wood in her arms, topped the stack with some smaller twigs for kindling, and gave her a gentle push toward the door. “These ought to burn.”

She stepped into a dark space with still air. A musty chill hung over the place. The owner may have been dead for a few years, but the cabin showed signs of other visitors.
How many people know about this cabin? And where the hell are we?

The dwelling was in pretty good shape and the unbroken glass in all its windows was a sure sign, Vic had taught her, of recent habitation. A scarred wooden table and two chairs centered the main room, and a brown bachelor-plaid sofa anchored one wall. How on earth anyone had managed to get that hideous thing out here was a mystery to Lacey, but ugly plaid sofas never died.
A water-stained “Colorful Colorado” calendar, ten years out of date, hung crookedly on the wall over the sofa. The cabin was all of two rooms, the larger one a combined living room, dining room, and kitchen. The second room featured a large bed with a stained bare mattress and a blanket, and a set of bunk beds. Tattered brown insulated curtains hung on thin rods at the windows.

No one could live here,
she thought.

Lacey dumped her armload of wood by the stove and searched in vain for a light switch, realizing with a start that there were none. There was no electricity at all. Not that it would be turned on if there was. She found a couple of hurricane lamps and candles, and fresh-looking matches from the Red Rose Bar in Sagebrush.

An impressive and ornate cast-iron woodstove fitted into the fireplace box for both cooking and heat. It had four flat burners with an oven below, set next to the wood box, and a food warmer up above. On top of the stove sat a teakettle, and there was a reservoir on the side for heating water. Lacey checked to make sure the flue was open and prayed she wouldn’t burn down the place. There was no telling when this thing had last been cleaned, if it ever had.
Who’s the patron saint of woodstoves?
she wondered, offering up a silent prayer to whoever might be listening. Lacey also called on her long-ago, half-remembered Girl Scout training to help her build a fire. She’d never scored a merit badge in that particular skill.

A stack of musty newspapers, some dating back five and six years, was stored in a tin wastebasket by the woodstove. The papers were, of course,
The Sagebrush Daily Press.
As she crumpled them into the firebox for tinder, she couldn’t resist reading a couple of headlines, curious about the stories, and the reporters who wrote them after she left town. Any stranger reading this newspaper would believe the high school football team was the single most important activity in the state. Lacey put the sports sections in the pile to burn, and set aside a few front sections to read later. One headline caught her eye: B
ARTENDER
S
HAKES
T
HEM AND
S
TIRS
T
HEM
.

Written five years earlier, the story was about one of
the victims, Ally Newport, who had been voted “Favorite Bartender” in some kind of readers’ survey
The Daily Press
had concocted.

Good grief
, Lacey thought.
Muldoon ought to have a sign on his desk: The Hucksterism Starts Here!

She scanned the story for quotes and ignored Muldoon’s blather.

“I love my customers,” says Ally Newport, our readers’ favorite bartender, behind the bar at the Little Snake Saloon. “I remember their favorite drinks. I listen to their hunting stories. I love my job!”

The story was a fluff piece, a picture of a professionally perky good-time gal. The photograph showed Ally standing in front of the Little Snake, wearing a white shirt, blue jeans, and a white apron wrapped around her waist. She had a wide smile and held a beer in her hand as if serving it up.

Lacey folded the page and tossed it in her tote bag so she wouldn’t inadvertently pitch it into the fire. She lit a rolled-up page of high school football to warm the flue and made sure the draft was going up and out and not coming in. She stripped some of the bark off the logs to add to the kindling and stuffed crumpled paper in between the logs.

It was so not Lacey’s thing, Girl Scout training notwithstanding. She lit a match to the crumpled newspaper, but the fire proved balky. She poked at it and added pine needles, pine cones, and more football and basketball games and swim team scores. Finally, the fire caught and started to crackle, the dry logs leaping into flame. She leaned back on her heels to admire her work.

“I see you got it going,” Tucker said. She hadn’t heard him come in behind her. He had an armload of firewood. “We’ll be warm in no time.” He dropped the wood and pulled a red bandana from his jeans and wiped a smudge from her nose. “You got a little bit of soot. Or maybe newsprint. There, I got it.”

There was a pause.
If he were Vic…But he’s not.
“Thanks.” Lacey pulled out a hand wipe from a little packet in her tote bag and wiped her hands clean. “You seem to know your way around this place.”

“I do. I put some of the glass in myself. I used to visit old man Thompson up here. He’s buried up on the hill. Place may not look like much, but he loved it. He wouldn’t mind us taking shelter here.”

“Good to know. But someone must own it.”

“His granddaughter. Out of town. She paid the taxes, but I guess she hasn’t found time to visit, or decide what she’s going to do with it.”

“Someone’s been here,” Lacey said. “The matches look new.”

“Kit and I’ve been around some to make sure it didn’t fall down,” Tucker said, inspecting the stove. “And there are the horny teenagers with no place else to go. Caught a few of them last summer. Ran ’em off, but I knew they’d be back.”

“The cabin doesn’t look vandalized. Nothing’s wrecked.” Lacey looked at a broken chair. “Not very wrecked anyway.” She trailed her finger through the dust on the table.

“Cheaper than Motel 6.”

“It’s filthy.” Her nose tickled at the dust. “And you think it’s turned into a no-tell motel?”

“Too risky for kids to go to a motel in Sagebrush. Somebody’d see your car, your parents would find out, and the backseat of the station wagon is a little cold this time of year. A cabin out of the way up here? Pretty romantic. Particularly if you’re seventeen.” Cole Tucker sounded suspiciously like the voice of experience.

“Not my idea of romance.” Lacey sneezed. “I hope they bring fresh sheets and pillowcases.”

“You are such a girly girl, Chantilly Lace.” Tucker laughed. “My guess is they bring in sleeping bags. Maybe a blanket. And lots of beer. You got to admit, it’s cozy.”

“I can still see my breath.” Her limbs were stiff from the saddle and her clothes smelled like Buttercup. She stretched her legs. “I need to wash.” She turned on the tap in the sink. Nothing.

“Oh, yeah. Meant to tell you. Used to be well water. But it’s hard work to keep up a well,” Tucker said. “I’ll get some more water for us from the creek.” He picked up a large bucket by the stove and inspected it for holes.

“Great. Just great. I need to use the outhouse too.”

“Let me check it first,” Tucker said.

“Check for what? It’s not like I’m going anywhere else.”

“Varmints,” he said. “Badgers, skunks, bears. That kind of thing.”

“Bears in the outhouse? Is there a Motel 6 handy?” He laughed and opened the door for her, and she reluctantly trudged outside. “I hope they find us soon.”

Tucker gallantly made sure the outhouse was clear of bears. While she acquainted herself with the primitive facilities, he collected water from the creek for washing and drinking.

“I rinsed out the bucket.” She gave Tucker The Look. “Why, Chantilly, this is Rocky Mountain springwater.” He poured it into the reservoir on the side of the stove and went for another bucketful.

“We’ll have to boil it,” she said when he came back, eyeing the old teakettle on the stove. She blew the dust out of it. “What if there’s a dead coyote floating in your Rocky Mountain spring?”

Tucker shook his head. “I hate to say this, Chantilly, darling, but I don’t think you’ll be winning any Frontierswoman of the Year Award.”

Lacey Smithsonian was beginning to hate Cole Younger Tucker. The gray sky darkened ominously. It was later than she thought. She’d had fond hopes of their being found by now. And laughing about all this with Vic, over martinis and a steak.
Where the hell are the police? Where is Vic?
Where am I?

“Where are we? And how old is this place?”

“Edge of the Sand Wash. This place was built in the Twenties or Thirties. Lot of homesteading going on back then. You’ll feel better after we eat. I promise.”

Inside a yellow-painted cupboard over the sink were several old cans of chili, soups, and stew. Lipton’s tea
bags filled a Mason jar, and a rusty can opener hung on a nail on the wall. A few chipped dishes and a beat-up old frying pan were left on an open shelf, an empty coffee can held some forks, knives, and spoons, and a vintage coffeepot rested on one of the burners. Unfortunately, there seemed to be no coffee. Or soap. Or running water. She wiped out the pans with another moist towelette.