Defiance (The Defending Home Series Book 1) (7 page)

Dale crossed his arms. “You’ve come looking to make a trade then, is that it?”

“We’ve come looking to reason with you, Dale.” Randy held a piece of paper up and waved it in the air like a sagging campaign banner. “This here’s bylaw two forty-seven which stipulates that the State of Arizona, and by extension the town of Encendido, owns all wells and aquifers.”

“Is that true?” Colton asked, concerned.

“Depends who you ask,” Dale said, before returning to Randy. “First thing you should know, Sheriff, is that that scrap of paper isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.”

Randy cocked an eyebrow. “Oh, really? I didn’t take you for a lawyer, Dale. How do you figure that?”

“I don’t need a law degree,” Dale replied, “because I know for certain this thirty-acre plot was settled by my great-great grandfather, Samuel Hardy, a dozen years before Arizona was even a state. So you can go and wave any piece of paper in the air you want, but when all is said and done, they’re all gonna end up in the same place. A place that’s dark and unpleasant, where the sun doesn’t shine.”

Clay flung out a litany of curse words, charging for Dale, only to be held back by the other deputies.

Dale felt Colton brush past him too and swung out to grab hold of his nephew. The kid was ready at the drop of a hat to throw himself into a fight, but the best fighters knew when to hold back.

Seeing Colton being physically restrained, Clay couldn’t help egging him on.

“Like father, like son,” the deputy said, grinning. “I can’t wait to throw your ass behind bars, just like your old man.”

Colton’s face contorted with rage as Walter joined in to prevent things from getting out of hand. Twenty feet away, Randy and his men were having a difficult time of their own, keeping Clay from breaking free.

The two men were screaming at each other.

“You’re nothing but a two-bit thug hiding behind a cop’s uniform,” Colton shouted, his voice straining to rise over the commotion.

And for a second, Clay seemed to calm down, pacing back and forth, telling his deputy friends he was all right, that the kid hadn’t gotten to him. They took him at his word and when their focus shifted back to Dale’s group, Clay reached into the cruiser closest to him and came out waving a pistol. Colton was right, the man was nothing more than a low-level criminal, so why did any of them think that a uniform would do anything to change that?  

A shot rang out as Clay pushed past the other deputies, striking Colton in the side. Colton fell and reached behind him, producing Dale’s Ruger, firing twice. One round struck Clay in the chest and the other in the neck as the deputy’s legs gave out and he crumpled to the ground, his service pistol falling by his side.

Even from here, Dale could see the spray of blood pumping from the wound in Clay’s neck. The bullet must have hit his carotid artery. If he wasn’t given medical attention immediately, he was sure to die. But instead of helping him, two of the three deputies ran to grab their guns. This wasn’t what Dale had wanted, in spite of the contentious debate he had known was about to unfold. An invisible hand pushed him toward the juniper tree and their cache of weapons. He tossed a pistol to Shane and took aim with the shotgun. Next to them, Walter aimed the AR-14, doing an excellent job of keeping his hands steady.

Both sides trained weapons on each other as the seconds ticked by at glacial speed. Fractions of seconds felt like hours.

“You need to get your brother to a hospital,” Dale told Randy, who was down by Clay’s side, aiming a Glock in their direction. A few feet away, Colton was clutching his blood-soaked shirt, squealing with pain.

“We’ll stand down if you leave right now,” Dale told them.

Something about the look in Randy’s eyes told Dale the sheriff didn’t want to leave, that he wanted to go down in a hail of bullets.

Dale shouted at him, practically commanding him to leave before Randy’s eyes cleared and he dragged Clay into his cruiser. The other deputies did the same and one by one, their cars backed out and sped away.

Shane and Walter were already tending to Colton.

Brooke, Nicole and Ann rushed out, worried to death.

“The bullet’s gone clean through the meat of his love handle,” Walter said, relieved. “Ladies, I hate to sound indelicate, but if you could grab us a couple of tampons...”

“Excuse me?” an exasperated Ann said to her husband. “Walter, have you lost your mind?”

“For the wound, dear. We need to plug it.”

Colton struggled to his feet, Dale and Shane on either side of him. The kid wasn’t supposed to have a weapon on him, and definitely wasn’t supposed to be mouthing off. Clay had pushed his buttons and in return Colton had done the same. Silently, Dale prayed that Clay would pull through. The situation was already bad enough with a deputy being shot. To Randy’s camp, it wouldn’t matter who was really at fault. And it would matter even less if Clay died from his wounds, a possibility Dale didn’t want to consider because it would mean they weren’t simply in trouble with the law, it would mean they were at war.

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D
ale was busy mixing concrete in a wheelbarrow by the road when Nicole appeared and handed him a metal cup filled with water. 

“Thought you might be thirsty,” she said, smiling. It looked like she was wearing makeup.

He tilted the cup back and downed every last drop.

“Appreciate it,” he said, handing the empty cup back to her. He was wearing a broad-brimmed hat to protect from the scorching sun, but staying hydrated on a day like this was just as important. On the ground next to him sat the fully loaded shotgun as well as his Ruger.

Dale continued mixing the concrete with a rake as she looked on, fanning her face with her free hand.

“Any word on Colton?” he asked.

“My mom’s taking care of him. The bleeding’s stopped and it doesn’t look like anything vital was hit.” She watched him work. “What are you doing?”

He stopped long enough to wipe away the sweat building on his forehead. “Randy and his men came up the drive in their patrol cars like they owned the place and I aim to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”

“You’re creating concrete posts?”

“They call them bollards,” he explained. “And they’re sometimes used to prevent cars from driving through pedestrian areas. I’ll pour a handful, setting them in these thick cardboard tubes, and stagger them. Any car aiming to reach the house will need to do a slow slalom course. Either way, it’ll give us plenty of time to react.”

Nicole looked confused. She was bright, but not so much when it came to home defense, it seemed. “Can’t they just walk up?”

Dale kept mixing. “Sure, but they won’t have their cars to use for cover.”

“Oh,” she said, suddenly concerned. “We don’t intend to shoot more deputies, do we?”

“We never planned on shooting any in the first place,” he replied, struggling to keep patient so she could grasp the seriousness of the situation. “The sheriff and his brother were the ones who created this mess, but now it’s quickly spiraling out of control. Where’s everyone else?”

Nicole shrugged. “I think Daddy and Brooke are grabbing the barbed wire from the barn you asked them to get. My mom’s with Colton.”

“And Shane?”

“Uh, making something to eat, I think.”

Shane showed up a moment later, holding a sandwich.

Dale straightened his back. “You know, the food we have needs to be rationed.” The irritation in his voice wasn’t lost on his younger brother, whose mouth dropped open.

“What? I needed something to eat.”

“You were there when Clay opened fire and was shot in the chest,” Dale said.

Shane looked on in silence, wondering where this was going.

“Don’t you get what’s going on here, Shane? The sheriff’s brother is in the hospital and at some point he’s gonna get his wits about him and come to even the score. When that happens, I don’t plan on being caught flat-footed again.”

“Trust me, I see what’s going on,” Shane said, “but there’s another way to handle the situation. I mean, the town wants some water and we have more than enough.”

“Enough for what?” Dale shot back. “You know how these things go. You offer an inch and they’ll take a mile.”

His brother’s hands went up. “Hey, I’m on your side, I’m just saying maybe a compromise would make everyone happy.”

“Maybe it would. But I never want to be in a position where I’m asking a town government filled with crooks for permission to drink from my own well. Maybe back in the day when Joe Wilcox and Mayor Curtis Long were in charge, my feelings might have been different. Men like Randy Gaines and Hugh Reid, they’re a different breed altogether.”

“That may be so,” Shane admitted. “Just seems to me that all men can be reasoned with.”

“Words that look mighty fine on paper, but what’ll you tell Nicole’s parents when the water runs dry? What’ll I tell my daughter? ‘Sorry about that, now we wait for the National Guard to show up and save us?’ I don’t think so.”

Nicole touched Dale’s elbow. “We didn’t mean to upset you.”

“I’m not upset,” Dale said, although the tone of his voice said otherwise. “I need everyone on deck and committing a hundred percent. There’s plenty of work ahead of us and not nearly enough time to get it done.”

Shane glanced back at the house. “Sounds like something Dad used to say.”

Resting on his rake, Dale shook his head. “Maybe it is. I guess both of us got stuff from the old man.”

“You got way more than I did,” Shane said quickly. “Working around the property was therapeutic for him. He always had some grand project on the go. But I also see him in the little things you do. The way you clear your throat before saying prayers during supper. The way your mouth drops open and your eyebrows pop up when you’re trying to be silly. Mostly in the way you take things so seriously.” He paused. “To be honest, I wish I had some of those traits. I wish I could still call the old man and ask for his opinion, even when I knew I wouldn’t like what he had to say. I miss the way Mom wouldn’t let me leave without an armful of leftovers.”

In spite of himself, Dale found himself grinning with the reminiscence. “You’d just moved out on your own,” he said.

“That’s right. Which will make it ten years this July when the house burned down.”

“I was speaking to a fireman friend of mine in Encendido,” Dale told him, “who said most of the time, folks in a fire don’t die in the flames. They suffocate from the smoke. They probably passed out and never knew what hit them.”

It was a somber thought, but one Dale’s mind often seemed to return to. Barely two weeks after Shane got his own place, an electrical fire had broken out in the middle of the night and engulfed the whole house. Went up like a pack of matches. Their parents never had a chance. The loss had been devastating for all of them, Shane in particular. He and the old man hadn’t seen eye to eye very often. Their mother had coddled him as a child, enamored by her adorable baby who had grown into a handsome young man. Dale wasn’t bad to look at by any means, but there was an almost magnetic quality about Shane. It was something nearly impossible to put your finger on, although you felt it from the first moment you met him. Whatever you called it, that charisma had landed Nicole without much effort, along with a string of other attractive women throughout the years. In many ways, he lived the life of a young Maharaja, indulging in many of life’s pleasures which had been handed to him on a silver platter.

Unlike so many others, Dale and their father hadn’t been fooled, which had resulted in strained relations between Shane and them. It was perhaps for this reason that his father had willed Dale the land. There was no doubt who was the more responsible custodian, even if for Shane it had proven a difficult pill to swallow. Following their deaths, Dale had used what little money he had inherited to rebuild the family home and continue the Hardy family legacy.

As though reading his mind, Shane reached out and shook his brother’s hand. “No hard feelings, right?” He was talking about his lack of participation, but he might as well have been talking about their long and sometimes complicated family history.

“Not in the least,” Dale replied. “Now go get a pair of gloves off the shelf in the garage and give me a hand, would you?”

Shane offered up that winning smile, his teeth impossibly white, his hair immaculate. “Sure thing.”

With all but Colton assembled, Dale set out his plan.

“I’d been meaning to put up a split-rail fence around the property for some time now,” he said, “but never got around to it. Stacked over by the barn are a large number of wooden posts with no rails. That part was still on my to-do list, but it’s looking like plans have changed. We’re gonna replace the wooden rails with strips of barbed wire.”

“You looking to cover all thirty acres?” Walter said, sounding overwhelmed.

“Definitely not,” Dale replied. “We don’t have enough posts for that anyway. I do think fencing in the front and circling around the crops behind the house and then back up to the road again is doable.”

“This is a big job,” Shane said. “Might take a while, especially with Colton recovering.”

Dale nodded. His brother was right.

“Not to mention we definitely need someone on watch,” Walter said. “We can’t afford to be caught with our pants down when the sheriff returns.”

“Maybe he won’t,” Ann said, hopeful.

“No, he’ll be back,” Dale assured them. “There’s a history between Randy and I. Something akin to bad blood, you might say, and I’m sure he’s itching to even the score. Maybe at first when he was enforcing the mayor’s orders he might have only been doing his job, but now it’s become personal.”

“Colton only shot to protect us,” Nicole said, glancing around in amazement that such a thing could happen.

“And that young deputy, Clay, clearly shot first,” Ann added.

“Prove it,” Dale said.

They grew quiet for a moment, stunned by his response.

“What do you mean?” Shane asked. “We saw it with our own eyes.”

“I mean just what I said. And you’re right, most of us saw what happened. Clay lost his temper and did something stupid, but do you really think any of that matters? I’m sure those deputies remember a completely different sequence of events. In their minds, Colton went haywire and Clay happened to be in the line of fire.”