Patricia Rosemoor: Heart Of A Lawman

An eighteen-wheeler, horn blaring!

Jerking the wheel was her second mistake. The old truck took on a life of its own, skated sideways over the slick pavement. Fear and adrenaline flooding her, she tried to keep her head. Steer into the skid. Brake gently.

Too late.

A tire grabbed the shoulder and spat gravel, while the rear end spun around and off solid ground into nothingness. Her heart skipped a beat as the rest of the truck followed. Flew without wings. For a second, she felt suspended….

Suddenly, a roller-coaster drop whipped her head into the side window and churned her stomach into her throat. Then turned her as the upended truck careened downward.

Free fall…

Touchdown.

The crash sent an explosion along her nerves, straight to her mind. She was straining against the seat belt, her voice catching as she tried to remember a prayer.

To escape the pain, she gladly entered the darkness….

Three miles out of the crumbling town of Silver Springs, Barton Quarrels pulled his four-by-four onto the washboard-dirt ranch road that would throw him back half a lifetime. Everything looked the same, he thought. Worn cedar and barbed wire fences. Yellowing grasses. A handful of mostly white-faced livestock grazing the high desert pasture.

What he feared was that everything would be the same.

His kids had been quiet all the way up from Albuquerque. Sullen, really. They’d get over it. Had to. He was doing this for them.

Well mostly, anyhow.

“Almost there,” he told them. In an effort to engage them, to rustle some little enthusiasm where he knew there to be none, he asked, “So, after you get your stuff settled in your rooms, what do you want to do?”

“Nothing to do out here but count cows,” Daniel mumbled.

“As I remember, you used to like that, ’cause it meant you were on a horse.”

“That’s when I was a kid.”

“Yeah, right. I keep forgetting.”

As far as Bart was concerned, sixteen was far from adulthood, but he needn’t alienate Daniel more. The air between them already bristled with teenage hostility.

Bart stopped the vehicle at the pasture’s barrier, and his son jumped out to open the metal pipe and wire gate. Daniel waited until his father had pulled through the opening before swinging the gate closed and clambering back into the passenger seat. The ritual was one repeated all over the ranch, whose nearly sixty thousand acres were broken down into manageable pastures.

Bart waited until they were once more on the prowl, past the scale house where cattle on the way to market were weighed before being shipped.

Then he tried making conversation again, this time with his daughter. “Hey, Lainey, honey, want to take some photographs around the place this afternoon?” Photography being her hobby.

He glanced in the rearview mirror to check out the twelve-year-old, whose attention was seemingly glued to those boring cows.

“Mom would hate this,” she suddenly said, head churning forward, green eyes exactly like Sara’s boring into the back of his neck. “She’d hate you, putting our home up for sale, making us move.”

Bart tore his gaze from the mirror and put it back where it belonged—on the road. “Your mother didn’t have a hateful bone in her body.”

Unable to help gripping the steering wheel, he couldn’t imagine ever completely erasing the pain of loss that burdened him.

“It’s not too late, Dad,” Lainey continued darkly. “The house didn’t sell yet, so we can still go home….”

“The Curly-Q’s gonna be our home now.”

Ignoring the interruption, the girl insisted, “You can get your deputy’s badge back and everything!”

Not that he’d really lost it in the first place.

Though he hadn’t told his kids—he didn’t want to raise their hopes—Bart had been smart enough to leave himself a safety net, just in case. He’d taken a long-term leave of absence and could go back to his old job as long as it remained vacant. The sheriff hadn’t wanted to lose him and so had promised to stall things, to keep his spot open for several weeks, at least.

Just in case.

But even a city as small as Albuquerque had growing problems that made Bart’s gut quake, not for himself, but for those he loved. He’d lost a wife to violence less than a year ago. He wasn’t going to give up his kids, as well.

After his mother’s death, Daniel had secretly joined a gang and had gotten into trouble defacing the high school with cans of spray paint. Bart wondered what he hadn’t gotten caught at. While he’d made his son swear to quit the gang, he knew the promise he’d wrung out of the boy was illusory. Peer pressure would get him in the end and he’d be sneaking out with his friends again. It was only a matter of time unless Daniel was removed from the path of temptation.

And Bart was willing to do anything to protect his kids…even sell his soul.

He stared out at the devil’s playground.

Rich, volcanic-based grasslands stretched around them as far as the eye could see. An optical illusion that plains gradually gave way to mountains. Though they were in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo range, the foothills here were nearly seven thousand feet up.

Clear air. Piercing blue sky. A slice of heaven.

At least the land itself was….

They’d reached the pinñon-and-ponderosa-pine-limned rimrock, their future spread out before them in all its splendor. The road here was dotted with dark green cedar, rusting scrub oak and the occasional grayish juniper bush.

The skin along Bart’s spine prickled as he started the descent into the canyon cut by Silverado Creek, a fat ribbon of water that twisted and turned and rushed across the Curly-Q. Now its function was merely to appease thirsty cattle and to provide a water table for the surrounding grasslands, but at one time, the creek had serviced the mine, which lay farther up the canyon and connected to town by a road that was now all but impassable.

The first hairpin curve thrilled Bart as always, and, also as always, his stomach was ready for the second. What he wasn’t prepared for was the state of the road, rutted by washout rains. The vehicle dipped and bounced its way down and red dust swirled around them. One spot was so bad that he found himself clenching his jaw so that he wouldn’t bite his tongue.

What had his father been thinking—not taking care of the only road out before it became near-impossible to fix?

“I want you two to give this a chance,” he said as the house drew in sight. The sprawling adobe backed by a handful of outbuildings looked the same, too, he noted. “If you can’t do it for me, then do it for your grandpa.Remember, we don’t know how long he has.”

Again, he glanced in the rearview mirror and caught the stricken expression Lainey was quick to hide.

“But Grandpa’s got Uncle Reed and Uncle Chance,” Daniel mumbled.

“If they decide to return.”

Certainly neither Reed nor Chance were anywhere in sight. No one was. The handful of dusty old pickups—the newest of which had to be twenty years old—were ranch vehicles. Though he hadn’t counted on his half-brothers agreeing to the deal, Bart experienced a moment’s disappointment. Unsure that anything would drag Reed and Chance back into a situation they’d all hated, he’d still wondered what it would be like—the three of them riding herd together again. Maybe this time they were old enough to make peace with each other. Maybe they were wise enough to make it work.

But Reed and Chance didn’t have families to think of. They had no reason to accept the devil’s bargain the way he had.

Bart almost expected the old devil himself to be waiting for them as he pulled into the front yard and two yapping dogs rushed the truck. But Emmett Quarrels was nowhere in sight.