B.J. Daniels - Renegade's Pride

His friend nodded. He didn’t look hopeful. It was clear Johnny thought he was making a terrible mistake by coming back. “If there is some way I can help...”

“You already have,” Trask said, seeing how uncomfortable all this was making his friend. “I don’t like putting you on the spot like this. I appreciate everything you’ve done. But I have it now.” He stepped to his old friend, took his hand and pulled him into a quick hug. “I’m going to keep you out of this from this point on.”

Johnny couldn’t hide his relief. “Gordon’s killer could still be around. If you start digging into the past...” He didn’t have to finish. For a moment, he looked guilty for not wanting to be involved. Trask knew how much his friend had to lose.

“Listen, if you need anything, call me on the burner,” Johnny said. “Don’t worry about getting me into trouble.” His old friend smiled. “You certainly tried to get me into trouble when we were kids.”

“And succeeded.” After he’d left town on the run, Trask had contacted his friend, needing to know what was going on with the murder investigation. He’d felt bad afterward, realizing he’d put Johnny in a tough position. It had been Johnny’s suggestion to use burner phones to stay in contact.

Now he realized just how worried his old friend was. But was it friendship? Or did Johnny know more than he’d told him? He hated the feeling that his old friend was hiding something.

“Thanks for the food, for everything.”

“Just be careful. I don’t want a bunch of trigger-happy deputies coming after you.”

Trask nodded. “Me, either.” He watched Johnny disappear over the horizon before turning back to the fire. The flames had died down, making the night seem darker. Clouds scudded past the moon, leaving a break in the sky to reveal the stars. The light painted the forest around him in silver.

He moved to his bedroll, thinking of Lillie. What if Johnny was right and Lillie was ready to move on with someone like Wainwright? Was he a fool for coming back here to clear his name? What if he couldn’t prove he didn’t do it?

Trask let out a long breath as he lay down. The embers in the fire flared in the breeze. He could still feel the heat. A narrow ribbon of smoke rose, wavering before it disappeared into the dark overhead.

He tried not to worry about Johnny and the feeling he had that all was not as it seemed. He closed his eyes, picturing Lillie earlier holding a gun on him. He smiled to himself. That was the woman he remembered. The woman he loved. The woman he didn’t want to live without any longer—no matter how much danger it put him in to come back here.

CHAPTER FIVE

LILLIE TOOK THE bottle of beer her brother handed her and put her feet up. It felt good to finally sit down after the bar closed for the night. They’d been busy all afternoon and evening, the time flying by. She’d hardly had time to think about Trask and speculate on where he might be. Or when he might show up again. A lie. He was all she’d thought about.

It had made for a tense day, fearing that he might foolishly show up at the bar any minute. He hadn’t. She figured he’d probably left again. If he’d been arrested, she would have heard by now.

“Does it ever bother you?” Darby asked as he joined her in their nightly ritual after the place closed. He took a drink of his cola and glanced out the window.

Lillie didn’t have to ask what he was referring to. She followed his gaze to the far pasture of the Cahill Ranch and the eight-by-eight metal fence around the missile silo.

“We don’t even know if there is a manned missile down there after the disarmament agreements,” she said.

“That’s just it, neither do the Russians or the Chinese or whoever else wants us all dead. So when they decide to destroy us, they will fire at all of the missile silos. It will be Armageddon.”

There were 450 active sites in Montana, Wyoming and North Dakota—two hundred of them in Montana alone. All of them were scattered around the state in pastures behind a chain-link fence much like the Cahills’. Their grandfather had been honored to do his part when it came to the nation’s security. He’d gladly given the military the land they wanted for the missile site.

Everything about the sites were top secret. And that was the problem. If there was a malfunction, not even the sheriff could get involved.

“Truthfully? I forget it’s even out there,” Lillie said, taking a drink of her beer. Today especially, since she had other things on her mind. She’d gone for a drive after leaving her father at his cabin. It had given her time to think about things. She’d felt better by the time she’d come back to work her shift at the bar.

Now hours later, she and her brother were relaxing together. It was her favorite time of the day normally. Sitting there, she kept thinking of Trask. Worse, she was keeping it from the brother she felt closest to. How could she pretend that nothing had changed?

Her brother sighed. “Dad thinks something is going on out there.”

“It’s those aliens. They just won’t leave him alone,” she joked.

“It’s because he is such a fine human specimen at nearly seventy.”

She suddenly felt like crying. “What if it’s real?”

“The air force has admitted that trained military men witnessed what they believe was a flying saucer hovering over some of the missile silos in March of 1967. Hell, whatever it was, it shut down the missiles, sent them off-line. If we’d been attacked during the more than twelve hours the missiles were inoperable...”

Lillie sighed. “If that really was an alien spaceship from some other planet, then we have more to worry about than the foreign invaders and the rest of our country’s enemies on this earth.”

Darby nodded. “I think it’s what Dad saw all those years ago. Maybe he really was abducted by aliens, as crazy as it sounds. He wouldn’t be alone. Aren’t there hundreds of people who make that claim elsewhere in the world?”

“Maybe not hundreds.” She could tell that he wanted to believe it. Or more than likely wanted other people to believe their father and quit treating him like a nutcase. “Or maybe what happened to him is more like a flashback from when he was in the Vietnam War. Let’s not forget what he’s been through before any of this alien talk.”

Darby nodded and took another drink. Their father was a war hero. He’d been shot down and captured, spending months in a prison camp before being rescued. “So you don’t think there is anything going on at the missile silo?” Darby asked.

“Is that one of the reasons you want to leave here?” Lillie had to ask.

“You have to admit, it’s unsettling to think that an enemy country could nuke us at any time.”

Did he really live with that fear every day? Not everyone had a missile silo in his backyard. But a whole lot of people they knew around here did. “Then I think I should find a way to buy you out and you should leave.”

He looked at her in surprise. “Are you serious?”

“Aren’t you?”

Slowly, he shook his head. “I don’t know what I want. I just feel...antsy.”

That was a feeling she knew well. She’d always blamed it on Trask. She’d lied to herself that she hadn’t been waiting for him all these years.

But after this morning, she wasn’t sure what she wanted. For years she’d wanted Trask. She’d played the fantasy of his return in her head. He would come back and beg her to forgive him, tell her what a fool he’d been, sweep her off her feet and... That was where she would stop imagining his amazing return.

There could be no happy ending. Not with a warrant out for his arrest. Even if there hadn’t been, he’d never wanted to stay in Gilt Edge and run a bar. And she didn’t want to leave. He’d known that. Maybe it was another reason he’d left her waiting that night nine years ago. They’d been at a stalemate. Nothing had changed.